All the King’s Men: British Codebreaking Operations: 1938-43

The Enigma code was one of the most dangerous and effective weapons the Germans wielded at the outbreak of the Second World War. The Enigma machine was capable of encrypting radio messages that seemed virtually unbreakable. In fact, there were 158,900, 000,000,000 possible combinations in any given message transmitted. On the eve of the war’s outbreak, the British had recently learned that the Poles had made significant progress against this intimidating cipher in the early 1930s. Incensed and with little help, the British Government Code & Cipher School began the war searching for a solution. Drawing from their experiences from the First World War, and under the visionary guidance of Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman, and countless others, the British created a new, mechanical approach to breaking the seemingly impossible German code. By breaking the code, they could very well save Britain

Project VENONA: Breaking the Unbreakable Code

Project VENONA was a top-secret counterintelligence program initiated by the United States Army Signals Intelligence Service during World War II. VENONA was established to decipher intercepted Soviet communications and break the “unbreakable” Soviet code system. Examining Project VENONA and its discoveries is vital to understanding the history of the early Cold War

Realistic caution and ambivalent optimism: US intelligence assessments and war preparations against Japan, 1918-1941

Throughout the years prior to the outbreak of the Pacific War, the United States defence establishment held an ambiguous view on Japanese policy and strategic aims. A number of factors precluded a clear-cut forecast, among the most important of which was the opportunistic and secretive manner in which Japanese leaders formulated their plans. Under the circumstances, the available intelligence could not provide a definite indication of the moves which the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) and Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) would undertake. The situation was further complicated because reliable pieces of evidence revealed Japan did not possess the military and economic resources to defeat a coalition of several Great Powers. The Americans were thus not inclined to expect the Imperial forces to undertake a full-scale conquest of the Asia–Pacific region. The inadequate knowledge of Japanese war plans, in turn, was one of the key factors which led United States defence officials to believe that efforts to bolster their military strength in the Far East were not necessary

Fortuitous Endeavor—Intelligence and Deception in Operation TORCH

The Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942 combined detailed planning, aggressive signals intelligence, deception, operational security, and good luck to achieve success seldom repeated—and that cannot be in the future if the episode’s lessons are not heeded

Connecting the Dots and Dashes: Wireless Telegraphy Communication in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1918

This article seeks to explain wireless telegraphy (W/T) equipment, its development and use over the course of the First World War and how W/T performed in conjunction with the established landline network. W/T deployment during Canadian Expeditionary Force battles is evaluated to determine whether W/T was viewed as an alternative battlefield communication medium or simply as a standby for emergency situations. The analysis discloses that the Canadian infantry was unable to take advantage of continuous wave, a superior form of wireless that the artillery relied upon. This article contends that by war’s end W/T had become a viable substitute for traditional wired networks, but was underutilised whenever the cable grid was operational