 | Bletchley Park TourMachine Room The Machine Room was the central core of the codebreaking activity. Given intercepted encyphered Enigma messages, the job of the Machine Room team was to find the settings used in the Enigma machine to encypher the messages. This involved finding both the base settings being used by all Enigma operators on a given German communications network and also finding the individual message key used for each message. The first task was to find cribs - deduced fragments of German text. Given reasonably long fragments, it was possible to eliminate base settings using one of the weaknesses of Enigma - it could not transform a letter into itself. When possible cribs had been found, menus could be constructed to instruct the Bombe operators to search for possible rotor positions and settings. Many other techniques were used to arrive at keys. Sometimes keys were never found. |
