OBITUARY : Shaun Wylie

20 Oct 2009

OBITUARY : Shaun Wylie
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Shaun Wylie, who has died aged 96, was one of the elite group of 
cryptanalysts who broke the German Enigma cipher at Bletchley Park during 
the Second World War.

He was teaching at Wellington College in December 1940 when a letter 
arrived from the mathematician Alan Turing, whom he had met in America, 
inviting Wylie to work with him at Britain's codebreaking centre. Two 
months later he arrived at Bletchley Park, the estate in Buckinghamshire 
where some of the Allies' finest minds were gathering in an attempt to 
unravel the mysteries of encrypted enemy messages.

He joined Turing's section, Hut 8, which was working on solving intercepts 
of German Navy messages encoded on the Enigma machine, which relied on a 
series of rotors to scramble "clear" text into a cipher with billions of 
variables. Wylie became head of the "crib" subsection, which was on the 
lookout for repeated words or phrases in German messages ( such as the 
names of senior officers, or the phrase "nothing to report" ) which became 
useful aides, or "cribs", to start breaking the code.

As head of the "crib", Wylie spent much time and effort with the Bletchley 
"bombe", a giant electro-mechanical machine that slowly chuntered through 
possible solutions to the code, and which depended largely on the educated 
guesses about the "cribs" that Wiley and his team proposed.

According to Hugh Alexander, Turing's successor as head of Hut 8, only 
Turing made a "bigger contribution to the success of Hut 8 than Wylie", 
whom he described as "easily the best all-rounder in the section, 
astonishingly quick and resourceful". Historians working at Bletchley 
today consider Wylie "highly significant in Allied codebreaking 
efforts"..../snip/ 


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/6389667/Shaun-Wylie.html

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