JUDE STACKPOLE (1334-+-1990) is on his ‘ETERNAL PATROL’, but we have a great deal of his work on hand, and bring it to you here. He was working hard to determine if the TRITON U-Boat code was sold to the Allies by a traitor, rather than having it broken by Bletchley Park.

Here he wrote: “Leonard Mosley wrote a book titled ‘THE DRUID’. In it he establishes a direct contact on the XX (so-called Double-Cross Committee) between the head of the Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park and the Burgess-McLean-Philby group.”

HARRY’S NOTE - the ‘Twenty Committee’ was actually written with the Roman numeral XX, so it was the XX Committee. It was so named because it meant the ‘double cross’. Every German agent that was put into England was captured and all but a few turned and worked for the British, under the supervision of this XX Committee who told the agent what to report back to Germany, what to ask for, what to complain about etc.

We continue with JUDE’s comments:

“Over the past few years I have endeavored to learn what I can about the ENIGMA machine and its workings. While looking at both machines and rotors in the Smithsonian I made an interesting discovery - later confirmed by reading - that the outer rim of an ENIGMA rotor is adjustable, thereby giving each rotor the 26 squared potential settings (the 26 wired positions in the rotor itself plus an additional 26 by virtue of being able to set it to any of 26 positions. This changes the potential setting picture considerably.

The final version of the ENIGMA had available eight different wheels, any four of which could be used at any one time. Therefore you start out with 8 x 26 squared plus the three variations introduced by the possible use of these auxiliary plugs which brings us up to something like 26 to the 16th power (minimum) or possibly 26 to the 64th power combinations.

If we use 26 to the 16th power, we have the total available of 436,090,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations. If it were possible to attempt to break the code at 3,600 combinations per second, it would still take something like 14,020,000,000,000 days to work through all the possible combinations. Just how that could be done using the type of equipment available during World War II eludes me.

On display at the Smithsonian is a Luftwaffe code setting sheet for use with a three-rotor machine. It tells on a day by day basis for a 30 day period what settings should be put into the ENIGMA machine at the appropriate time each day. This included the proper wiring arrangement; what rotors to use; what settings to put on the rotors themselves; the final initial setting for the day.

HARRY’S NOTE - It was these secret settings, among other secret items, that were seized by the US Navy when they captured U-505. The failure of the crew to sink their boat cost the lives of untold thousands more U-BootFahrer.

“With this sheet in one’s possession, one could read the ENIGMA traffic using that particular setting sheet for the useful life of the sheet. At that point, it would be back to ‘scratch’.

“Without the setting sheet, one would have to find the key on a day by day basis, working one’s way through all 436 Quintillion possibilities.

Possession of an ENIGMA machine meant little really; possession of the wheels meant little by itself although much has been made of the fact that one way or another the British managed to get hold of both. In fact, without the daily keys it was strictly an uphill job and I believe, beyond the capability of the technology of the time.

An interesting side aspect of all this is the fact that although all coded messages were sent using the ENIGMA machine, only the Naval HEIMAT, the Luftwaffe and Heer codes were in fact broken. The raiders - Hilfskreuzers - did not use the HEIMAT but rather the AUSLAND code which, as far as I know, was never broken.

The raiders that were detected on the high seas - ATLANTIS and her support ships for example, were - it has been intimated, located as a result of monitoring HEIMAT messages sent to U-Boats. You will recall that ATLANTIS was refueling U-Boats at the time it was discovered, as was PYTHON several days later when it too, was discovered and sunk.

Much food for thought . . .”