Re: Allied codes
Group: soc.history.war.world-war-ii Date: Sun, Feb 3, 2013, 4:31pm From:
***@aol.com
On Feb 2, 11:46 pm, Padraigh ProAmerica) wrote:
WE know how the Allies penetrated the major Axis codes like Germany's
ENIGMA and the various Japanese codes- but did the Axis ever penetrate
any major Allied codes?
The answer is "yes," on a number of occasions. German Army cryptanalysts
solved the U.S. M-209 ode when the two armies fought in North Africa in
1942 giving the Germans a fairly good idea of the plans and condition of
the troops they faced. Again, at the time of the USAAF raid on the
Ploesti oil fields, in order to avoid a shoot-down of the U.S.
Liberators by friendly ground fire, the USAAF sent a message advising
allied ground units in the area of the U.S. bombing mission.
The message was send in
the U.S. system known as "Syco" which was fast and simple to use but
which the Germans were able to break into plain text only a short time
after the 178 Liberators had departed from Bengazi. The result was
unusually heavy flak over Rumania which caused the loss of 53 American
planes with large American loss of life.
On another occasion, a German
merchant raider, in the Indian Ocean,the "Atlantis," captured a Btitish
ship and a boarding party was able to obtain some of the Admiralty's
non-current encipherment tables of the broadcasting code to Allied
Merchant Ships called the "BAMS" code, which, although not the current
tables, enabled the Germans by crytanalytic efforts to break into
current messages, locate Allied ship routes, and wait for victims at
locations which could be determined in advance from the intercepts.
Germans were also able
to break into some Atlantic convoy messages from the British Commander
of Western Approaches which enabled U-Boats to be effectively employed.
Italy also had
considerable success in breaking into British Naval codes in 1942.
British Admiral Cunningham was so frustrated that after the invasion of
Crete he threatened to send his messages in the "clear" unless he was
given better cipher systems. Italy also had one other success which
Kahn, in his book "The Codebreakers" called "probably the greatest Axis
communications-intelligence result of the war," the obtaining of the
secret U.S. "BLACK" code tables by an employee of rhe U.S. Embassy in
Rome who broke into a safe and photographed them in the office of the
U.S. military attache in August of 1941, before the U.S. had entered the
war.
One result was that Italy passed the
U.S.BLACK code to Germany, the German high command passed information
obtained from it to Rommel and Rommel was able to obrain volumes of
highly valuable military information about the British campaign which
was being transmitted to Washington by the U.S. military attache in
Cairo.
All
the above were Axis successes by Germany and Italy. but in the Pacific
the Japanese had little if any success breaking Allied codes. On the
other hand, the U.S.was reading Japanese diplomatic codes beginning in
the 1940's, throughout the war, and even after the war. Also Japanese
Naval codes to a considerable extent throughout the war.
=============COMMENT========
AAUI, there were several Japanese codes:
The diplomatic code (PURPLE) broken pre-war.
A simple cipher used by fishermem reporting catch amounts and weather
reports.
A Merchant Marine code used by ships to report predicted noon positions
of ships.
The primary JN-25 naval code.
A special 'flag officers' code for communications between high-ranking
officers (this one remained unbroken due to a lack of traffic).
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An
excellent source of information on the above (and more) is David Kahn's
"The codebreakers" which is a voluminous volume consisting of over 1100
pages tracing the history of secret communications from ancient times to
the dawn of the space age.
WJH
--
"A man who can own a gun is a citizen. A man who cannot own a gun is a
subject."--
LTC Allen West, USA, (Ret.)