What if Enigma had never been broken?

Deleted member 1487

Excuse me please.

But according to Wikipedia this honor belongs to Konrad Zuse:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse

His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-controlled Turing-complete Z3 became operational in May 1941. Thanks to this machine and its predecessors, Zuse has often been regarded as the inventor of the modern Computer.
Good thing the Nazis didn't decide to fund it like the British did their computer efforts; it was a shame Zuse didn't get to participate in international computer developments for something like 10 years after the war; he deserves a lot more credit than he gets, but cut off from developments after the war, his work didn't really influence the rest of the world the way it should have.
 
If the germans had adopted the procedure to change frequently (e.g. every two weeks) rotors and had changed them at the same time everywhere in the nazi empire, Bletchely Park work would have been so hampered that no real time intelligence would have been available, only after-the-events confirmations, even with an unchanged Enigma.

A bit of "germanic" organization and lots of things would have gone very differently.
 
If the germans had adopted the procedure to change frequently (e.g. every two weeks) rotors and had changed them at the same time everywhere in the nazi empire, Bletchely Park work would have been so hampered that no real time intelligence would have been available, only after-the-events confirmations, even with an unchanged Enigma.

A bit of "germanic" organization and lots of things would have gone very differently.

Yes there were a lot of simple procedures that the Germans were supposed to follow but were ignored - this allowed such things as sending the same message regularly (e.g. weather reports) to have more value than they should have. It would probably have been difficult to prevent the individual breaches and idiosyncrasies that the code breakers found so useful, though. Also wouldn't stop the very brave actions taken to recover enigma machines and code books from sinking submarines or from German weather ships.

Also if more use had been made of landlines by the Luftwaffe instead of radios that would have provided less material to decrypt. The Italians had their own, simpler, version of the Enigma machine, which was easier to decrypt.

Enigma was crucial to the Battle of the Atlantic, along with wireless detection/direction but the books that say that it was the major reason for lack of German success at various stages usually only look at sinkings/U Boat losses during periods the code was cracked, without looking for alternative explanations - there is a strong correlation, but there were other developments happening at the same time. Enigma decrypts allowed the allies to sink all the ships heading for Tunisia in 1943 except the food ships - they knew what was in every ship as well as all the other details. They also found all the German Atlantic supply ships and "milch cow" submarines using Enigma decrypts
 
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