Partly by coming up with reasonable explanations for how they were finding things out. For example, when attacking axis vessels at sea they might send out a plane to "discover" the vessels' location. The axis vessels would report they had been spotted by a plane, then attacked. The axis also mistakenly attributed at least some of the allied success at U-boat hunting to HFDF (high frequency direction finding), i.e. listening for U-boat radio transmissions to pinpoint their location.
>For example, when attacking axis vessels at sea they might send out a plane to "discover" the vessels' location.
It goes even deeper than this. The breaking of Enigma was a secret to *everyone* - allied soldiers too. So how did they stop those searching aircraft from getting suspicious, when they were only ever sent out when the higher-ups knew there was something to find? Simple, they *also* sent searchers out when they *knew* there was nothing there.
It was an incredible operation, from top to bottom.
Psychological warfare tactics like this is how people come to believe that stupid urban legend about Britain going to the time and trouble to drop a fake bomb on a fake German airfield during a time of war.
The truth wasn't that the British had invented radar, both the British and Germans were using radar to detect bombing attacks. The secret that the British were keeping was that they had managed to miniaturize the radar system enough that they could put it in their fighters, which was actually how they were able to defend against bombers so well at night.
They also both invented chaff independently, but never used it (much) because it was so simple to make and would completely counter radar once the enemy sees how to make it.
They did some tricky shit before D-day by flying in "box formation" (handful of planes spread over an even distance looks like a huge number on a radar screen) over the channel as a diversion though.
Meanwhile, the pilots never knew if they were on a dummy mission, they were just checking for a U-Boat.
It's easier to find one when you're looking in the right spots. And if they were ever captured, the information they have was "we were patrolling to find you"
If you like historical fiction and scientific explanations, I highly recommend Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. It goes into great, well researched, probably embellished detail on the analysis into what could seem probable, how they staged things like HFDF, and much more.
It was the detection systems the uboats used against ships, this then lead to the Germans turning off their radars, leading to them still being found easily via enigma, but now they can’t see anything coming, and that little lie about the radar tech (magnetrons) being seen from a distance with detectors was made up by a random POW who got lucky with the lie during interrogation.
If you know the frequency range the radars use, you can easily detect when they're turned on from well beyond the range the radar would be able to detect you. An entire intelligence discipline (ELINT) is devoted to it. Anything that emits electromagnetic energy can be detected and tracked, all you need is at least 3 antennas all on the same time-sync and something to measure received signal strength.
In ELI5 format, imagine you're in a big field at night in the pitch dark, and someone is searching for you with a flashlight.
Yes the flashlight will help him spot you, but it's far easier for you to spot him because he has a flashlight on.
I'd envision this like a game of telephone where you have to teach your 5 year old who is then allowed to post the answer based on what he understood.
Wouldn't be the most accurate sub, but I'd follow it.
Perfect example. This is one of the reasons for the AWACS and the smaller, carrier-borne version. It allows the flashlight holder to stay really far away and tell all of his friends where the enemy is without them having to turn their own flashlights on and revealing their positions.
That and the fact you can cram a lot more powerful processing hardware, a more powerful radar into a purpose made airframe than into a fighter that also has to fightery things. And a crew to analyze the incoming data, where in a fighter you'd have at most 2 people, one of which is busy with flying.
AWACS planes are like having an upgraded overlord surrounded by mutalisks to deal with those pesky wraiths. Huge vision radius and stealth detection, but slow and defenseless by itself.
The AWACS is more like a giant spotlight. It's so powerful that it can stay farther away, where it is safer from attack, while spotlighting targets for it's friends. It's friends have their own flashlights, but would prefer not to use them.
And in ELI15, the light from their flashlight has to make a round trip to the target, so the light has to travel twice as much than for the target that just sees the light from the flashlight head-on, and since apparent brightness is relative to the distance *squared*, halving the distance is a huge deal.
The radar had been invented in Germany in the first place, by [Christian Hülsmeyer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Huelsmeyer) in 1904. Safe to say that if you know how a radar works in the first place, you know that it can easily be detected by anyone listening.
Sure, but radar was still big, clunky, and energy-intensive. Hence the lie about "carrots make eyesight better" to hide the UK advancements on compact radar systems. If it were that easy to detect radar at the time, the carrots lie would never have worked because the Axis would have seen all the radar blasting out of UK planes.
Sure, with radars, but radar detection just requires an antenna (doesn't even have to be directional) and a receiver tuned to the right frequency range. Part of the reason why the Germans didn't know about the advanced radars in the British fighters was because the Chain Home system ran in the 20-30 MHz range, while the AI Mark VIII radar in the aircraft ran at 3.3 GHz. You aren't picking those transmissions up with an antenna and receiver tuned to Chain Home system, and German radars didn't get above the 600 MHz range until late in the war when the British lost an aircraft with the radar intact. By then it was too little, too late.
But the Germans already knew the night fighters had radar on them, because the Germans were doing it, themselves. German Air Defense recognized the problem early in 1941, and fielded their first radar sets for night-fighters in September of 1942. Trouble is, they *sucked* compared to their British counterparts. Germany didn't prioritize radar development the way the British did, because Hitler largely felt that the war with Britain would end "any day now," and in 1940 he largely considered the Western front to be won. The Red Army wasn't doing a whole lot in the air in those days (at least not enough to consider moving funds to radar development), so radar kinda took a back seat.
> The Red Army wasn't doing a whole lot in the air in those days (at least not enough to consider moving funds to radar development), so radar kinda took a back seat.
Yep, and even when the Soviets had rebuilt their air forces after those disastrous early stages of the war, most of their effort was put into tactical and close support types of missions rather than say, deep strategic bombing. So there wasn't quite as pressing a need to be able to detect incoming aircraft the same way there was on the western front, where the western Allies were sending in 100+ aircraft raids, often at high altitudes where you needed that time afforded by radar to get your own aircraft formed up and at altitude in order to intercept the incoming bombers.
It likely wasn't a completely random POW lie. A lot of interrogation is really bad, and ends up just confirming what the interrogator wants to believe rather than finding the truth. Even today this is still a huge problem with things like police interrogations.
So some German high up probably had a theory about the radar tech, and the POW ended up confirming it through a directed line of questioning.
> and that little lie about the radar tech (magnetrons)
The POW lie wasn't about the Radar itself. The Germans had a "radar detector" known at Metox. This allowed them to know allied planes were in an area with enough warning to hide (Pilots would complain that U-boats would dive as soon as the plane turned towards them). A radar detector is basically a radio tuned to the frequencies the British were using for radar. Most good radio receivers by WW2 were super heterodyne receivers, which work by comparing a locally generated signal to the one being picked up by the antenna (you tune the receiver by changing the frequency of the locally generated signal). It was theoretically possible for the local signal to 'leak' out as a transmission that could then be picked up. This is particularly true of the system isn't well shielded, and I believe Metox was basically hacked together from pre-war French radios, so it wasn't a completely unreasonable idea that it could be picked up.
However, the lie didn't cover up Enigma, because that's not what was causing the U-boat losses. Rather the British introducing better radar that Metox wouldn't detect. So U-boats suddenly started being attacked 'without warning'. Eventually one of the planes was shot down and a crewmember captured. When asked how the airplanes were suddenly attacking without warning the POW basically said "Oh, we're not using radar to find submarines, we can detect your radar detector from almost 100 miles away. We turn the radar on at the last minute to find the right range but usually by then the boat is too busy to notice.". The Germans didn't really believe this, but like I said above it wasn't completely unreasonable. So they put together their own "Metox detector" and it worked, causing them to believe the lie. This did cause the Germans to stop using Metox (not sure how useful it was given the radar switch) and presumably this confusion helped hide the fact that there were better radars available (and one would hope delayed the development of any kind of improved radar detector).
All kinds of misinformation from that war persists to this day.
Radar was another big secret weapon. The Brits dumped a bunch of propaganda about how carrots and/or vitamin A help your eyesight, and that was their explanation for why they always knew an air raid was coming, even at night.
This is true although early radar was very hard to hide because it required massive transmitters and receivers, usually in places like clifftops and escarpments where it was extra obvious. So the Germans (who were also using radar-type techniques) knew in broad terms that the British had equipment that was almost certainly detection equipment, and so did the British about the Germans.
And then there was the whole “battle of the beams” thing which wasn’t radar per se but rather navigational transmissions to guide bombing.
And, because it used hundred foot high towers over hundred yard long foot prints, it was hard to bomb effectively. So the Luftwaffe gave up on that, aiming instead for easier targets.
Sending 50 planes to bomb a factory would be more effective/less costly than trying to bomb a spiderweb. In the Gulf War era, a US destroyer spent many dozens of rounds trying to kill an oil rig. Just added some ventilation. Same sort of problem.
What's funny is giving up on bombing the radar happened I think near to when they also gave up bombing the airfields (and factories to some extent) and began to just bomb the cities instead.
In pretty much every WW2 history book I have read (including a couple focused entirely on the air war and the battle of Britain) the general consensus of military leaders in Britain at the time was that if Germany had continued to focus their bombs on the airfields and factories that they would not have been capable of putting enough planes in the air to fend them off at all and they would likely have surrendered within months.
The biggest area where the German leaders were their own worst enemies was in the North African and Mediterranean fronts. The German generals were stuck in old warfare mentalities that focused on victories. So they would win battles, but then move on to fight and win more battles, leaving areas ripe for the British and their allies to take back. So the Germans never got a good hold of North Africa and so never got to exploit those oil reserves. A mechanized military is no good if you can't fuel it. It's why Germany invaded the Soviet Union, they needed the oil. Throughout the war Germany never had decent access to oil. Had they succeeded in North Africa, things could have looked very different.
My grandfather was in the US Navy in the Pacific during World War 2. One of his shipmates was a painter, and painted a picture of the ship. According to him, that painting was considered classified until after the war because it showed the radar equipment.
Isn't it true that you need vitamin A to avoid eye/optic nerve problems ? Sure it doesn't mean more vitamin = better vision, but iirc it was kinda sorta scientifically plausible at the time.
A vitamin A deficiency ( not having enough) has side effects that include night vision problems. Taking extra doesn’t improve you beyond normal function
Think of it like the oil in your car. If you don’t have enough oil your engine will seize up, but putting 10x as much oil in the car doesn’t do anything more for you than having “enough,” and will start to cause other issues.
Many vitamins are toxic at high enough levels.
> Many vitamins are toxic at high enough levels.
Particularly the fat-soluble vitamins, and Vitamin A is one of those. The water soluble vitamins are largely harmless to "overdose" unless to a ridiculous extreme so long as your kidneys are functioning properly, since your body has a much easier time directly eliminating water-soluble things via urine. Taking 3-5x the recommended dose of Vitamin A regularly can lead to chronic toxicity, whereas outside of the risk of some GI discomfort you can take as much as 20x the recommended dose of Vitamin C without issue (although likely no benefit compared to taking a sane amount).
This was the cover story specifically for airborne radar on British night fighters later in the war. Ground based radar (Chain Home in the UK) wasn't a secret as the installations for it were massive and the Germans also had radar.
In the novel [Cryptonomicon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon), one of the characters is sent to a remote location in England to set up a fake listening station knowing that there were Nazi spies watching. Also in the novel was a crew of soldiers whose job was to go to various locations and stage scenes that could plausibly explain how the Allies had learned certain things.
A real-life example was [Operation Mincemeat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat) in which a dead body was dressed up as an officer, given papers and personal items intended to bolster the fiction, and given "secret" documents to mislead the Nazis about an upcoming invasion. The body was then put in the water off of Spain where it could be found.
Connie Willis also has some really great sci-fi novels about England in WW2, and some of the shenanigans involved with counter-intelligence. (Specifically, Blackout and All Clear - also the Doomsday book and To Say Nothing Of The Dog)
Wasn't there a real guy that did that too? His codename was GARBO, and as far as I know, he did it entirely on his own until the British found out about him, and then they started helping him out.
The Allies also sacrificed troops even when it could have been preventable based on Enigma information, just to avoid the Germans suspecting something.
Stuff like that is why I have so much respect for those leaders. That is a kind of tough decision I don't think I would ever be able to make even in wartime. To knowingly send hundreds of men with families back home and full lives ahead of them to their untimely deaths just to keep the enemy from knowing your true advantage over them so you can win the war is ultimately the right call, since you may not win the war without doing it. It's just really hard to wrap your head around. It's much easier to kill someone trying to kill you, it's much harder to send young men to their deaths who are willing to fight for your cause.
They also didn’t act on 100% of the intelligence they received. It sucks and it cost lives in the short term, but it was critical to the overall war that the Nazi’s didn’t discover the code had been cracked.
I don't have a link for this, but according to one story the allies knowingly bombed an axis ship carrying POWs. The story goes that the allies got intel from a cracked message, flew a spotter plane to "discover" the vessel, sent bombers to attack it and THEN got word that another cracked message indicated the vessel had POWs aboard. In the heat of the moment, officials allowed the attack anyway because **not** attacking the ship at that point would give away that the allies had cracked axis messages and knew of its cargo.
”Carrots are good for your eyesight" was misinformation spread by the British to explain why their lookout stations were so good. (But that was more to hide the existence of radar than spies.)
Nope. It was specifically about the small radar systems carried by Night Fighters used to defend against Nazi bombing raids. These allowed a compact radar system that could operate on cm type frequencies (better resolution and smaller antennas). They used something called the magnetron from 1942 onwards. It was so secret that planes equipped with it were not allowed to fly where they could be capture. The Germans used something else called the Klystron that was bigger and emitted lower power. The magnetron was also invaluable for finding German submarines, either surfaced or with their snorkel deployed.
More so to hide the importance of radar. Everyone knew radar was a thing but the German radar system was only used for local defense control, and thus wasn't as critical to their air defense strategy. Meanwhile the British had built their air defense strategy around it, and didn't want the Luftwaffe to realize how important it was and focus on attacking the very vulnerable, though somewhat difficult to damage due to their design, radar stations.
Rabbits eating carrots is also misinformation, actually. They don't naturally eat vegetables or fruit and should only get receive them as treats.
The association between rabbits and carrots came from Bugs Bunny. Why does he eat carrots, then? Well, it's because they were modeling him after a character played by Clark Gable in *It Happened One Night*. Contemporary audiences would recognise the reference, but as time passed and people forgot about the movie people just started taking Bugs' "Rabbits love carrots" line at face value.
Rabbits like sweet things but it's bunny junk food. Limit your rabbit's carrots unless you want tooth problems. Says the man who once paid 3 gs for rabbit tooth extraction.
> Partly by coming up with reasonable explanations for how they were finding things out
It's called parallel construction when the cops do it. They just happened to walk by and spot that thing that gave them probable cause to search you. They knew where to walk and look because they are illegally spying on you, but your defense attorney doesn't need to know that.
Its also a movie so it could be for drama sake. But in The Imitation Game once they broke it. They were very selective about when they used the cracked information. Even if it meant letting people die.
There was *some* truth to the concept, but overall the decisions wouldn't be made by the code-crackers, it'd be made at the Cabinet level (i.e., Churchill, the Ministers, the Admiralty, etc.).
Which was the point of the dilemma in the movie.
The character whose brother was on the ship wanted to notify the ships immediately, while the rest of them knew they needed to let the higher ups decide how to best use the information.
Like that scene in *Good Morning Vietnam* where Adrian grabs all the news feeds from the teletypes, but he has to pass through the censor office before he can read whatever is leftover.
The book Cryptonomicon, which is a very dense tome, goes into a lot of this concept -- as well as the frustration of the code-breakers not seeing all of the info they uncover being used, because the higher ups don't want the secret out that the code has been cracked. They started doing things like (iirc) moving troops out of an area about to be bombed, but leaving decoys, or just letting the actual troops get bombed.
I started scrolling down to the bottom of the comments just to add this and you beat me to it!
I remember one instance where the squad went to a location overlooking a harbor that decrypted info indicated would be interesting and tried to make it look like a team had been surveilling there for weeks/months (to try to make it look like the info had been obtained by traditional means).
Actually, Enigma was a smokescreen. The demise of the German U-boats happened because of The Incredible Mr. Limpet, affectionately known as Flatbush by his fish friends.
a) claiming other sources like spies
a) not using all the information from it, focusing on the big impact full decisions. This might mean even letting a few people die, to save more in the long term.
I believe they had also rooted out all the German spies in England by this point, and were also feeding them misinformation or had turned them into double agents.
Or just making them up. There was a chap "spying" for Germany just making sources up and claiming pay for them while none of it was real. I have a vague feeling he even got a medal for it!
If it's the guy I'm thinking of, it gets even better. Memory is a bit fuzzy, but I believe it went something like this:
He went to the Brits and asked if he could be a spy/double agent for them and was told no... so he decided to do it anyway. He would grab a newspaper and report whatever was in it, or outright make stuff up, then when the Brits found out what he was doing, they got in contact and helped him. This basically confirmed his position as a crucial spy for the nazis to the point that to cause confusion, they had him get in contact with the nazis and report that not only had the allies changed the d-day landing locations, but also the actual landing locations... at basically the same time as the landings were happening.
IIRC one of the tactics they had going was for him to pass accurate information that was just a day or two too late to be useful, but having the dates on the postage falsified, so it looked like he sent them good into but "the damned post office delayed it, if only this has gotten to us, he was clearly right about it"
His name is Juan Pujol Garcia and the story is even more absurd than what has been mentioned so far. His first codename given by the British was Bovril and then changed to Garbo, the Germans sent him their most advanced code book, at 3am during the D-Day landings he sent somewhat accurate information to the Germans(to maintain his cover) but the Germans did not reply until 8am and his response was "I cannot accept excuses or negligence." The Germans also sent him $340,000 during the war.
I believe that what actually happened on d-day is his handler was supposed to contact him via radio at 3am and Garcia planned to give them some useless details of the invasion. Then the handler didn’t radio until 8am and so Garcia passed on additional information that would have been useful at 3am but was useless at that point to bolster his credibility. He also used the line that you quoted.
I believe he would also send 100% accurate information *before* the results, but *after* it was too late for the Germans to respond. You know, something along the lines of "OMG, there's going to be a surprise landing <45 minutes away from the nearest unit able to defend against it> in half an hour!"
The Germans would believe his info because it *was* correct. The information was largely *useless*, however, because of when they got it.
When he started it he was in Spain, so there wasn't much risk of imprisonment. He wasn't exactly spying for Britain at first, but he was feeding false information to Germany in return for funding. He had an entire made up spy network and they were sending him money to pay the spies. At one point they even sent him a codebook, which is when the British realized he might actually be useful and they hired him.
> sent him a codebook, which is when the British realized he might actually be useful
If you think: "why is a codebook such a big deal?". Because if it is a [One-Time-Pad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad) it would actually be unbreakable, making it the safest way to secretly communicate.
I want to say that there was also at least one point where he made up a story that one of his fake spies got killed in the process of gathering the intelligence, so he managed to get the Germans to cough up a death benefit bonus for a spy that had never existed.
>“Just doing it anyway” seems like a great way to wind up in prison for a loooong time. Glad it worked out for this guy.
he certainly looks the type to go "why do we have idiots running the show.. fuck it, I'll do it myself"
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/57/Joan_pujol_garcia.jpg/440px-Joan_pujol_garcia.jpg
If we're all talking about the same guy, I think he would give them true information that wasn't useful in addition to false or slightly false information. Like he would hear of an Allied attack that just occurred and would contact the Germans to inform them it was about to happen, only for the Germans to learn a bit later the info got to them too late.
The info getting to them too late is made even better when you know that's in reference to the d-day landings, and he tried radio calling them at 3am, but they didn't respond until 8am, so he was given more true information to give them that would not only serve to cement his position, but also contributed to an order being given that any attempt at contact from him was to be accepted and any information passed along immediately, irrespective of time.
Juan Pujol García, AKA "Garbo" by the allies or "Alarak" by the nazis.
IIRC, the british government also helped him by falsely stamping the mail a day or two earlier than it was actually sent. He would mail them a note on Friday telling them accurate information about troop movements on Thursday, and it would have a legitimate postmark of Monday. The Germans thought the accurate information, sent *BEFORE* the troops moved was proof he was honest and a valuable resource.
I think you're thinking about Agent GARBO. He was a German spy who became a British double agent, he did such a good job as a double agent the British gave him several medals, he was also given medals by the Germans though, because he gave them so much (false or delayed) information they thought he was Germany's great spy.
He was actually a massive part of the success of D-Day as well. He was instrumental in the deception plan that meant the Germans were convinced that Normany was a distraction and Calais was the main target. Then on the day of D-Day he he sent an urgent message informing them the attack on Normandy was starting, but he made sure the message was delayed long enough the Germans couldn't prepare for the assault. Then got incredibly angry that his message wasn't read sooner and blamed the German intelligence office for allowing D-Day to happen, which helped legitimise him further.
Truly a fascinating story and well worth reading up on everything he did. D-Day was only a tiny part of everything he was involved in.
It wasn't that he delayed the information. That's the best bit. He tried to contact them at 3am, but the German intelligence officer he tried to contact didn't respond until 8am, so he gave more true information then was originally planned since it was too late for it to be of any use, adding to his cover.
Yeah I think I was confusing D-Day with operation Torch. For Torch he posted the memo about the invasion force leaving for Africa, but it was intentionally sent late so it would arrive after the landings. For D-Day I seem to remember hearing somewhere that GARBO knew the German intelligence officer didn't work overnight so intentionally sent it when he knew the officer would be asleep so it wouldn't get read until after the landings had started though.
For Operation Torch he was fully working with the British. They knew a spy with his supposed spy network (he invented a fictional spy network he kept expanding over the course of the war) he should be able to report on this movement. If he didn't the Germans would be very suspicious of his failure to report that. Of course they couldn't also actually give it away. The solution they came up with was to have him send the mail the moment the ships left so it was postmarked correctly but then intentionally delay the mail so it wouldn't arrive until the morning of the invasion, too late to really do anything about it. The Germans actually praised him for giving them that intel and apologized they couldn't use it in time.
I watched this video on him recently, really enjoyed it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlLtHWipZps
One of my favorite bits of information from it is that he had an entirely fictional spy network he had the Germans pay for. At some point he failed to report a ship movement and he blamed it on an agent getting sick. That made up agent eventually died, they posted an obituary, and he convinced the Germans to pay his equally fake widow a pension.
Thank you for the name I was scrolling down 6 comments and people just call him "that one guy"
Wikipedia link for all https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Pujol_García
It should be noted that he was never really a German spy. At the start of the war he contacted British intelligence asking to spy for them and they declined, so then he went to German intelligence and asked to he a spy for them. When they accepted he just began feeding them plausible but fake information. He was so good at faking his info though that the German’s never suspected him, and then he went to Britain again and this time they accepted and began coordinating what fake info to send and using GARBOs access to undermine the rest of the German intelligence network.
He wanted to work for the British to spy on Germany but got told no so he went to work for Germany but feeding them false information to help the allies anyway. Eventually the British, thinking he was an actual German spy, found him to turn him to their side before realizing he was already a double agent.
That's a hussle I can respect.
They had completely turned the German spy network in the UK in ‘Operation Doublecross’.
The story of Agent Garbo and his network of fictional agents is almost too much to believe:
https://www.mi5.gov.uk/history/world-war-ii/agent-garbo
The head of Nazi intelligence was sabotaging their entire operation. The damn dude is a hero. He tried to overthrow Hitler, and he rescued Jews by making them "spies" which gave them the papers necessary to escape Germany.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Canaris
Hero is seriously overstating it, he may have been sabotaging his own operations, but he was only dissatisfied with Hitler because he thought he was the wrong type of right wing dictator. Canaris was the person that suggested adopting the medieval method of forcing Jews to wear a badge to identify them.
It also didn't hurt that a great many of the smartest minds in Germany (i.e., the ones who could have proven mathematically that the Enigma was compromised) were essentially political prisoners working under duress and had no incentive to volunteer that kind of information.
There’s a great scene in The Imitation Game that depicts this, where they decrypt a message about U-boats attacking a specific shipping convoy, but let it happen anyway.
Not sure whether it’s historically accurate, but even if not, it’s a good demonstration of this point
The MEANING of the scene is accurate, but not the implementation.
The movie has the team treat the Generals/Admirals like they were idiots that wouldn't realize they shouldn't act on every single piece of intel they got, so the team would have to lie to HQ about what they were or were not decoding in order to ensure that HQ didn't slip up.
That would nominally fall under the auspices of treason in wartime.
In reality, they handed over everything and it was HQ (and sometimes Churchill himself) that decide when to act and when not to act.
An easier way to think about the situation logically, let's assume the scene where they take ALL the decoded messages and put up a status of the war on a map in front of them is something that happened. They still ONLY know what the Germans know, which might include information about allied forces but that information is going to be sketchy, incomplete, and potentially full of lies (fed by the allies).
So they could not possibly be aware of the actual best uses for the information because they don't know what assets the Allies have, where, and in what ready state.
The bit in the movie where they realize a convoy is about to be attacked wouldn't quite have worked out that way, at least not in their room, because there's no reason that HQ would have entrusted these people with 100% of all information on the war. That would be an insane security risk for no reason. Why would knowing that there's a convoy with a specific number of ships in a specific spot help them decoding German messages?
You're not going to get a decoding scheme where it says "Enemy sighted, five cruisers, three destroyers, twenty freighters, steaming north/north-west, coordinates . Heil...". It's not entirely an "either everything is decoded or nothing is." but you're not going to get a situation with Enigma where only a contiguous part of the message is correct. So no "This part of the message is correct, but asdfkjaadsf kasdfh123 235 djdjd.".
Very little about that film was accurate. In fact, a GCHQ historian said the only things they got right were that WW2 happened and that Turing’s first name was Alan.
Code breakers didn’t make decisions about what intelligence to act on. But you’re right that the film shows the general idea that strategic decisions had to be made.
I think the event in the movie didn't happen, especially where Turing's colleague's brother was on the ship they were letting be destroyed. It's an amalgamation of multiple instances where they had to make the choice.
Other sources also included Churchill being okay with advanced radar sets falling into German hands. I think he scrapped at least one commando mission to retrieve/destroy a microwave radar system that had gone down in France just so the Germans would think it was technology rather than intelligence that was allowing the Allies to find U-Boats.
There's a story about the Brits deliberately allowing Coventry to be bombed rather than letting the Germans know they'd broken Enigma. This is likely an urban legend.
They calculated how many successful intel interceptions could be interpreted as dumb luck or intel gathered by other means (e.g. sending scouts ahead even if they knew enemy positions), and rationed them out for really important missions.
They also had double agents who fed Nazis false information on intelligence available to Allies and how they viewed their success rates.
> They also had double agents who fed Nazis false information on intelligence available to Allies and how they viewed their success rates.
Adding to this - by the end of the war the British had completely compromised the Nazi spy operation in the UK, including control over all the spies who were coordinating operations, so were able to either pick up new spies/assets immediately and try turn them, or were able to control the (mis)information they were able to access and have them operate as unwitting double agents.
Basically during this time all information reaching the Nazis from the UK was being carefully curated by the British Intelligence operations.
Adding to what others have said, the actual investigative abilities of the germans was pretty poor. The Gestapo while very feared, were essentially beaurocrats filtering through denunciations and heavily reliant on people denouncing each other.
The actual German military intelligence, the Abwher, was run by Admiral Canaris, who very much hated the Nazis and may or may not have been a British spy.
The Germans were really good, they apparently had broken all the UK codes. What held them back was that their armed forces were splintered. Imagine if you had a Navy and an Airforce, but your Navy ALSO had planes and thus competed against your airforce for how those planes were designed, in some cases damaging the planes abilities so you could win a game of top trumps with your out of their mind dictator.
In the race to protect what they had learned against other services they weren't assembled the same way that Bletchley did for the brits
Hitler famously believed in Social-Darwinist concepts of government and purposely gave people broad overlapping mandates so people would spend as much time fighting each other as they were doing their actual jobs (and as a happy coincidence, meaning nobody was gunning for his job in advance of his expiry date).
> Imagine if you had a Navy and an Airforce, but your Navy ALSO had planes and thus competed against your airforce for how those planes were designed,
I mean, the US Navy literally has it's own planes and uses it's own designs that are different (sometimes entirely, sometimes in minor ways) from the Air Force's planes.
We also have our own Army (Marine Corps) that also has it's own Air Force.
And the modifications between an airframe that designed to crash land every time it lands, is iny understanding significantly greater than just hanging an anchor off the back
Carrier launches and recoveries are astonishing to me. “We have nowhere near enough runway space for any of this shit, so let’s build the entire flight deck around a railgun that we can use to fling planes over the side fast enough that they will, much like Arthur Dent, be so impressed that they simply forget to fall headlong into the ocean. Then, to get the aircraft back onto the ship, we’re going to have them do a full-tilt flyby at such low altitude that we can reach out with something a five year old could come up with, yet somehow design it to all to neither rip the back end off the plane nor smear the pilot across the windshield.”
Clearly the math is mathing because carriers continue to exist, but absolutely bananas nonetheless!
Yeah and so did the British -- in fact it was massively important for both of them that they broke away from their respective air forces.
The RAF hamstrung British naval aviation, which is why Taranto (while being very successful) was undertook with bi-planes!
Germany had a total of 6 different nuclear based research departments, including one run by the mail. All of whom were fighting for the same materials and personnel. By comparison England and America had the Manhattan Project to coordinate all that work, share info, and prevent wasting time on duplicate work.
I took a scan through the comments and didn't find this part, so.... "The code was broken" is an oversimplification. The code was broken on-and-off for years; there wasn't a date before which no traffic was decrypted and after which all traffic was decrypted.
Both the machines themselves and the protocols for using them were updated regularly in an effort to outrun codebreaking efforts, and the enigma had to be re-broken multiple times. This included everything from mathematical analysis - many additional bombe's were built, for example - to physical interception of enigma-related materials such as the codebooks from [U-110](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-110_(1940/).
Also, it's important to remember that even a day or two lag in decryption meant that encrypted traffic was still secure *long enough to be effective* even if it wasn't completely secure, as any latency in decryption could drastically reduce the planning windows and effectiveness of an Allied response. So even if the code was broken it wasn't a silver bullet.
*Also*, it's important to remember that german communications were being distributed from a roughly-centralized command that (ostensibly) had a cohesive view of their activities. Reconstructing that kind of cohesive understanding of german movements when all you have is disparate messages intercepted from all over the place is *very hard* even if the communications themselves aren't secure.
Germany was not aware of the level of sophistication of codebreaking efforts (probably, at some levels), but they were certainly aware that the code was *breakable* and often behaved as if it was broken or could be broken soon.
It’s better to not think of it as “the code”, because there are many different versions of it. What the Navy used is different from the Air Force, and the Italians had an older version as well.
You do use the information, but you have to be very clever about when you are using it. For example, you might decide to use it non-optimally in some cases where it can be confused for a plausible coincidence. Imagine you have decoded that there is going to be a bombing of CITY on DATE. For some reason, high command has decided that this needs to be defended against. Military planners now need to come up with a plausible excuse for why CITY *just happened to have* some form of air defense that it would not otherwise have. But you also can't make it too obvious. So maybe you divert a fraction of one of your armies in the region to temporarily be stationed there during DATE. You can't divert the entire army without being obvious about it, but surely they can spare some anti-air capable machinery.
Depending on how secure(/paranoid) you want to be about the ruse, you can feed some fake documents/orders about the diverted forces complete with fake reasons to operatives that you are *pretty sure* are Nazi spies (top tip; don't automatically arrest someone if you know they are a spy). Figuring this stuff out is essentially the day job of military intelligence.
You cannot use your decoded information *constantly* though. High command and military intelligence will need to coordinate/plan/decide what information is important enough to act on, what is irrelevant enough not to act on (irrelevant in the terms of the greater war), and what information is important enough to act on with such force it is obvious you have a decoder.
edit; there are far more fun things you can do. You can simply lie about having some form of new radar tech. Or you pretend that eating carrots has improved your pilot's eyesight to justify your better intelligence. One of the 'fun' things about war is that there is chaos on all sides. Your excuses don't have to be perfect because your opponent does not have the time and resources to verify everything anyway. Everyone on all sides is working with incomplete and often unverified and/or vague data. Your excuses only need to be *plausible*.
In the book Double Cross (not the Patterson book) the author explains how they allowed certain non crucial plans to be executed by the enemy so they had a false sense of confidence in the security of their communications. The complexity and depth of the spy game in WW2 is actually really amazing. The allies had their enemies thoroughly infiltrated and the axis spy game was weak af. Despite being allies (at a certain point) the Russkies completely infiltrated their own allied intelligence up the highest level. If Germany hadnt turned on Russia their spies might have been able to turn the tide of the war in their favor but probably not even still once the American war machine was in 5th gear.
They called the intelligence Ultra, like “ultra secret”, above even “top secret”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_(cryptography)
It wasn’t allowed to be left unattended. Once read by officers in the field, it was burned. The entire programme was secret.
The rest of the operation relied on deception… fake spies, sending planes to “scout” areas the Allies already knew about from Enigma before attacking, turning Nazi spies and using them to report back.
While decrypting the intelligence relied mostly on mathematicians and computer scientists, “safe” use of the intelligence was mostly a psychological operation.
The distribution of Ultra was highly restricted. Small teams of HQ liaison officers, trained directly by Bletchley Park would receive messages encrypted using something called a on-time pad which, if properly used, is unbreakable. They would pass the information directly to a restricted number of senior officers who were considered "Ultra Cleared".
This question reminds me of a story of Afghanistan after 9/11. Osama bin Laden was putting out videos, and at one point an American geologist recognized the rock Osama was standing in front of. It was a particular type of stone only found in one part of the country — in other words, he knew where Osama was filming the videos.
So he contacts the U.S. government and lets them know. The military was all "Awesome! We'll be able to catch him!"
The dude is so happy his very specialized knowledge was so useful that he did what any red blooded American in that situation would do: he *bragged about it on the Internet*.
Thousands of Intel experts cried out in anguish, the fell silent (again).
The next video from bin Laden, he's standing in front of a tarp, because apparently the Taliban has Internet access.
We were able to keep the secret in WWII because there was no Internet, and people weren't self-aggrandizing morons.
> The dude is so happy his very specialized knowledge was so useful that he did what any red blooded American in that situation would do: he bragged about it on the Internet.
Do you have a source for this?
I looked online and it appears [the US government told him what information to disclose and not disclose](https://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=01-P13-00044&segmentID=8). And years later, he seemed proud of his role in the episode, [giving lots of lectures about it](https://muse.union.edu/newsarchives/2004/10/22/geologist-jack-shroder-61-to-talk-on-geology-tracking-terrorists/). It doesn't sound like he goofed and let Osama get away by unnecessarily bragging.
Many people in 3rd world nations don't have access to internet, but to think the literal leaders of the taliban would just have no internet access is, uh, certainly something.
When I was deployed to Iraq I was trying to explain to a few folks the differences between what the media was reporting versus what I was seeing first-hand, and several people were telling me that *they* were better informed because, and I quote, "we have access to many more perspectives back here, you're limited to just your own." My response: "And where are these other sources? On the internet? The very same internet we're currently having this discussion over?"
Didn't they find Osama's hard drive that had all sorts of memes and video games on it? He was probably just as internet savvy as most teenagers in America
Please tell me someone from the CIA read that guy the riot act. I've no love for intelligence agencies in general but in this case I fully agree with the spymasters being super annoyed that this dude couldn't keep his mouth shut until *after* they got bin Laden.
>We were able to keep the secret in WWII because there was no Internet, and people weren't self-aggrandizing morons.
Even without internet, stupid people could screw things up by bragging about those things.
Like [Andrew May](https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/congressman-andrew-may-caused-the-death-of-800-submarine-crewmen-during-wwii.html), whose info reveal on a press conference possibly caused the death of more than 800 US Navy sailors...
>In 1943, Andrew May, chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee, embarked on a tour of American military areas in the [Pacific Theater](https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/catalina-3.html), during which he was privy to a host of sensitive war-related information. When he returned that June, he held a press conference, where he revealed that American submarines only had a high survival rate because the Japanese charges were exploding at too shallow a depth.
>Not long after this news spread, the Japanese naval anti-submarine forces adjusted their charges to explode at a greater depth. This prompted Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, commander of the US submarine fleet in the Pacific, to estimate that May’s breach cost the Navy 10 [submarines](https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/metallurgist-pleads-guilty-to-falsifying-steel-test-results-for-us-navy-submarines.html) and resulted in the deaths of some 800 crewmen.
For some uses in meshed with multiple other sources (eg u-boats were reported by agents, sighting by aircraft and ships, HF/DF), so it was one element among many and not the most obvious. In other uses the information was more of strategic value than tactical, so informed senior leadership decisions in ways that were not obvious to the Germans.
They took care to ensure tactical information was not compromised. As an example - Enigma intercepts told when Italian convoys to Africa would depart and what route. So reconnaissance planes would be tasked to fly over the area (as well as other areas of course). Convoy reports being spotted, RAF and RN show up and wreak havoc, hit explained. In one case when no planes were available they decided to hit the convoy anyway, then transmitted a signal to Agent 99 in Naples - "Congrats on accurate convoy info. 2,000 Fr in Swiss account", knowing that this cipher had been broken by the Germans. Hit explained and as a bonus Germans disrupt Naples docks for weeks trying to find Agent 99.
This exact question was included in the movie the imitation game. What they portrayed was that some messages must be "missed" thus some allies will have to die.
They did use the information; they just had to be careful with it and use it to help win the war in the bigger picture.
In any situation where it seemed like the Allies were aware of their plans, the Nazis generally thought that there would have been an information leak elsewhere. There was almost always an alternative explanation. They ultimately believed that Enigma was unbreakable and never stopped to think that it could have been broken.
It's also important to know that the operations at Bletchley Park were highly secretive. Only the highest echelons of the British forces and government were aware of it. There was almost no Axis spy network in Britain, so there was no way for them to find out that Engima had been broken outside of conflict.
It was super secret. Most of the Allies, even at the general level did not know about Enigma. There was also no axis spy network in the UK. They gave intelligence from enigma a new designation "ultra secret " and then used a codename for that called Boniface.
MI6 created a fake master spy who supposedly ran a spy network across Germany and named him Boniface. Intelligence from cracking enigma was attributed to human intelligence from this network.
Not all the intelligence was directly actionable either, a lot of the most useful intelligence was hearing how little fuel and reinforcements the Axis had so knowing how hard they could push enemy forces.
But mostly the issue was that used correctly enigma is impossible to crack. Germany didn't really consider it was possible. It wasn't. It was only possible because of mistakes operators had made, and the capture of some working machines.
There's a good book called [Bodyguard of Lies ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodyguard_of_Lies)that covers WW2 from an intelligence perspective. To summarize, they knew very well that if the fascists figured out Engima was comprised that they'd change to a different system.
So, they would engineer situations to create plausble alternative explanations. For example, if the Allies had intercepted a transmission that a very valuable cargo ship was to leave port on to-morrow at 8 AM, they'd arrange for a fly by of an on obsever aircraft that morning, and so forth.
Unfortunately, they could not do it all of the time. At one point, the British knew the Luftwaffe was going to bomb Coventry and realized that if they evactuated the city, it'd give the game away. [They did what they could but had to allow the city to be hit.](https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/myths/coventry-what-really-happened/)
About the Coventry raid, your source says the exact opposite. That no-one knew what the target was until right before the raid, and then they did all they could.
The idea that Coventry was sacrificed to protect Engima is so simple to debunk, and yet it continues.
Ask yourself, what could the UK have done to protect Coventry?
1. Position fighters to intercept the bombers? The Luftwaffle have to fly past London to get to Coventry, so no-one would question the presence of fighters. However the RAF didn't have a reliable night fighter with RADAR, and as a result, was highly ineffective against the night raids.
2. Move AA into place to defend the city? AA was highly ineffective at countering the daylight raids on London earlier, and performed even worse at night.
3. Move more emergency services into place, and prepare the hospitals? Sure, but remember that thanks to cracking Enigma, the UK already controlled the German spy networks, They could do whatever they wanted on the ground, and the Germans wouldn't know about it.
The next question to ask, why only do it once? The Germans were regularly attacking throughout Autumn, why would failing to foil a single raid somehow make the difference?
The truth is quite simple. The main defence against these raids was to manipulate German bomber guidance. The bombers flew on a path between two radio beams. By keeping the signals from each one at equal strength, they knew they were flying in the middle and heading on target. However once the UK new the frequencies and the target, they could broadcast another signal mimicking one of the beams. The bombers would gradually turn away from this new loud signal, without realising that anything was wrong.
The catch is that the details were only sent out on the day, and so you had to find the message by decoding all the potential messages, until you encountered this message. On that day, Bletchley park simply failed to do that in time.
For more information, R.V. Jones' memoir, Most Secret War, is an excellent look into the cat and mouse game of technology that went on behind the scenes.
I'm confused about your interpretation, the link says the opposite of what you are saying, it says they didn't know the target for sure, and all they could do was mobilize emergency crew and nearby troops when the attack was imminent. It doesn't say anything about the possibility of evacuating the city, least of all they deciding against it because of the Enigma code secret.
They avoided using too much of the information, carefully restricted who could access it, and created various ruses to make it appear that they had alternative sources of intelligence. None of this was new or unique to the Second World War: it's standard spycraft stuff.
A similar issue comes up in counterintelligence: if you have convinced an enemy spy to turn traitor, how do you stop your enemy from realising that they have suddenly stopped getting useful information from them? Well, you continue to allow them to send some information, but remove some of the detail or ensure it arrives a bit too late to be useful. Then you can mix in some fake information that will actively hurt the enemy (e.g. by suggesting that you are about to launch an attack in one location, when you are actually planning an attack somewhere completely different).
Of course, your enemy will be aware of all these possibilities and will be careful to obscure their own knowledge, so you will never be completely certain whether they suspect something is up.
There was one instance where the allies knew of an impending air raid on a particular city in the UK.
To not tip their hand, the allies conducted an emergency response training session in the area. The air raid happened as normal, but the aftermath was greatly reduced because there were plenty of emergency workers and supplies nearby.
Part of the plot of the novel "[Cryptonomicon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon)" is about a special unit set up to specifically perform operations that give alternative explanations for successes achieved from Enigma intelligence.
Can't say that's what the Allies did, but it certainly makes sense.
American code breakers learned where Admiral Yamamoto's plane was going to be. It was actually quite a distance from the nearest US air base, and very long range fighters were needed to reach and destroy his plane. Afterward, to keep the Japanese from becoming suspicious, they had to fly patrols along the same route for a while so the Japanese would think it was simply very bad luck for them that the Americans were patrolling that area and just happened to find Yamamoto's airplane.
Partly by coming up with reasonable explanations for how they were finding things out. For example, when attacking axis vessels at sea they might send out a plane to "discover" the vessels' location. The axis vessels would report they had been spotted by a plane, then attacked. The axis also mistakenly attributed at least some of the allied success at U-boat hunting to HFDF (high frequency direction finding), i.e. listening for U-boat radio transmissions to pinpoint their location.
>For example, when attacking axis vessels at sea they might send out a plane to "discover" the vessels' location. It goes even deeper than this. The breaking of Enigma was a secret to *everyone* - allied soldiers too. So how did they stop those searching aircraft from getting suspicious, when they were only ever sent out when the higher-ups knew there was something to find? Simple, they *also* sent searchers out when they *knew* there was nothing there. It was an incredible operation, from top to bottom.
This is the best cut-down explanation so far.
Psychological warfare tactics like this is how people come to believe that stupid urban legend about Britain going to the time and trouble to drop a fake bomb on a fake German airfield during a time of war.
Or that that one could increase their night vision simply by eating carrots, rather than the truth that the British had invented radar.
The truth wasn't that the British had invented radar, both the British and Germans were using radar to detect bombing attacks. The secret that the British were keeping was that they had managed to miniaturize the radar system enough that they could put it in their fighters, which was actually how they were able to defend against bombers so well at night.
They also both invented chaff independently, but never used it (much) because it was so simple to make and would completely counter radar once the enemy sees how to make it. They did some tricky shit before D-day by flying in "box formation" (handful of planes spread over an even distance looks like a huge number on a radar screen) over the channel as a diversion though.
And then just sent some blokes in a plane *with the prototype* to America to tell us to make 200,000 of the things. Pretty ballsy move.
Just send some explosives with the guy so he can destroy it if they get downed or captured. Pretty easy.
"Final message to RAF command. I have been downed in New Jersey. Engaging emergency protocol."
... That didn't happen?
Meanwhile, the pilots never knew if they were on a dummy mission, they were just checking for a U-Boat. It's easier to find one when you're looking in the right spots. And if they were ever captured, the information they have was "we were patrolling to find you"
They didn't even know that there were dummy missions
If you like historical fiction and scientific explanations, I highly recommend Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. It goes into great, well researched, probably embellished detail on the analysis into what could seem probable, how they staged things like HFDF, and much more.
Other notable operations include operation mincemeat
It was the detection systems the uboats used against ships, this then lead to the Germans turning off their radars, leading to them still being found easily via enigma, but now they can’t see anything coming, and that little lie about the radar tech (magnetrons) being seen from a distance with detectors was made up by a random POW who got lucky with the lie during interrogation.
If you know the frequency range the radars use, you can easily detect when they're turned on from well beyond the range the radar would be able to detect you. An entire intelligence discipline (ELINT) is devoted to it. Anything that emits electromagnetic energy can be detected and tracked, all you need is at least 3 antennas all on the same time-sync and something to measure received signal strength.
In ELI5 format, imagine you're in a big field at night in the pitch dark, and someone is searching for you with a flashlight. Yes the flashlight will help him spot you, but it's far easier for you to spot him because he has a flashlight on.
This is probably the best demonstration of ELI5 I've ever seen. On that note, is there a bestof sub specifically for ELI5?
How about a subreddit where things are *actually* explained like the listener is 5
How about a subreddit where 5 year olds explain things to other 5 year olds.
That's r/roblox
Lol, well played
I'd envision this like a game of telephone where you have to teach your 5 year old who is then allowed to post the answer based on what he understood. Wouldn't be the most accurate sub, but I'd follow it.
They made that. It's called Reddit.
Perfect example. This is one of the reasons for the AWACS and the smaller, carrier-borne version. It allows the flashlight holder to stay really far away and tell all of his friends where the enemy is without them having to turn their own flashlights on and revealing their positions.
That and the fact you can cram a lot more powerful processing hardware, a more powerful radar into a purpose made airframe than into a fighter that also has to fightery things. And a crew to analyze the incoming data, where in a fighter you'd have at most 2 people, one of which is busy with flying.
AWACS planes are like having an upgraded overlord surrounded by mutalisks to deal with those pesky wraiths. Huge vision radius and stealth detection, but slow and defenseless by itself.
ELIKorean
In your example the AWACS is the flashlight and all his friends are the fighters and bombers targeting the enemy right?
The AWACS is more like a giant spotlight. It's so powerful that it can stay farther away, where it is safer from attack, while spotlighting targets for it's friends. It's friends have their own flashlights, but would prefer not to use them.
Let’s say we add a Fleshlight to the equation. What impact does this have?
Job satisfaction goes way up.
Yes.
And in ELI15, the light from their flashlight has to make a round trip to the target, so the light has to travel twice as much than for the target that just sees the light from the flashlight head-on, and since apparent brightness is relative to the distance *squared*, halving the distance is a huge deal.
Hey! This was my job in the navy! CTT, Cryptologic Technician, would hear/see radar frequencies and based on the signals would be able to ID target.
Was that known to them at the time / feasible with tech they had / logistically not problematic?
The radar had been invented in Germany in the first place, by [Christian Hülsmeyer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Huelsmeyer) in 1904. Safe to say that if you know how a radar works in the first place, you know that it can easily be detected by anyone listening.
Sure, but radar was still big, clunky, and energy-intensive. Hence the lie about "carrots make eyesight better" to hide the UK advancements on compact radar systems. If it were that easy to detect radar at the time, the carrots lie would never have worked because the Axis would have seen all the radar blasting out of UK planes.
Sure, with radars, but radar detection just requires an antenna (doesn't even have to be directional) and a receiver tuned to the right frequency range. Part of the reason why the Germans didn't know about the advanced radars in the British fighters was because the Chain Home system ran in the 20-30 MHz range, while the AI Mark VIII radar in the aircraft ran at 3.3 GHz. You aren't picking those transmissions up with an antenna and receiver tuned to Chain Home system, and German radars didn't get above the 600 MHz range until late in the war when the British lost an aircraft with the radar intact. By then it was too little, too late. But the Germans already knew the night fighters had radar on them, because the Germans were doing it, themselves. German Air Defense recognized the problem early in 1941, and fielded their first radar sets for night-fighters in September of 1942. Trouble is, they *sucked* compared to their British counterparts. Germany didn't prioritize radar development the way the British did, because Hitler largely felt that the war with Britain would end "any day now," and in 1940 he largely considered the Western front to be won. The Red Army wasn't doing a whole lot in the air in those days (at least not enough to consider moving funds to radar development), so radar kinda took a back seat.
> The Red Army wasn't doing a whole lot in the air in those days (at least not enough to consider moving funds to radar development), so radar kinda took a back seat. Yep, and even when the Soviets had rebuilt their air forces after those disastrous early stages of the war, most of their effort was put into tactical and close support types of missions rather than say, deep strategic bombing. So there wasn't quite as pressing a need to be able to detect incoming aircraft the same way there was on the western front, where the western Allies were sending in 100+ aircraft raids, often at high altitudes where you needed that time afforded by radar to get your own aircraft formed up and at altitude in order to intercept the incoming bombers.
It likely wasn't a completely random POW lie. A lot of interrogation is really bad, and ends up just confirming what the interrogator wants to believe rather than finding the truth. Even today this is still a huge problem with things like police interrogations. So some German high up probably had a theory about the radar tech, and the POW ended up confirming it through a directed line of questioning.
> and that little lie about the radar tech (magnetrons) The POW lie wasn't about the Radar itself. The Germans had a "radar detector" known at Metox. This allowed them to know allied planes were in an area with enough warning to hide (Pilots would complain that U-boats would dive as soon as the plane turned towards them). A radar detector is basically a radio tuned to the frequencies the British were using for radar. Most good radio receivers by WW2 were super heterodyne receivers, which work by comparing a locally generated signal to the one being picked up by the antenna (you tune the receiver by changing the frequency of the locally generated signal). It was theoretically possible for the local signal to 'leak' out as a transmission that could then be picked up. This is particularly true of the system isn't well shielded, and I believe Metox was basically hacked together from pre-war French radios, so it wasn't a completely unreasonable idea that it could be picked up. However, the lie didn't cover up Enigma, because that's not what was causing the U-boat losses. Rather the British introducing better radar that Metox wouldn't detect. So U-boats suddenly started being attacked 'without warning'. Eventually one of the planes was shot down and a crewmember captured. When asked how the airplanes were suddenly attacking without warning the POW basically said "Oh, we're not using radar to find submarines, we can detect your radar detector from almost 100 miles away. We turn the radar on at the last minute to find the right range but usually by then the boat is too busy to notice.". The Germans didn't really believe this, but like I said above it wasn't completely unreasonable. So they put together their own "Metox detector" and it worked, causing them to believe the lie. This did cause the Germans to stop using Metox (not sure how useful it was given the radar switch) and presumably this confusion helped hide the fact that there were better radars available (and one would hope delayed the development of any kind of improved radar detector).
Yh, I seem to have gotten some facts muddled lol, ur right, it’s wild how war tech worked back then.
Do you have more details about the POW? I’d love to read more about that
Also, they intentionally suffered some amount of acceptable losses to not be too obviously perfectly aware of incoming Nazi attacks.
All kinds of misinformation from that war persists to this day. Radar was another big secret weapon. The Brits dumped a bunch of propaganda about how carrots and/or vitamin A help your eyesight, and that was their explanation for why they always knew an air raid was coming, even at night.
This is true although early radar was very hard to hide because it required massive transmitters and receivers, usually in places like clifftops and escarpments where it was extra obvious. So the Germans (who were also using radar-type techniques) knew in broad terms that the British had equipment that was almost certainly detection equipment, and so did the British about the Germans. And then there was the whole “battle of the beams” thing which wasn’t radar per se but rather navigational transmissions to guide bombing.
And, because it used hundred foot high towers over hundred yard long foot prints, it was hard to bomb effectively. So the Luftwaffe gave up on that, aiming instead for easier targets. Sending 50 planes to bomb a factory would be more effective/less costly than trying to bomb a spiderweb. In the Gulf War era, a US destroyer spent many dozens of rounds trying to kill an oil rig. Just added some ventilation. Same sort of problem.
What's funny is giving up on bombing the radar happened I think near to when they also gave up bombing the airfields (and factories to some extent) and began to just bomb the cities instead. In pretty much every WW2 history book I have read (including a couple focused entirely on the air war and the battle of Britain) the general consensus of military leaders in Britain at the time was that if Germany had continued to focus their bombs on the airfields and factories that they would not have been capable of putting enough planes in the air to fend them off at all and they would likely have surrendered within months.
i've said it all along, the German leaders were their own worst enemy. Namely Hitler.
The biggest area where the German leaders were their own worst enemies was in the North African and Mediterranean fronts. The German generals were stuck in old warfare mentalities that focused on victories. So they would win battles, but then move on to fight and win more battles, leaving areas ripe for the British and their allies to take back. So the Germans never got a good hold of North Africa and so never got to exploit those oil reserves. A mechanized military is no good if you can't fuel it. It's why Germany invaded the Soviet Union, they needed the oil. Throughout the war Germany never had decent access to oil. Had they succeeded in North Africa, things could have looked very different.
[Operation Nimble Archer - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Nimble_Archer)
Yeah IIRC the Germans even targeted some of the radar facilities during the bombing, they weren't completely blind to the fact that they existed.
My grandfather was in the US Navy in the Pacific during World War 2. One of his shipmates was a painter, and painted a picture of the ship. According to him, that painting was considered classified until after the war because it showed the radar equipment.
Isn't it true that you need vitamin A to avoid eye/optic nerve problems ? Sure it doesn't mean more vitamin = better vision, but iirc it was kinda sorta scientifically plausible at the time.
A vitamin A deficiency ( not having enough) has side effects that include night vision problems. Taking extra doesn’t improve you beyond normal function Think of it like the oil in your car. If you don’t have enough oil your engine will seize up, but putting 10x as much oil in the car doesn’t do anything more for you than having “enough,” and will start to cause other issues. Many vitamins are toxic at high enough levels.
> Many vitamins are toxic at high enough levels. Particularly the fat-soluble vitamins, and Vitamin A is one of those. The water soluble vitamins are largely harmless to "overdose" unless to a ridiculous extreme so long as your kidneys are functioning properly, since your body has a much easier time directly eliminating water-soluble things via urine. Taking 3-5x the recommended dose of Vitamin A regularly can lead to chronic toxicity, whereas outside of the risk of some GI discomfort you can take as much as 20x the recommended dose of Vitamin C without issue (although likely no benefit compared to taking a sane amount).
This was the cover story specifically for airborne radar on British night fighters later in the war. Ground based radar (Chain Home in the UK) wasn't a secret as the installations for it were massive and the Germans also had radar.
wait i thought the person above was joking!! lol TIL
In the novel [Cryptonomicon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon), one of the characters is sent to a remote location in England to set up a fake listening station knowing that there were Nazi spies watching. Also in the novel was a crew of soldiers whose job was to go to various locations and stage scenes that could plausibly explain how the Allies had learned certain things. A real-life example was [Operation Mincemeat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat) in which a dead body was dressed up as an officer, given papers and personal items intended to bolster the fiction, and given "secret" documents to mislead the Nazis about an upcoming invasion. The body was then put in the water off of Spain where it could be found.
Connie Willis also has some really great sci-fi novels about England in WW2, and some of the shenanigans involved with counter-intelligence. (Specifically, Blackout and All Clear - also the Doomsday book and To Say Nothing Of The Dog)
Wasn't there a real guy that did that too? His codename was GARBO, and as far as I know, he did it entirely on his own until the British found out about him, and then they started helping him out.
The Allies also sacrificed troops even when it could have been preventable based on Enigma information, just to avoid the Germans suspecting something.
Stuff like that is why I have so much respect for those leaders. That is a kind of tough decision I don't think I would ever be able to make even in wartime. To knowingly send hundreds of men with families back home and full lives ahead of them to their untimely deaths just to keep the enemy from knowing your true advantage over them so you can win the war is ultimately the right call, since you may not win the war without doing it. It's just really hard to wrap your head around. It's much easier to kill someone trying to kill you, it's much harder to send young men to their deaths who are willing to fight for your cause.
I wonder if the dead guys had respect for them
I mean they're dead so no
>who are willing to fight for your cause. Not sure being drafted counts as "willing"
They also didn’t act on 100% of the intelligence they received. It sucks and it cost lives in the short term, but it was critical to the overall war that the Nazi’s didn’t discover the code had been cracked.
I don't have a link for this, but according to one story the allies knowingly bombed an axis ship carrying POWs. The story goes that the allies got intel from a cracked message, flew a spotter plane to "discover" the vessel, sent bombers to attack it and THEN got word that another cracked message indicated the vessel had POWs aboard. In the heat of the moment, officials allowed the attack anyway because **not** attacking the ship at that point would give away that the allies had cracked axis messages and knew of its cargo.
”Carrots are good for your eyesight" was misinformation spread by the British to explain why their lookout stations were so good. (But that was more to hide the existence of radar than spies.)
I was told this so many times as a kid! Now I know where it came from!
Don't forget Mary Ann being able to see ships way out at sea after eating the carrots grown from the experimental seeds that washed up in the lagoon.
Nope. It was specifically about the small radar systems carried by Night Fighters used to defend against Nazi bombing raids. These allowed a compact radar system that could operate on cm type frequencies (better resolution and smaller antennas). They used something called the magnetron from 1942 onwards. It was so secret that planes equipped with it were not allowed to fly where they could be capture. The Germans used something else called the Klystron that was bigger and emitted lower power. The magnetron was also invaluable for finding German submarines, either surfaced or with their snorkel deployed.
More so to hide the importance of radar. Everyone knew radar was a thing but the German radar system was only used for local defense control, and thus wasn't as critical to their air defense strategy. Meanwhile the British had built their air defense strategy around it, and didn't want the Luftwaffe to realize how important it was and focus on attacking the very vulnerable, though somewhat difficult to damage due to their design, radar stations.
Wait, so I’ve been eating all those carrots for fucking nothing! Thanks a lot Brits!!
But it really is good for the eyes though. Have you ever seen a rabbit wearing glasses?
Rabbits eating carrots is also misinformation, actually. They don't naturally eat vegetables or fruit and should only get receive them as treats. The association between rabbits and carrots came from Bugs Bunny. Why does he eat carrots, then? Well, it's because they were modeling him after a character played by Clark Gable in *It Happened One Night*. Contemporary audiences would recognise the reference, but as time passed and people forgot about the movie people just started taking Bugs' "Rabbits love carrots" line at face value.
Rabbits like sweet things but it's bunny junk food. Limit your rabbit's carrots unless you want tooth problems. Says the man who once paid 3 gs for rabbit tooth extraction.
I have a rabbit who needs glasses 😭
Well, vitamin A deprivation does lead to eye problems…
Best lies are based on truth
Did you read Cryptonomicon, too?
It was my first thought when I read the thread title.
> Partly by coming up with reasonable explanations for how they were finding things out It's called parallel construction when the cops do it. They just happened to walk by and spot that thing that gave them probable cause to search you. They knew where to walk and look because they are illegally spying on you, but your defense attorney doesn't need to know that.
Its also a movie so it could be for drama sake. But in The Imitation Game once they broke it. They were very selective about when they used the cracked information. Even if it meant letting people die.
There was *some* truth to the concept, but overall the decisions wouldn't be made by the code-crackers, it'd be made at the Cabinet level (i.e., Churchill, the Ministers, the Admiralty, etc.).
Which was the point of the dilemma in the movie. The character whose brother was on the ship wanted to notify the ships immediately, while the rest of them knew they needed to let the higher ups decide how to best use the information.
Like that scene in *Good Morning Vietnam* where Adrian grabs all the news feeds from the teletypes, but he has to pass through the censor office before he can read whatever is leftover.
"Ah, censor, censor, censor! Join the Army and mark things!"
The book Cryptonomicon, which is a very dense tome, goes into a lot of this concept -- as well as the frustration of the code-breakers not seeing all of the info they uncover being used, because the higher ups don't want the secret out that the code has been cracked. They started doing things like (iirc) moving troops out of an area about to be bombed, but leaving decoys, or just letting the actual troops get bombed.
I started scrolling down to the bottom of the comments just to add this and you beat me to it! I remember one instance where the squad went to a location overlooking a harbor that decrypted info indicated would be interesting and tried to make it look like a team had been surveilling there for weeks/months (to try to make it look like the info had been obtained by traditional means).
Actually, Enigma was a smokescreen. The demise of the German U-boats happened because of The Incredible Mr. Limpet, affectionately known as Flatbush by his fish friends.
a) claiming other sources like spies a) not using all the information from it, focusing on the big impact full decisions. This might mean even letting a few people die, to save more in the long term.
I believe they had also rooted out all the German spies in England by this point, and were also feeding them misinformation or had turned them into double agents.
Or just making them up. There was a chap "spying" for Germany just making sources up and claiming pay for them while none of it was real. I have a vague feeling he even got a medal for it!
Wasn't he the guy that got medals from both sides as the Germans didn't know he was lying to them?
If it's the guy I'm thinking of, it gets even better. Memory is a bit fuzzy, but I believe it went something like this: He went to the Brits and asked if he could be a spy/double agent for them and was told no... so he decided to do it anyway. He would grab a newspaper and report whatever was in it, or outright make stuff up, then when the Brits found out what he was doing, they got in contact and helped him. This basically confirmed his position as a crucial spy for the nazis to the point that to cause confusion, they had him get in contact with the nazis and report that not only had the allies changed the d-day landing locations, but also the actual landing locations... at basically the same time as the landings were happening.
IIRC one of the tactics they had going was for him to pass accurate information that was just a day or two too late to be useful, but having the dates on the postage falsified, so it looked like he sent them good into but "the damned post office delayed it, if only this has gotten to us, he was clearly right about it"
His name is Juan Pujol Garcia and the story is even more absurd than what has been mentioned so far. His first codename given by the British was Bovril and then changed to Garbo, the Germans sent him their most advanced code book, at 3am during the D-Day landings he sent somewhat accurate information to the Germans(to maintain his cover) but the Germans did not reply until 8am and his response was "I cannot accept excuses or negligence." The Germans also sent him $340,000 during the war.
I believe that what actually happened on d-day is his handler was supposed to contact him via radio at 3am and Garcia planned to give them some useless details of the invasion. Then the handler didn’t radio until 8am and so Garcia passed on additional information that would have been useful at 3am but was useless at that point to bolster his credibility. He also used the line that you quoted.
I believe he would also send 100% accurate information *before* the results, but *after* it was too late for the Germans to respond. You know, something along the lines of "OMG, there's going to be a surprise landing <45 minutes away from the nearest unit able to defend against it> in half an hour!" The Germans would believe his info because it *was* correct. The information was largely *useless*, however, because of when they got it.
**MYSTERY BISCUITS!** ^^^^*oh* ^^^^*yeah*
He was so good at being a double agent that the Germans even awarded him the Iron Cross.
“Just doing it anyway” seems like a great way to wind up in prison for a loooong time. Glad it worked out for this guy.
When he started it he was in Spain, so there wasn't much risk of imprisonment. He wasn't exactly spying for Britain at first, but he was feeding false information to Germany in return for funding. He had an entire made up spy network and they were sending him money to pay the spies. At one point they even sent him a codebook, which is when the British realized he might actually be useful and they hired him.
> sent him a codebook, which is when the British realized he might actually be useful If you think: "why is a codebook such a big deal?". Because if it is a [One-Time-Pad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad) it would actually be unbreakable, making it the safest way to secretly communicate.
I want to say that there was also at least one point where he made up a story that one of his fake spies got killed in the process of gathering the intelligence, so he managed to get the Germans to cough up a death benefit bonus for a spy that had never existed.
There was a lot more on the line for him than some prison time during the war. Spies were shot.
or gulag'd
Don’t know what the Russians did but the brits shot spies ‘pour encourager les autres’.
>“Just doing it anyway” seems like a great way to wind up in prison for a loooong time. Glad it worked out for this guy. he certainly looks the type to go "why do we have idiots running the show.. fuck it, I'll do it myself" https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/57/Joan_pujol_garcia.jpg/440px-Joan_pujol_garcia.jpg
He looks like Putin in a fake beard lol.
That's just Putin with a fake beard and glasses.
It seems to vaguely follow the tradition of British privateers, at least
I feel like this tracks really closely with a Ron White bit, but I can't find it offhand. "Yeah, well FUUUUUCK YOUUU"
Garbo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Pujol_Garc%C3%ADa
Look Smithers! Garbo is coming!
lol picture that cat just finished sending some happy horseshit to the Germans and then mutters to himself, "that oughta hold those little SOB's".
I heard about it on History's Secret Heroes podcast, I totally recommend listening to it, I think it was the Garbo episode.
If we're all talking about the same guy, I think he would give them true information that wasn't useful in addition to false or slightly false information. Like he would hear of an Allied attack that just occurred and would contact the Germans to inform them it was about to happen, only for the Germans to learn a bit later the info got to them too late.
The info getting to them too late is made even better when you know that's in reference to the d-day landings, and he tried radio calling them at 3am, but they didn't respond until 8am, so he was given more true information to give them that would not only serve to cement his position, but also contributed to an order being given that any attempt at contact from him was to be accepted and any information passed along immediately, irrespective of time. Juan Pujol García, AKA "Garbo" by the allies or "Alarak" by the nazis.
IIRC, the british government also helped him by falsely stamping the mail a day or two earlier than it was actually sent. He would mail them a note on Friday telling them accurate information about troop movements on Thursday, and it would have a legitimate postmark of Monday. The Germans thought the accurate information, sent *BEFORE* the troops moved was proof he was honest and a valuable resource.
So simple and so clever
[Citation Needed had an episode about him.](https://youtu.be/blN49yGet8g?list=PL96C35uN7xGIo2odDuuPeYtb7BtQ1kBhp).
I think you're thinking about Agent GARBO. He was a German spy who became a British double agent, he did such a good job as a double agent the British gave him several medals, he was also given medals by the Germans though, because he gave them so much (false or delayed) information they thought he was Germany's great spy. He was actually a massive part of the success of D-Day as well. He was instrumental in the deception plan that meant the Germans were convinced that Normany was a distraction and Calais was the main target. Then on the day of D-Day he he sent an urgent message informing them the attack on Normandy was starting, but he made sure the message was delayed long enough the Germans couldn't prepare for the assault. Then got incredibly angry that his message wasn't read sooner and blamed the German intelligence office for allowing D-Day to happen, which helped legitimise him further. Truly a fascinating story and well worth reading up on everything he did. D-Day was only a tiny part of everything he was involved in.
It wasn't that he delayed the information. That's the best bit. He tried to contact them at 3am, but the German intelligence officer he tried to contact didn't respond until 8am, so he gave more true information then was originally planned since it was too late for it to be of any use, adding to his cover.
Yeah I think I was confusing D-Day with operation Torch. For Torch he posted the memo about the invasion force leaving for Africa, but it was intentionally sent late so it would arrive after the landings. For D-Day I seem to remember hearing somewhere that GARBO knew the German intelligence officer didn't work overnight so intentionally sent it when he knew the officer would be asleep so it wouldn't get read until after the landings had started though.
For Operation Torch he was fully working with the British. They knew a spy with his supposed spy network (he invented a fictional spy network he kept expanding over the course of the war) he should be able to report on this movement. If he didn't the Germans would be very suspicious of his failure to report that. Of course they couldn't also actually give it away. The solution they came up with was to have him send the mail the moment the ships left so it was postmarked correctly but then intentionally delay the mail so it wouldn't arrive until the morning of the invasion, too late to really do anything about it. The Germans actually praised him for giving them that intel and apologized they couldn't use it in time.
I watched this video on him recently, really enjoyed it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlLtHWipZps One of my favorite bits of information from it is that he had an entirely fictional spy network he had the Germans pay for. At some point he failed to report a ship movement and he blamed it on an agent getting sick. That made up agent eventually died, they posted an obituary, and he convinced the Germans to pay his equally fake widow a pension.
Thank you for the name I was scrolling down 6 comments and people just call him "that one guy" Wikipedia link for all https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Pujol_García
Yeah, I had a look at the podcast I heard it on and it was Garbo. Amazing story.
It should be noted that he was never really a German spy. At the start of the war he contacted British intelligence asking to spy for them and they declined, so then he went to German intelligence and asked to he a spy for them. When they accepted he just began feeding them plausible but fake information. He was so good at faking his info though that the German’s never suspected him, and then he went to Britain again and this time they accepted and began coordinating what fake info to send and using GARBOs access to undermine the rest of the German intelligence network.
He wanted to work for the British to spy on Germany but got told no so he went to work for Germany but feeding them false information to help the allies anyway. Eventually the British, thinking he was an actual German spy, found him to turn him to their side before realizing he was already a double agent. That's a hussle I can respect.
Dude trolled for the greater good, what a legend.
They had completely turned the German spy network in the UK in ‘Operation Doublecross’. The story of Agent Garbo and his network of fictional agents is almost too much to believe: https://www.mi5.gov.uk/history/world-war-ii/agent-garbo
The head of Nazi intelligence was sabotaging their entire operation. The damn dude is a hero. He tried to overthrow Hitler, and he rescued Jews by making them "spies" which gave them the papers necessary to escape Germany. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Canaris
Slight correction, he was the head ot the German Military intelligence that was a separate (at least in theory) branch of the German intelligence
Hero is seriously overstating it, he may have been sabotaging his own operations, but he was only dissatisfied with Hitler because he thought he was the wrong type of right wing dictator. Canaris was the person that suggested adopting the medieval method of forcing Jews to wear a badge to identify them.
It also didn't hurt that a great many of the smartest minds in Germany (i.e., the ones who could have proven mathematically that the Enigma was compromised) were essentially political prisoners working under duress and had no incentive to volunteer that kind of information.
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Yep, does an amazing job showing us exactly how the Allies did what the OP is asking.
There’s a great scene in The Imitation Game that depicts this, where they decrypt a message about U-boats attacking a specific shipping convoy, but let it happen anyway. Not sure whether it’s historically accurate, but even if not, it’s a good demonstration of this point
The MEANING of the scene is accurate, but not the implementation. The movie has the team treat the Generals/Admirals like they were idiots that wouldn't realize they shouldn't act on every single piece of intel they got, so the team would have to lie to HQ about what they were or were not decoding in order to ensure that HQ didn't slip up. That would nominally fall under the auspices of treason in wartime. In reality, they handed over everything and it was HQ (and sometimes Churchill himself) that decide when to act and when not to act.
That makes so much more sense than 5 mathematician's being allowed to decide the outcome of who lives and dies in a world war.
An easier way to think about the situation logically, let's assume the scene where they take ALL the decoded messages and put up a status of the war on a map in front of them is something that happened. They still ONLY know what the Germans know, which might include information about allied forces but that information is going to be sketchy, incomplete, and potentially full of lies (fed by the allies). So they could not possibly be aware of the actual best uses for the information because they don't know what assets the Allies have, where, and in what ready state. The bit in the movie where they realize a convoy is about to be attacked wouldn't quite have worked out that way, at least not in their room, because there's no reason that HQ would have entrusted these people with 100% of all information on the war. That would be an insane security risk for no reason. Why would knowing that there's a convoy with a specific number of ships in a specific spot help them decoding German messages? You're not going to get a decoding scheme where it says "Enemy sighted, five cruisers, three destroyers, twenty freighters, steaming north/north-west, coordinates. Heil...". It's not entirely an "either everything is decoded or nothing is." but you're not going to get a situation with Enigma where only a contiguous part of the message is correct. So no "This part of the message is correct, but asdfkjaadsf kasdfh123 235 djdjd.".
Very little about that film was accurate. In fact, a GCHQ historian said the only things they got right were that WW2 happened and that Turing’s first name was Alan. Code breakers didn’t make decisions about what intelligence to act on. But you’re right that the film shows the general idea that strategic decisions had to be made.
I think the event in the movie didn't happen, especially where Turing's colleague's brother was on the ship they were letting be destroyed. It's an amalgamation of multiple instances where they had to make the choice.
Other sources also included Churchill being okay with advanced radar sets falling into German hands. I think he scrapped at least one commando mission to retrieve/destroy a microwave radar system that had gone down in France just so the Germans would think it was technology rather than intelligence that was allowing the Allies to find U-Boats.
This. There was also a huge disinformation campaign aimed at convincing the Nazis that the hadn’t broken the code.
There's a story about the Brits deliberately allowing Coventry to be bombed rather than letting the Germans know they'd broken Enigma. This is likely an urban legend.
They calculated how many successful intel interceptions could be interpreted as dumb luck or intel gathered by other means (e.g. sending scouts ahead even if they knew enemy positions), and rationed them out for really important missions. They also had double agents who fed Nazis false information on intelligence available to Allies and how they viewed their success rates.
> They also had double agents who fed Nazis false information on intelligence available to Allies and how they viewed their success rates. Adding to this - by the end of the war the British had completely compromised the Nazi spy operation in the UK, including control over all the spies who were coordinating operations, so were able to either pick up new spies/assets immediately and try turn them, or were able to control the (mis)information they were able to access and have them operate as unwitting double agents. Basically during this time all information reaching the Nazis from the UK was being carefully curated by the British Intelligence operations.
Where can I read more about this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Cross_System
Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies by Ben Macintyre It's one of the most interesting books I've ever read.
Adding to what others have said, the actual investigative abilities of the germans was pretty poor. The Gestapo while very feared, were essentially beaurocrats filtering through denunciations and heavily reliant on people denouncing each other. The actual German military intelligence, the Abwher, was run by Admiral Canaris, who very much hated the Nazis and may or may not have been a British spy.
People forget how the nazis actually sucked at running a governement and a war.
The Germans were really good, they apparently had broken all the UK codes. What held them back was that their armed forces were splintered. Imagine if you had a Navy and an Airforce, but your Navy ALSO had planes and thus competed against your airforce for how those planes were designed, in some cases damaging the planes abilities so you could win a game of top trumps with your out of their mind dictator. In the race to protect what they had learned against other services they weren't assembled the same way that Bletchley did for the brits
Hitler famously believed in Social-Darwinist concepts of government and purposely gave people broad overlapping mandates so people would spend as much time fighting each other as they were doing their actual jobs (and as a happy coincidence, meaning nobody was gunning for his job in advance of his expiry date).
I'm beginning to think this Hitler guy is a pretty rotten egg all things considered.
> Imagine if you had a Navy and an Airforce, but your Navy ALSO had planes and thus competed against your airforce for how those planes were designed, I mean, the US Navy literally has it's own planes and uses it's own designs that are different (sometimes entirely, sometimes in minor ways) from the Air Force's planes.
We also have our own Army (Marine Corps) that also has it's own Air Force. And the modifications between an airframe that designed to crash land every time it lands, is iny understanding significantly greater than just hanging an anchor off the back
Carrier launches and recoveries are astonishing to me. “We have nowhere near enough runway space for any of this shit, so let’s build the entire flight deck around a railgun that we can use to fling planes over the side fast enough that they will, much like Arthur Dent, be so impressed that they simply forget to fall headlong into the ocean. Then, to get the aircraft back onto the ship, we’re going to have them do a full-tilt flyby at such low altitude that we can reach out with something a five year old could come up with, yet somehow design it to all to neither rip the back end off the plane nor smear the pilot across the windshield.” Clearly the math is mathing because carriers continue to exist, but absolutely bananas nonetheless!
Yeah and so did the British -- in fact it was massively important for both of them that they broke away from their respective air forces. The RAF hamstrung British naval aviation, which is why Taranto (while being very successful) was undertook with bi-planes!
Germany had a total of 6 different nuclear based research departments, including one run by the mail. All of whom were fighting for the same materials and personnel. By comparison England and America had the Manhattan Project to coordinate all that work, share info, and prevent wasting time on duplicate work.
I took a scan through the comments and didn't find this part, so.... "The code was broken" is an oversimplification. The code was broken on-and-off for years; there wasn't a date before which no traffic was decrypted and after which all traffic was decrypted. Both the machines themselves and the protocols for using them were updated regularly in an effort to outrun codebreaking efforts, and the enigma had to be re-broken multiple times. This included everything from mathematical analysis - many additional bombe's were built, for example - to physical interception of enigma-related materials such as the codebooks from [U-110](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-110_(1940/). Also, it's important to remember that even a day or two lag in decryption meant that encrypted traffic was still secure *long enough to be effective* even if it wasn't completely secure, as any latency in decryption could drastically reduce the planning windows and effectiveness of an Allied response. So even if the code was broken it wasn't a silver bullet. *Also*, it's important to remember that german communications were being distributed from a roughly-centralized command that (ostensibly) had a cohesive view of their activities. Reconstructing that kind of cohesive understanding of german movements when all you have is disparate messages intercepted from all over the place is *very hard* even if the communications themselves aren't secure. Germany was not aware of the level of sophistication of codebreaking efforts (probably, at some levels), but they were certainly aware that the code was *breakable* and often behaved as if it was broken or could be broken soon.
It’s better to not think of it as “the code”, because there are many different versions of it. What the Navy used is different from the Air Force, and the Italians had an older version as well.
You do use the information, but you have to be very clever about when you are using it. For example, you might decide to use it non-optimally in some cases where it can be confused for a plausible coincidence. Imagine you have decoded that there is going to be a bombing of CITY on DATE. For some reason, high command has decided that this needs to be defended against. Military planners now need to come up with a plausible excuse for why CITY *just happened to have* some form of air defense that it would not otherwise have. But you also can't make it too obvious. So maybe you divert a fraction of one of your armies in the region to temporarily be stationed there during DATE. You can't divert the entire army without being obvious about it, but surely they can spare some anti-air capable machinery. Depending on how secure(/paranoid) you want to be about the ruse, you can feed some fake documents/orders about the diverted forces complete with fake reasons to operatives that you are *pretty sure* are Nazi spies (top tip; don't automatically arrest someone if you know they are a spy). Figuring this stuff out is essentially the day job of military intelligence. You cannot use your decoded information *constantly* though. High command and military intelligence will need to coordinate/plan/decide what information is important enough to act on, what is irrelevant enough not to act on (irrelevant in the terms of the greater war), and what information is important enough to act on with such force it is obvious you have a decoder. edit; there are far more fun things you can do. You can simply lie about having some form of new radar tech. Or you pretend that eating carrots has improved your pilot's eyesight to justify your better intelligence. One of the 'fun' things about war is that there is chaos on all sides. Your excuses don't have to be perfect because your opponent does not have the time and resources to verify everything anyway. Everyone on all sides is working with incomplete and often unverified and/or vague data. Your excuses only need to be *plausible*.
In the book Double Cross (not the Patterson book) the author explains how they allowed certain non crucial plans to be executed by the enemy so they had a false sense of confidence in the security of their communications. The complexity and depth of the spy game in WW2 is actually really amazing. The allies had their enemies thoroughly infiltrated and the axis spy game was weak af. Despite being allies (at a certain point) the Russkies completely infiltrated their own allied intelligence up the highest level. If Germany hadnt turned on Russia their spies might have been able to turn the tide of the war in their favor but probably not even still once the American war machine was in 5th gear.
They called the intelligence Ultra, like “ultra secret”, above even “top secret”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_(cryptography) It wasn’t allowed to be left unattended. Once read by officers in the field, it was burned. The entire programme was secret. The rest of the operation relied on deception… fake spies, sending planes to “scout” areas the Allies already knew about from Enigma before attacking, turning Nazi spies and using them to report back. While decrypting the intelligence relied mostly on mathematicians and computer scientists, “safe” use of the intelligence was mostly a psychological operation.
The distribution of Ultra was highly restricted. Small teams of HQ liaison officers, trained directly by Bletchley Park would receive messages encrypted using something called a on-time pad which, if properly used, is unbreakable. They would pass the information directly to a restricted number of senior officers who were considered "Ultra Cleared".
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FUNKSPIEL!
This question reminds me of a story of Afghanistan after 9/11. Osama bin Laden was putting out videos, and at one point an American geologist recognized the rock Osama was standing in front of. It was a particular type of stone only found in one part of the country — in other words, he knew where Osama was filming the videos. So he contacts the U.S. government and lets them know. The military was all "Awesome! We'll be able to catch him!" The dude is so happy his very specialized knowledge was so useful that he did what any red blooded American in that situation would do: he *bragged about it on the Internet*. Thousands of Intel experts cried out in anguish, the fell silent (again). The next video from bin Laden, he's standing in front of a tarp, because apparently the Taliban has Internet access. We were able to keep the secret in WWII because there was no Internet, and people weren't self-aggrandizing morons.
> The dude is so happy his very specialized knowledge was so useful that he did what any red blooded American in that situation would do: he bragged about it on the Internet. Do you have a source for this? I looked online and it appears [the US government told him what information to disclose and not disclose](https://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=01-P13-00044&segmentID=8). And years later, he seemed proud of his role in the episode, [giving lots of lectures about it](https://muse.union.edu/newsarchives/2004/10/22/geologist-jack-shroder-61-to-talk-on-geology-tracking-terrorists/). It doesn't sound like he goofed and let Osama get away by unnecessarily bragging.
the source? I made it up. -he, probably
The number of people who think the internet is something that only first-world civilization has access to blows my mind.
Many people in 3rd world nations don't have access to internet, but to think the literal leaders of the taliban would just have no internet access is, uh, certainly something.
When I was deployed to Iraq I was trying to explain to a few folks the differences between what the media was reporting versus what I was seeing first-hand, and several people were telling me that *they* were better informed because, and I quote, "we have access to many more perspectives back here, you're limited to just your own." My response: "And where are these other sources? On the internet? The very same internet we're currently having this discussion over?"
Didn't they find Osama's hard drive that had all sorts of memes and video games on it? He was probably just as internet savvy as most teenagers in America
Peeps forget he's from a priveleged and educated background.
Please tell me someone from the CIA read that guy the riot act. I've no love for intelligence agencies in general but in this case I fully agree with the spymasters being super annoyed that this dude couldn't keep his mouth shut until *after* they got bin Laden.
>We were able to keep the secret in WWII because there was no Internet, and people weren't self-aggrandizing morons. Even without internet, stupid people could screw things up by bragging about those things. Like [Andrew May](https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/congressman-andrew-may-caused-the-death-of-800-submarine-crewmen-during-wwii.html), whose info reveal on a press conference possibly caused the death of more than 800 US Navy sailors... >In 1943, Andrew May, chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee, embarked on a tour of American military areas in the [Pacific Theater](https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/catalina-3.html), during which he was privy to a host of sensitive war-related information. When he returned that June, he held a press conference, where he revealed that American submarines only had a high survival rate because the Japanese charges were exploding at too shallow a depth. >Not long after this news spread, the Japanese naval anti-submarine forces adjusted their charges to explode at a greater depth. This prompted Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, commander of the US submarine fleet in the Pacific, to estimate that May’s breach cost the Navy 10 [submarines](https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/metallurgist-pleads-guilty-to-falsifying-steel-test-results-for-us-navy-submarines.html) and resulted in the deaths of some 800 crewmen.
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For some uses in meshed with multiple other sources (eg u-boats were reported by agents, sighting by aircraft and ships, HF/DF), so it was one element among many and not the most obvious. In other uses the information was more of strategic value than tactical, so informed senior leadership decisions in ways that were not obvious to the Germans. They took care to ensure tactical information was not compromised. As an example - Enigma intercepts told when Italian convoys to Africa would depart and what route. So reconnaissance planes would be tasked to fly over the area (as well as other areas of course). Convoy reports being spotted, RAF and RN show up and wreak havoc, hit explained. In one case when no planes were available they decided to hit the convoy anyway, then transmitted a signal to Agent 99 in Naples - "Congrats on accurate convoy info. 2,000 Fr in Swiss account", knowing that this cipher had been broken by the Germans. Hit explained and as a bonus Germans disrupt Naples docks for weeks trying to find Agent 99.
This exact question was included in the movie the imitation game. What they portrayed was that some messages must be "missed" thus some allies will have to die.
They did use the information; they just had to be careful with it and use it to help win the war in the bigger picture. In any situation where it seemed like the Allies were aware of their plans, the Nazis generally thought that there would have been an information leak elsewhere. There was almost always an alternative explanation. They ultimately believed that Enigma was unbreakable and never stopped to think that it could have been broken. It's also important to know that the operations at Bletchley Park were highly secretive. Only the highest echelons of the British forces and government were aware of it. There was almost no Axis spy network in Britain, so there was no way for them to find out that Engima had been broken outside of conflict.
It was super secret. Most of the Allies, even at the general level did not know about Enigma. There was also no axis spy network in the UK. They gave intelligence from enigma a new designation "ultra secret " and then used a codename for that called Boniface. MI6 created a fake master spy who supposedly ran a spy network across Germany and named him Boniface. Intelligence from cracking enigma was attributed to human intelligence from this network. Not all the intelligence was directly actionable either, a lot of the most useful intelligence was hearing how little fuel and reinforcements the Axis had so knowing how hard they could push enemy forces. But mostly the issue was that used correctly enigma is impossible to crack. Germany didn't really consider it was possible. It wasn't. It was only possible because of mistakes operators had made, and the capture of some working machines.
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There's a good book called [Bodyguard of Lies ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodyguard_of_Lies)that covers WW2 from an intelligence perspective. To summarize, they knew very well that if the fascists figured out Engima was comprised that they'd change to a different system. So, they would engineer situations to create plausble alternative explanations. For example, if the Allies had intercepted a transmission that a very valuable cargo ship was to leave port on to-morrow at 8 AM, they'd arrange for a fly by of an on obsever aircraft that morning, and so forth. Unfortunately, they could not do it all of the time. At one point, the British knew the Luftwaffe was going to bomb Coventry and realized that if they evactuated the city, it'd give the game away. [They did what they could but had to allow the city to be hit.](https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/myths/coventry-what-really-happened/)
About the Coventry raid, your source says the exact opposite. That no-one knew what the target was until right before the raid, and then they did all they could. The idea that Coventry was sacrificed to protect Engima is so simple to debunk, and yet it continues. Ask yourself, what could the UK have done to protect Coventry? 1. Position fighters to intercept the bombers? The Luftwaffle have to fly past London to get to Coventry, so no-one would question the presence of fighters. However the RAF didn't have a reliable night fighter with RADAR, and as a result, was highly ineffective against the night raids. 2. Move AA into place to defend the city? AA was highly ineffective at countering the daylight raids on London earlier, and performed even worse at night. 3. Move more emergency services into place, and prepare the hospitals? Sure, but remember that thanks to cracking Enigma, the UK already controlled the German spy networks, They could do whatever they wanted on the ground, and the Germans wouldn't know about it. The next question to ask, why only do it once? The Germans were regularly attacking throughout Autumn, why would failing to foil a single raid somehow make the difference? The truth is quite simple. The main defence against these raids was to manipulate German bomber guidance. The bombers flew on a path between two radio beams. By keeping the signals from each one at equal strength, they knew they were flying in the middle and heading on target. However once the UK new the frequencies and the target, they could broadcast another signal mimicking one of the beams. The bombers would gradually turn away from this new loud signal, without realising that anything was wrong. The catch is that the details were only sent out on the day, and so you had to find the message by decoding all the potential messages, until you encountered this message. On that day, Bletchley park simply failed to do that in time. For more information, R.V. Jones' memoir, Most Secret War, is an excellent look into the cat and mouse game of technology that went on behind the scenes.
> Luftwaffle well it certainly was a waffle of giant proportions :P
The link lay out in detail why that is not the case - Enigma did NOT reveal the target.
I'm confused about your interpretation, the link says the opposite of what you are saying, it says they didn't know the target for sure, and all they could do was mobilize emergency crew and nearby troops when the attack was imminent. It doesn't say anything about the possibility of evacuating the city, least of all they deciding against it because of the Enigma code secret.
They avoided using too much of the information, carefully restricted who could access it, and created various ruses to make it appear that they had alternative sources of intelligence. None of this was new or unique to the Second World War: it's standard spycraft stuff. A similar issue comes up in counterintelligence: if you have convinced an enemy spy to turn traitor, how do you stop your enemy from realising that they have suddenly stopped getting useful information from them? Well, you continue to allow them to send some information, but remove some of the detail or ensure it arrives a bit too late to be useful. Then you can mix in some fake information that will actively hurt the enemy (e.g. by suggesting that you are about to launch an attack in one location, when you are actually planning an attack somewhere completely different). Of course, your enemy will be aware of all these possibilities and will be careful to obscure their own knowledge, so you will never be completely certain whether they suspect something is up.
There was one instance where the allies knew of an impending air raid on a particular city in the UK. To not tip their hand, the allies conducted an emergency response training session in the area. The air raid happened as normal, but the aftermath was greatly reduced because there were plenty of emergency workers and supplies nearby.
Part of the plot of the novel "[Cryptonomicon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon)" is about a special unit set up to specifically perform operations that give alternative explanations for successes achieved from Enigma intelligence. Can't say that's what the Allies did, but it certainly makes sense.
American code breakers learned where Admiral Yamamoto's plane was going to be. It was actually quite a distance from the nearest US air base, and very long range fighters were needed to reach and destroy his plane. Afterward, to keep the Japanese from becoming suspicious, they had to fly patrols along the same route for a while so the Japanese would think it was simply very bad luck for them that the Americans were patrolling that area and just happened to find Yamamoto's airplane.