118 | 12 BOmBES
the plugboard was the key to the British bombe’s power.^55 Soon, the techniques that Turing
pioneered in Victory became the backbone of the whole Bletchley attack on the Wehrmacht’s
Enigma messages.
‘Cribbing’, the codebreakers’ term for finding cribs, was an art in itself. Some codebreakers
worked as specialized ‘cribsters’, searching out phrases that cropped up frequently in German
messages, usually stereotyped military jargon. Hut 8’s cribsters worked in the ‘Crib Room’.
One commonly used crib was WEWA, the Enigma term for a weather station (abbreviating
the German Wetter Warte). Another was ‘Continuation of previous message’ (Fortsetzung,
figure 12.6 An early bombe menu, drawn by Turing. The menu is constructed from the crib depicted in Fig. 12.8.
From ‘Prof’s Book’, p. 99 (see Note 15); digitized and enhanced by The Turing Archive for the History of Computing.
figure 12.7 Rear panel of a bombe, photographed in Hut 11A. Here the operator ‘plugged up’ the menu.
Crown copyright and reproduced with permission of the Director of GCHQ.