What if the allies don't crack enigma

Deleted member 1487

pretty much what if the allies didn't crack enigma as thoroughly as they did IRL?
You need to provide more info than that. To what extent do they crack it? I'd say that at the Wallies would be much more cautious than IOTL and the Battle of the Atlantic would go somewhat worse and last longer, but non-ULTRA things like better convoy protection assets and technologies would win that in the end anyway. The biggest thing would be the Allies not knowing what the Nazis were thinking and if their deceptions were working as well, but they'd likely focus on more wholistic intelligence gathering and get good results anyway. Personally I think much of the benefit was overblown anyway. One area where it would make somewhat of a difference is Axis convoys in the Mediterranean, even with the Italians being somewhat compromised by British code breaking Enigma provided a lot of valuable intelligence about where Axis supply convoys would be and could be sunk. I doubt that was enough to win in that theater alone, but it would have made the Allies job harder.
 
Perhaps the most important use for the Engima/ULTRA intel was the feed back on the many deception ops. The Deception Committiee had ULTRA acess and used high level decrypts to track German reactions to the false information and adjust it. On the other hand Hitlers use of intel was so poor it may not have mattered

As Wiking and many others have observed less Enigma/ULTRA intel the more attention the Allied leaders pay to other sources, which in some cases may not be a bad thing. ie: Patton kept a balanced view of all his intel sources, & anticipated a German offensive in Dec 1944. Conversely the 1st Army G2 was overly dependant of ULTRA info, did not accept a OSS liasion, paid poor attention to reports from the Corps G2, ect...
 
Not to mention that the British possessed superb air reconnaissance assets and techniques from which they gleaned most of their knowledge of German secrets etc + Humit and other traditional intel sources

As mentioned 'Ultra' can be too heavily relied on and sometimes it makes little difference - ie Crete and Coventry - and in the long run while it was a boon to the Allies and a Jealously guarded one to have relied solely on Ultra would have been a mistake.
 
Stalin was warned about Barbarrosa by British Intelligence (officially and through moles) which used Ultra as one of its main sources. This information only served to increase his paranoia about being dragged into a war. Maybe without the western information he would listen a bit more to his own intelligence sources which were telling him the same things.

Not sure of the outcome of this because I have read some people who claim that a better prepared Soviet Union would have been beaten even harder in the battles of 41. Lessons needed to be learnt and having even more divisions in the front line just means longer columns of POWs and more burning wrecks.
 

Deleted member 9338

Does this also include the naval and diplomatic code?
 
Does this also include the naval and diplomatic code?

The Navy & diplomats mostly used the Enigma machines/system. There were some other codes or encryption machines used, but mostly the Germans used variants of the Engima machine. The variants being the number of rotors and the presence of the Stecker cables/board. Some organizations stayed with the older single or two rotor machines, some did not use machines with the Stecker system. Procedures for key setting and other encryption details varied. The Bletchly Park crew could count of Luftwaffe messages to be easier than the Naval or Army radio traffic. Wehrmacht administrative organizations in Germany were often very easy, tho the information there was not much use operationaly.

When you say 'Enigma' does that mean just Enigma or include the other German systems such as the Lorenz cipher as well?

Although the Lorenz system is often mistaken for and refered to as a Enigma machine it used a different machine design and mechanical operation than the more common Enigma machines. The Brits got inside that system through sloppy encryption/transmission practices in 1941. They were able to break messages in what they called the "Tunny" or "Fish" cypher using hand methods since the Bombs reverse engineered from the Enigma machines would not work for the Lorenz. After a year of work a decryption machine was worked out. Later Colossus machines were programed for decryption of the Tunny & Fish messages.

The far more complex Lorenz or SZ machines were used for high level traffic to and from senior HQ.
 
Last edited:
Top