Ancient Indian languages, sophisticated cipher algorithms and tens of thousands of specialists working to unravel the enemy's secret codes - during the Second World War, encryptors and signalmen made an important contribution to victory. There are different approaches to coding information - RIA Novosti talks about the most interesting.
Aboriginal help
The American military began to involve the Indians in radio communications back in the First World War. The traditional languages of Native Americans - Cherokee, Choctaw, Mesquake, Comanche, Ojibwe - were used to convey information about troop movements, enemy positions and the situation on the battlefield. They did not refuse help from the aborigines during the Second World War. Ideal for encrypting radio communications, the Navajo language was not only extremely complex, but also devoid of writing and alphabet.
The Americans used it mainly in the Pacific theater of operations in battles with the Japanese army. Despite the fact that the Japanese were well versed in cryptography and were able to break many of the enemy's codes, they did not manage to unravel the Navajo cipher. The initiator of the program - World War I veteran Philip Johnston - was not an Indian, but grew up on one of the Navajo reservations. It was he who suggested to the command of the United States Marine Corps to use the language of the tribe to encrypt secret messages.
First U. S. Marine Corps Navajo recruits sworn in at Fort Wingate.
The first twenty-nine Indians enlisted in the US Army in 1942 helped ciphers develop a vocabulary of technical terms. In total, more than four hundred representatives of the Navajo tribe took part in the battles of the Second World War. The so-called code takers have been involved in the most violent and important military operations of the American army. In the United States, a whole school of cryptographers was created, where several types of codes were introduced.
Not very secret messages were simply transmitted in Indian language. Radiograms of prime importance were transmitted using coded phrases. The bottom line was that each letter of the alphabet corresponded to words in English and Indian languages.
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For example, the letter D stood for dog (dog), in the Navajo dialect it sounded like lha-cha-eh. Or the letter r corresponds to the word rabbit (rabbit), which in Native American sounds like gah. Thus, instead of each letter of the English word, the corresponding Indian word was substituted, making up a radiogram. Obviously, it was impossible to make out a random set of words, and even in an unknown language. It is noteworthy that signalmen translated ciphers from English into Indian without writing on paper, in their minds. The Navajo code was kept secret after the war. The dictionary of codes and ciphers was published only in 1968.
Navajo radio operators.
Cryptor Manor
Soviet engineers did not have access to the languages of the Indians, but by the mid-1930s they had achieved high results in the field of encryption using other methods. At the Leningrad enterprise "Plant No. 209" they developed a special device for encoding radiograms - a V-4 encryption machine, and in 1939 an upgraded version of the M-100 apparatus. The technique made it possible to encode and decrypt messages much faster - before that, encryption was carried out manually and sometimes took many hours. True, the main disadvantage of the first samples was weight - encryption devices weighed more than 140 kilograms. Such characteristics, for obvious reasons, did not allow their full use in the field.
By the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, Soviet designers had created an improved model of the K-37 "Kristall" coding machine, which weighed about twenty kilograms and worked on the principle of a multi-alphabetic replacement cipher. The troops received about one hundred and fifty such sets. In total, during the war years, more than one and a half million radiograms were processed with their help.
The German specialists failed to decipher the intercepted radio messages. To recognize them, the apparatus itself was required. In 1942, Hitler even issued a special order on the Wehrmacht, in which he promised an iron cross to everyone who captured a Soviet cipher officer or seized a cipher machine. In addition, home leave was relied on to the reward, and after the victory - an estate in the captured Crimea.
In addition to the "Crystals", the Soviet command had at its disposal the S-1 "Sobol-P" classified communications equipment. She worked on a radio channel and was very useful in breaking wire communications in especially hot sectors of the front. The first samples were used to communicate with the headquarters and the headquarters of the Transcaucasian Front in Tbilisi, and were used in the battles at the Kursk Bulge, Stalingrad and other key battles.
K-37 encryption machine * Crystal *.
A riddle solved
The Germans, of course, also used encryption machines. The most famous of these was developed in the late 1920s and was named "Enigma". The work of "Enigma", published in almost 100 thousand copies, was built on the creation of a cipher by replacing one letter with another using a certain algorithm.
This principle was used in many machines of the time, but the Enigma code was considered very difficult to decipher. The most interesting thing is that there was a commercial version of the machine on the free market, designed for safe banking operations. It differed from its military counterpart in its simplified design and lack of protection systems.
Encryption machine * Enigma *.
The first to decipher the Enigma code were Polish intelligence officers. A specially created encryption bureau had only simple commercial versions at its disposal. Later, the Polish cryptologists obtained obsolete codes for the Enigma, which were given to them by one of the Wehrmacht soldiers. However, the Poles did not succeed in revealing the Enigma code to the end. With the outbreak of the Second World War, they transferred all the accumulated data to French and English colleagues.
Bletchley Park.
The British took a much more serious approach to solving the Enigma. On the direct orders and under the control of Winston Churchill, a whole counterintelligence center, Station-X, began work in 1938. It is located in one of the mansions in Bletchley Park in the city of Milton Keynes in the south-east of Great Britain. Several thousand specialists worked here - mathematicians, linguists, engineers, translators and even champions in solving crosswords. All work was carried out in the strictest secrecy.
For several years of work, the British were able to create several hundred decryption devices for the Enigma, thanks to which they managed to read most of the intercepted German radio messages.
Soviet sailors also made a significant contribution to solving the Enigma code. In the summer of 1944, scouts of the Baltic Fleet managed to lift a military encryption machine under fire from the German submarine U-250 sunk in the Vyborg Bay.
Encryption machine code * Enigma *.
Nikolay Protopopov
