The

The From the home of the co-breakers and the birthplace of modern computing, this is the Bletchley Park podcast.

Welcome to another Bletchley Park podcast Extra.

Professor Jack Copeland is a leading expert on Alan Turing, but last time he visited Bletchley Park,

it was to talk to a pack teleprinter hall about another code-breaking genius.

This time he looked into how computers were used against Hitler. Max Newman ran a section named after him, the Newmanry, which focused on the strategic

high-level cipher Hitler was using to communicate with his high command, Lawrence.

Max never worked on Enigma.

He attacked this entirely different machine, which the British codenamed the Tunney machine.

There is a real Tunney machine here in Bletchley Park.

You can go and gaze at it in awe, if you like, in Block B,

where it's got a huge red German flag with a swastika on hanging behind it. It looks very striking.

You can't miss it if you go to Block B. Enigma was sort of old technology by the time the war started.

The Enigma machine was invented, you know, kind of like 20 years or more before the war.

It was really kind of slow and clunky and only just about suitable for the purposes that the German military wanted to use it for.

It needed an enormous number of people in order to encrypt and decrypt a message using Enigma.

You needed three operators at each end of the link.

There was the cipher operator who would type the German plain text at the keyboard of the Enigma machine.

And as the cipher clerk typed at the keyboard, letters would light up at the lampboard.

And the cipher clerk would type the

plain text, the German message, and then the letters of the cipher text would light up at the

lampboard. The cipher clerk had an assistant who wrote down the letters of cipher text, painstakingly

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