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It took the brilliance of Alan Turing, the leadership of Hugh Alexander, and the razor-sharp
minds of the other codebreakers working in Hut 8 to overcome Naval Enigma and give the
advantage to the Allies in the Battle of the Atlantic.
There was an irony to the navy’s using a codebook to disguise the message setting, since
Enigma was deployed in the first place to overcome the inherent weaknesses of the German
naval codebooks of the First World War. Another irony is that the Germans could easily have
made small alterations to the Enigma machine that would have made breaking the messages
much more difficult. For example, simply placing the turnover notches at the same place on
all the wheels would have undercut many of Hut 8’s hand-methods for working out the daily
settings. As with Germany’s even more formidable ‘Tunny’ cipher machine (described in
Chapter 14), some of the complications included by the designers—presumably to make the
machine harder to break—in fact made the codebreakers’ work easier.
Fundamentally, Germany’s cryptographic procedures in the Second World War were dan-
gerously flawed—as shown by Bletchley Park’s devastating successes. Yet generally speaking the
weakness was not in the Enigma machine itself. As Gordon Welchman said about Enigma:^13
The machine as it was would have been impregnable if it had been used properly.