Turing: The Tragic Life of Alan Turing
Hundreds of movies and thousands of books have been written about the heroes of World War II. For dozens of years, however, few people knew about one of the greatest heroes of the war—a mild-mannered, eccentric mathematician from the University of Cambridge.
This man, an undeniable genius whose later life was plagued by controversy and tragedy, probably played a greater role in the eventual Allied victory than anyone else. Until quite recently his contribution to the war effort was barely recognized. Everyone’s heard of Churchill, Eisenhower, Montgomery, Patton and even de Gaulle, but far fewer have ever heard of Alan Turing. This is his incredible story.
This man, an undeniable genius whose later life was plagued by controversy and tragedy, probably played a greater role in the eventual Allied victory than anyone else. Until quite recently his contribution to the war effort was barely recognized. Everyone’s heard of Churchill, Eisenhower, Montgomery, Patton and even de Gaulle, but far fewer have ever heard of Alan Turing. This is his incredible story.
Excerpt From Alan Turing Biography
Chapter 1: Secret Whispers
The Roman lawyer and statesman Marcus Cicero once said “Nervos belli, pecuniam infinitam” – “The sinews of war, unlimited money.” That was as true then as it is now. Waging war is an incredibly expensive business. In 1941, the sinews of the British Empire were creaking under the strain; standing almost alone against Nazi Germany and its inexorable expansion across Europe, Britain was near bankruptcy, kept afloat only by draconian rationing and a steady flow of aid from the USA.
If war is thought of as a body it needs more than sinews, though. It needs a nervous system as well, to transmit commands from the brain – the commanders – to the armored fists that will carry them out. It’s also vital that the enemy can’t read those commands or he’ll know what to expect, a vital edge that can change the course of the war. The most brilliant plan is useless if the enemy know it ahead of time. The nerves of war are secure communications, and with its troops scattered from the Spanish border to the gates of Moscow – a distance of nearly 2,000 miles – and submarines operating right up to the US coast, the Nazis faced a huge challenge in communicating secretly.
It was a challenge that, with typical German innovation and efficiency, they had worked very hard to meet. In every major headquarters across their growing empire, in the operations room of every air base, on board every warship and U-Boat, sat a varnished wooden box. Inside was a complex electromechanical device that could turn plain text into a gibberish stream of random-seeming letters, or restore sense from an incoming coded message. This was the Enigma machine. In total, Germany manufactured over 40,000 of them and throughout the war they generated tens of millions of messages, each one encyphered by a fiendishly complex transmutation that changed every day.
Cypher machines were nothing new. Substitution tables went back thousands of years, and Thomas Jefferson developed an early mechanical device – the Jefferson Wheel – that was in use with the US Army until 1945. What made the Enigma different was the incredible complexity of its mechanism, and the number of separate transformations it imposed on the text. Even the simplest military machine changed each letter nine times on its way through the circuits, and at every key press the machine reconfigured itself so the next letter would be encoded with a completely different cypher. Even if a machine fell into British hands it would be useless without the key settings, which changed every day. To read an intercepted message, the British would have to know how the machine had been set up, and if the wrong setting was chosen it would simply spit out more gibberish. Guessing the settings was hopeless – there were 1,074,584,913,000,000,000,000,000 possible start configurations and only one of them would work. It’s hardly surprising that the Germans believed, right to the end, that Enigma was unbreakable.
But they were wrong. Unknown to them it had first been cracked as early as 1932, although that was an older, simpler model. A brilliant team at the Polish Cypher Bureau had found a tiny weakness in the system and managed to exploit it. It was hard, painstaking work and success was never guaranteed, but with luck, Enigma could be broken. Of course, by the time war broke out in 1939, the machines themselves, and the operating procedures for them, had been improved. The volume of messages had also expanded massively, and the Polish techniques – even with the aid of the machines they’d built to automate the process – were just too slow to handle the traffic.
But, unknown to the Nazis – and to almost anyone else until the 1970s – the British had their own techniques. By 1941, they’d made a series of significant breakthroughs that ripped the Enigma cypher wide open, and were now decoding messages on an industrial scale. These breakthroughs weren’t the result of a commando raid or espionage operation to steal Enigma’s secrets; they were the work of a group of university professors, telephone engineers and crossword fanatics. The driving force behind this odd group was one man – a mild-mannered, eccentric mathematician from the University of Cambridge. This man, an undeniable genius whose later life was plagued by controversy and tragedy, probably played a greater role in the eventual Allied victory than anyone else. Until quite recently, his contribution to the war effort was barely recognized. Everyone’s heard of Churchill, Eisenhower, Montgomery, Patton and even de Gaulle, but far fewer have ever heard of Alan Turing.