Lorenz by Jerry Roberts

Author:Jerry Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750982047
Publisher: The History Press

Period Two – 1 October 1942–31 December 1942 at 15 per day

1,170

Period Three – January–June 1943 at 30 per day

4,680

Period Four – July–31 December 1943, twenty-four hours at 72 per day

11,232

Period Five – 1944, with Colossus, twenty-four hours at 112 per day

35,056

Period Six – 1945 (four months) at 112 per day

11,685

Total

64,343

In the early days, there was only one shift, fewer staff and fewer messages. A year later, more staff had been recruited into the department. When the ATS girls worked on the Lorenz machine, we started three shifts within each twenty-four-hour day and we always worked for six days a week. If I had used the figures quoted by my two colleagues, they would have suggested a total nearer to 80,000 messages, but I always prefer to be on the cautious side with such estimates, especially considering how long ago this all happened: memory can play strange tricks over time.

Even 64,000 was a very substantial number of messages. Although it is only a ballpark figure, it shows very clearly what a great quantity of top-level intelligence the messages provided, leading to the success of the Allies and shortening the war – a war which was costing at least 10 million lives a year. A great deal of this succes was due to the fantastic work of Bill Tutte and the Testery.

How did the Lorenz Decrypts Provide Massive Help to the War Effort?

Let us investigate five significant contributions:

1. The Battle of Kursk

In early April 1943, we broke many Lorenz messages in the Testery. I can remember personally breaking messages about Kursk three months before the battle began on 5 July 1943. Through Lorenz decrypts, we at Bletchley knew that Hitler was to move a massive number of troops to the south and we knew fully of the Germans’ thinking and planning with the intention of breaking through Russian lines. After their failure at the Battle of Stalingrad at the end of 1942, the Germans were planning another huge assault on the Eastern Front near the city of Kursk, 280 miles south-west of Moscow.

Although the Russians had local information about the German intentions, the main intelligence was provided by the British from Lorenz decrypts. We were able to forewarn the Russians of the attack, tell them when and how the Germans were going to attack and which army groups and tank units were going to be thrown in. We also knew that the Germans planned to use a pincer attack, and told the Russians that the German forces numbered nearly 800,000 men and 2,500 tanks. Everything was in great detail. We were able to warn the Russians three months before the attack was going to be launched, to help them to defend their territory before eventually pushing the Germans back.

A major problem was how to convey the gist of the information to the Russians without letting them know how it had been learned. The British could not tell them about the breaking of Lorenz. At first, they ignored the British intelligence but we managed to find ways to send very many detailed reports to the Russians.

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