Tunny

In 1940 the German Lorenz company produced a state-of-the-art 12-wheel cipher machine: the Schlüsselzusatz SZ40, code-named Tunny by the British. Only one operator was necessary—unlike Enigma, which typically involved three (a typist, a transcriber, and a radio operator). The Tunny operator simply typed in plain German at the keyboard, and the rest of the process was automated. The extent to which the Lorenz engineers had succeeded in automating the processes of encryption and decryption was striking: under normal operating conditions, neither the sender nor the receiver ever saw the coded message. Morse Code was not employed either. The encrypted output of the Tunny machine went directly to a radio transmitter.

Tunny began operational use in June 1941, and by July 1942 Bletchley Park was in a position to read the messages regularly—thanks, in particular, to a series of breakthroughs by British mathematician William Tutte. It was soon discovered that Tunny, unlike Enigma, carried only the highest grade of intelligence—messages between the German army’s high command and the generals in the field. Tunny decrypts provided detailed knowledge of German strategy, most notably the counter-preparations for the anticipated Allied invasion of northern France in 1944 (the D-Day landings, which actually took place in Normandy).

Turing’s anti-Enigma Bombe was of no use against Tunny; to crack the high volumes of messages, different machines were developed. The first Tunny-breaking machine (called Heath Robinson, after British cartoonist William Heath Robinson, known for drawing absurdly ingenious contrivances) was installed at Bletchley in 1943, but it was never entirely satisfactory. British engineer Thomas Flowers took a different tack and built an electronic computer for Tunny breaking. His Colossus, the world’s first large-scale programmable electronic computer, was constructed in London and installed at Bletchley in January 1944. By the end of the war, 10 models operated round-the-clock for Tunny breaking. The full nature and scope of Bletchley’s attack on Tunny was not revealed until 2000, when the British government declassified a 500-page document written in 1945, “General Report on Tunny with Emphasis on Statistical Methods.” See also cryptology.