h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The story of the enigma machine is complex enough to deserve an entry of its own... and... wait... here's one :

A653276 - The Enigma Cipher Machine

This doesn't cover the incredibly interesting story of how the codes (some of them!) were broken... I'd write about that, but, I don't particularly know

'Cept that there's a whole section in 'The Pleasures of Counting' by Tom W Körner that gives a fairly heavily mathematical treatment of how the codes were broken...

Nice entry, anyhow

I have not (yet) read the entry on the Enigma Machine, but I have read some articles on how the British broke the code (at the expense of the sanity of some of the mathematicians, I think).

It does lead into an entire area of information encoding, I think. I recall reading about the US efforts in WWII, using native Americans (at the time called Indians). The messages were sent in the native language (I think the Navajo tribe) and received by their tribal members, all of whom were in the US military. The idea is that a foreign language is not subject to "code cracking". I think this was all in the Pacific War with the Japanese.

I am from Oklahoma, where the five "civilized" tribes were relocated (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole). If I've gotten the tribe wrong, I apologize.

My recollection of the Enigma story is very hazy, but I can remember that calling U571 a misrepresentation is being very charitable.

A complete fairy story, more like.