"Enigma and the British code of honour" article
Martin Postranecky <mp-/[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.science.cryptography.bletchley-park |
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| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
An article about a newly released ULTRA doccument in the National Archives in today's ( Thursday 22 June ) Daily Telegraph : THE DAILY TELEGRAPH 22/06/2006 Enigma and the British code of honour ------------------------------------- By Ben Fenton Britain's top military officers were told they must never reveal that the German Enigma code had been broken because it would give the defeated enemy the chance to say they "were not well and fairly beaten". On April 19, 1945, 11 days after the end of the war in Europe, the MI6 officer in charge of secrecy for Ultra, the codename for intelligence gained from breaking Enigma, issued stern instructions to a select few. "Although it would be natural to think that the need... for secrecy has lessened or disappeared, this is not so and for very good reasons," Group Captain Fred Winterbotham wrote, in a document recently released at the National Archives in Kew. "Firstly, no possible excuse must be given to the Germans to explain away their complete defeat by force of arms. "They will seize on any excuse to maintain that they were not well and fairly beaten, and the uncanny success of our intelligence would offer them just such an excuse." The order then goes on to list three other reasons: the need to use Ultra intelligence in post-war operations in Europe; its use in the continuing Pacific war against Japan and the possibility that "other enemies may arise in the future [who] would be on their guard lest the same thing befell them". These three reasons to continue secrecy have been obvious to historians, but not the idea that the Germans might use the activities of the codebreakers at Bletchley Park to show that the Allied tactics were not quite cricket...../snip/ see ( wrap ! ) : ---------------- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml ;jsessionid=OGHJH2HE2WSR1QFIQMGCFFOAVCBQUIV0?xml=/news/2006/06/22/nenigma22.xml http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/06/22/nenigma22.jpg