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Testery
The Testery was a section at Bletchley Park, the British codebreaking station during World War II. It was set up in July 1942 as the "FISH Subsection" under Major Ralph Tester, hence its alternative name. Four founder members were Tester himself and three senior cryptanalysts were Captain Jerry Roberts, Captain Peter Ericsson and Major Denis Oswald. All four were fluent in German. From 1 July 1942 on, this team switched and was tasked with breaking the German High Command's most top-level code Tunny after Bill Tutte successfully broke Tunny system in Spring 1942. Methods The Testery used hand decrypting methods to break Tunny traffic. Within one year of its foundation, the Testery had deciphered 1.5 million texts by these methods. By the war's end in Europe in May 1945, the Testery had grown to nine cryptanalysts, a team of 24 ATS, a total staff of 118, organised in three shifts working round the clock. The logical structure of the Tunny system was worked out by mathematician Bi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cryptanalysis Of The Lorenz Cipher
Cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher was the process that enabled the British to read high-level German army messages during World War II. The British Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park decrypted many communications between the '' Oberkommando der Wehrmacht'' (OKW, German High Command) in Berlin and their army commands throughout occupied Europe, some of which were signed "Adolf Hitler, Führer". These were intercepted non-Morse radio transmissions that had been enciphered by the Lorenz SZ teleprinter rotor stream cipher attachments. Decrypts of this traffic became an important source of "Ultra" intelligence, which contributed significantly to Allied victory. For its high-level secret messages, the German armed services enciphered each character using various online ''Geheimschreiber'' (secret writer) stream cipher machines at both ends of a telegraph link using the 5-bit International Telegraphy Alphabet No. 2 (ITA2). These machines were subsequently di ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jerry Roberts
Captain Raymond C. "Jerry" Roberts MBE (18 November 1920 – 25 March 2014) was a British wartime codebreaker and businessman. During the Second World War, Roberts worked at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park from 1941 to 1945. He was a leading codebreaker and linguist, who worked on the Lorenz cipher system – Hitler's most top-level code. Jerry Roberts was born in Wembley, London. His father Herbert, had trained as a pharmacist, but worked for Lloyds Bank head office in the City for the rest of his 40-year career, since coming to London from Wales in 1915. His mother, Leticia, was a pianist and an organist who played in the local chapel. He was educated at Latymer Upper School, Hammersmith in London 1933–39 and University College London 1939–41. He gained a degree in German and French. War service Early in the Second World War, his tutor at University College London, Prof. Leonard Willoughby, who had worked during the First World War i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ralph Tester
Ralph Paterson Tester (2 June 1902 – May 1998) was an administrator at Bletchley Park, the British codebreaking station during World War II. He founded and supervised a section named the ''Testery'' for breaking Tunny (a Fish cipher). Background The Lorenz cipher machine had twelve wheels, and was thus most advanced, complex, faster and far more secure than the three-wheeled Enigma. Lorenz was used to encipher top-secret messages between German Army H.Q. in Berlin, and the top generals and field-marshals on all fronts, including Adolf Hitler himself. Career Before World War II, Tester was an accountant who had worked extensively in Germany and as a result was very familiar with the German language and culture.Paul Gannon, ''Colossus: Bletchley Park's Greatest Secret'', 2006, p. 168, Atlantic Books, . He held a senior position in the accountancy division of Unilever. On the outbreak of war, he worked for the BBC Monitoring Service which listened in to German public radio broadc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lorenz Cipher
The Lorenz SZ40, SZ42a and SZ42b were German rotor stream cipher machines used by the German Army during World War II. They were developed by C. Lorenz AG in Berlin. The model name ''SZ'' was derived from ''Schlüssel-Zusatz'', meaning ''cipher attachment''. The instruments implemented a Vernam stream cipher. British cryptanalysts, who referred to encrypted German teleprinter traffic as ''Fish'', dubbed the machine and its traffic ''Tunny'' (meaning tunafish) and deduced its logical structure three years before they saw such a machine. The SZ machines were in-line attachments to standard teleprinters. An experimental link using SZ40 machines was started in June 1941. The enhanced SZ42 machines were brought into substantial use from mid-1942 onwards for high-level communications between the German High Command in Wünsdorf close to Berlin, and Army Commands throughout occupied Europe. The more advanced SZ42A came into routine use in February 1943 and the SZ42B in June 1944. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes ( Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years following 1883 for the financier and politician Sir Herbert Leon in the Victorian Gothic, Tudor, and Dutch Baroque styles, on the site of older buildings of the same name. During World War II, the estate housed the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), which regularly penetrated the secret communications of the Axis Powersmost importantly the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers. The GC&CS team of codebreakers included Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman, Hugh Alexander, Bill Tutte, and Stuart Milner-Barry. The nature of the work at Bletchley remained secret until many years after the war. According to the official historian of British Intelligence, the "Ultra" intelligence produced at Bletchley shortened the war by two to four years, and without it th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Hilton
Peter John Hilton (7 April 1923Peter Hilton, "On all Sorts of Automorphisms", '' The American Mathematical Monthly'', 92(9), November 1985, p. 6506 November 2010) was a British mathematician, noted for his contributions to homotopy theory and for code-breaking during World War II. Early life He was born in Brondesbury, London, the son Mortimer Jacob Hilton, a Jewish physician who was in general practice in Peckham, and his wife Elizabeth Amelia Freedman, and was brought up in Kilburn. The physiologist Sidney Montague Hilton (1921–2011) of the University of Birmingham Medical School was his elder brother. Hilton was educated at St Paul's School, London."About the speaker"announcement of a lecture given by Peter Hilton at Bletchley Park on 12 July 2006. Retrieved 18 January 2007. He went to The Queen's College, Oxford in 1940 to read mathematics, on an open scholarship, where the mathematics tutor was Ughtred Haslam-Jones. Bletchley Park A wartime undergraduate in wartime ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Newmanry
The Newmanry was a section at Bletchley Park, the British codebreaking station during World War II. Its job was to develop and employ statistical and machine methods in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. It worked very closely with the Testery where a complementary set of operations were performed to complete the decryption of each message. Formally called the Statistical section, it was known as the Newmanry after its founder and head, Max Newman. It was responsible for the various Robinson machines and the ten Colossus computers. Some of the cryptanalysts had joint appointments with the Testery. in Initially in June 1943 the section was small: Good, Mitchie, two engineers and sixteen Wrens in a small hut. By the end of the war there were 26 cryptographers, 28 engineers, 273 Wrens with ten Colossi, three Robinsons, three Tunies, plus twenty small electronic and electrical machines. See also * Fish * Allen Coombs * Tommy Flowers * Jack Good * Peter Hilton * Donald Michie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Denis Oswald (codebreaker)
Denis Geoffrey Oswald (12 November 1910 – 5 February 1998) was an English first-class cricketer, educator and a codebreaker at Bletchley Park. Early life and first-class cricket Oswald was born at Stanley in the Falkland Islands to Louis and Lillian Oswald. He left the Falklands for England with his family when he was 8 years old aboard the . He was educated in England at St Lawrence College, Ramsgate, before going up to Wadham College, Oxford. While studying at Oxford, he made two appearances in first-class cricket for Oxford University in 1931, playing against Leicestershire and the touring New Zealanders at Oxford. In addition to playing first-class cricket, Oswald also played minor counties cricket for Hertfordshire in 1931 and 1932, making a total of nine appearances in the Minor Counties Championship. After graduating from Oxford in 1932, Oswald took up the post of languages teacher at Uppingham School. Bletchley Park Oswald served in the Intelligence Corps dur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Max Newman
Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman, FRS, (7 February 1897 – 22 February 1984), generally known as Max Newman, was a British mathematician and codebreaker. His work in World War II led to the construction of Colossus, the world's first operational, programmable electronic computer, and he established the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at the University of Manchester, which produced the world's first working, stored-program electronic computer in 1948, the Manchester Baby. Education and early life Newman was born Maxwell Herman Alexander Neumann in Chelsea, London, England, to a Jewish family, on 7 February 1897. His father was Herman Alexander Neumann, originally from the German city of Bromberg (now in Poland), who had emigrated with his family to London at the age of 15.William Newman, "Max Newman – Mathematician, Codebreaker and Computer Pioneer", pp. 176–188 in Herman worked as a secretary in a company, and married Sarah Ann Pike, an Irish schoolteacher, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Heath Robinson (codebreaking Machine)
Heath Robinson was a machine used by British codebreakers at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park during World War II in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. This achieved the decryption of messages in the German teleprinter cipher produced by the Lorenz SZ40/42 in-line cipher machine. Both the cipher and the machines were called "Tunny" by the codebreakers, who named different German teleprinter ciphers after fish. It was mainly an electro-mechanical machine, containing no more than a couple of dozen valves (vacuum tubes), and was the predecessor to the electronic Colossus computer. It was dubbed "Heath Robinson" by the Wrens who operated it, after cartoonist William Heath Robinson, who drew immensely complicated mechanical devices for simple tasks, similar to (and somewhat predating) Rube Goldberg in the U.S. The functional specification of the machine was produced by Max Newman. The main engineering design was the work of Frank Morrell at the Post Of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Colossus Computer
Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in the years 1943–1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to perform Boolean and counting operations. Colossus is thus regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer, although it was programmed by switches and plugs and not by a stored program. Colossus was designed by General Post Office (GPO) research telephone engineer Tommy Flowers to solve a problem posed by mathematician Max Newman at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. Alan Turing's use of probability in cryptanalysis (see Banburismus) contributed to its design. It has sometimes been erroneously stated that Turing designed Colossus to aid the cryptanalysis of the Enigma. (Turing's machine that helped decode Enigma was the electromechanical Bombe, not Colossus.) The prototype, Colossus Mark 1, was shown to be working in December 1943 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Benenson
Peter Benenson (born Peter James Henry Solomon; 31 July 1921 – 25 February 2005) was a British barrister, human rights activist and the founder of the human rights group Amnesty International (AI). He refused all honours for most of his life, but in his 80s, largely to please his family, he accepted the Pride of Britain Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2001. Early life Benenson was born in London to a large Jewish family, the only son of British-born Harold Solomon and Russian-born Flora Benenson; Peter Benenson adopted his mother's maiden name later in life. His father, an army officer, died from a long-term injury when Benenson was nine, and he was privately tutored by W. H. Auden before attending Eton College. At the age of sixteen, he helped to establish a relief fund with other schoolboys for children orphaned by the Spanish Civil War. He took his mother's maiden name of Benenson acceding to his dying grandfather’s wishes, the Russian financier Grigori Benenson (1860 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
