Fwd: OBITUARY : Rolf Noskwith, Bletchley Park codebreaker

Friday 06 January 2017

OBITUARY : Rolf Noskwith, Bletchley Park codebreaker
----------------------------------------------------


Rolf Noskwith, who has died aged 97, was the last of the leading
Bletchley Park codebreakers who worked on the German Enigma ciphers.

Noskwith, a German Jew, was one of a small group of codebreakers led by
Alan Turing who worked in Hut 8, the naval Enigma section, initially in
one of the wooden huts hastily assembled in the grounds of Bletchley
Park. He played a key role in the breaking of the German Navy’s  ciphers
which allowed the RAF and the Royal Navy to destroy the U-boat “wolf
packs” during the Battle of the Atlantic. The intelligence they produced
allowed the Admiralty to route the Atlantic convoys bringing vital
supplies and US troops and equipment to Britain safely much more quickly
than would otherwise have been the case.

Sir Harry Hinsley, the former Bletchley intelligence officer who became
the official historian of intelligence in the Second World War,
calculated that the impact of the breaking of the U-boat Enigmas cut two
years off the end of the war.....


....Given his knowledge of German, Rolf Noskwith put his name forward
for intelligence work and was interviewed for Bletchley Park, but was
turned down on security grounds because he had been born in Germany.

Eventually the rules were changed, and in early 1941 he was interviewed
by CP Snow, then a Civil Service Commissioner, and Hugh Alexander,
Turing’s deputy, and recruited into Hut 8, arriving at Bletchley on June
20 1941, the day after his 22nd birthday.

At this stage, the codebreakers were just beginning to get a grip on the
ciphers generated by the three-rotor naval Enigma machine, dramatically
increasing the number of Atlantic convoys that were getting through.

But in March 1942 the U-boats began using a new four-rotor machine,
codenamed Shark, which Hut 8 was unable to break. Over the next ten
months, the U-boat “wolf packs” ran riot in the Atlantic and tension
with the Admiralty reached new peaks.

Naval bosses unfairly accused Bletchley Park of being obsessed with
solving puzzles apparently oblivious to the way in which their failure
to break the codes meant that thousands of Royal Navy and Merchant
seamen were being lost at sea.

“I have been asked whether our prolonged inability to break Shark gave
us a sense of guilt,” Noskwith said later. “While we knew the
seriousness of the situation I cannot say that we felt guilty.”

He and his fellow codebreakers, who included Joan Clarke,  who at one
point was engaged to Turing, knew that they were doing as much as they
could and that while they would eventually break Shark using new
“bombes” which were being built in America, they would not do so in the
short term without captured codebooks.

The capture in October 1942 of a number of lower level codes from the
U559, which had been forced to the surface off the Egyptian coast by the
destroyer Petard, gave Hut 8 the assistance it needed, albeit at the
cost of the lives of two of the Petard’s crew, First Lieutenant Anthony
Fasson and Able Seaman Colin Grazier.

On December 12 1942, Hut 8 managed to get into the Shark cipher and, as
the new four-rotor bombes came into service on both sides of the
Atlantic, the U-boat codes were broken on a daily basis allowing the new
long-range Liberator aircraft to pick off the U-boats, forcing them out
of the Atlantic.

Noskwith remained in Hut 8 until the end of the war when “unable to tear
myself away from decoding” he moved to Eastcote with Bletchley Park’s
successor organisation GCHQ.

After a year working on codes and ciphers from the Soviet bloc he joined
the family business, Charnos, where he remained for the rest of his
working life, becoming chairman in 1952....


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2017/01/06/rolf-noskwith-bletchley-park-codebreaker-obituary/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2017/01/05/noskmain-large_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqRmZxqUyEu0I6GGKqPBcow2r2b0B9JkCSitGlELd1eZk.jpg

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2017/01/05/noskyoung-xlarge_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq8p5aOIhtOTU4hWu1EnADwcXw9ugI1TbSgbX6vqdU23U.jpg

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2017/01/05/nosk-large_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqbGGFpKb0ZSkVWHuPGASy6s6tSXjMpahBWfRhokhCR50.jpg

http://forward.com/culture/359025/remembering-rolf-noskwith-the-jewish-cryptographer-who-helped-break-german/

http://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/rolf-noskwith-rip/

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2543517/jewish-maths-genius-crack-enigma-code-alan-turing-dies/

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/incoming/bletchley-park-codebreaker-who-worked-12410015


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

https://www.amazon.com/Codebreakers-Inside-Story-Bletchley-Park/dp/0192801325/?tag=thefor03-20