What if the Germans Increased encryption codes.

The Army and Air force added a fourth wheel to there Enigma machines in 1941 and the Navy added a fifth one for the U-Boats?

 

Now that's a nice 'what if'!

I'd need to look this up but didn't the four wheel enigma take about a year to crack? (the 'happy time' for the Uboots?). So that could theoretically be the same sort of period deprived of all enemy forces Ultra information, though perhaps it's much more likely that a 4 wheel machine would be captured on land rather than the British capture of U559 (sorry, that bloody awful film needs countering ), so perhaps a somewhat faster solution could have been obtained?

As for a fifth Wheel ... Not being a able to even manage long division in maths I don't know how much more of an exponential increase in complexity each wheel added, presumably a 5th wheel would make things hugely more difficult than even the fourth did?
My Brain hurts...

I suppose the real heart of the question is just how much damage could the Submarines wreak without Ultra dogging their every move?
Based on their success while the fourth was being worked on, the answer is likely... Lots?

Cheers,
Adam.
:uboot: :uboot:

 

It would have helped just a bit but not much on the whole. Until about mid-war Benchley Park was taking several days to a week or more to decode messages. While having the capacity to read German communications was useful there were really other things that had far more impact on their operations.
With the U-boats Dönetz' requirements that they check in daily meant most of them could be tracked simply by ship and shore based HF/DF. This does nothing for radar becoming more and more widespread and efficent making surface operations impossible. Nor does it help boats with the ever increasing number and effectiveness of Allied escort vessels.
Decyphering Ultra / Neptune was gravy on the plate rather than central to defeating U-boats. On land, it was likewise just one more nail in the coffin rather than central to victory. There are lots of other methods of intelligence gathering that went into assessments of enemy action.

 

Cannot say how much things would have changed as there´s always a countermeasure to everything and also the US decoding was getting faster and faster but I trust the war would have lasted longer.

I do know the Germans had developed a couple of things to make their messages even harder to decode like the Uhr box and also Enigmas with up to seven wheels if I recall correctly from the book ( room 27 or something like that I have previously put info on that one in the Forums ), but the fact is that the Germans were sure their machine could not be decoded.

Enigma Uhr

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Found the book :

" The secret in building 26 " by DeBrosse and Burke

If you wish to read on the US decoding this was a great book in my opinion.

 

So the outcome would be the war would had dragged on a little longer.

 

I believe ULTRA was picking up German signals in the battles around Normandy,like Hill 112.And also at Kursk. Adding another wheel I don't think would have helped much there.

 

If the Enigma security was improved in late 1942 or early 1943 as proposed above here, it may have even had the effect of helping the Allies. Some Allied commanders thought the Ultra/ Enigma decryption system was overrelied on by the British & US. That is not enough resources were allocated to other signals intellegence & intelegence gathering in general. Patton was one such Allied leader & required his intel department to draw heavily from reconissance reports, prisoner interrogation, locally run signals intel, air photography. Degradation of the Ultra material may have pushed more Allied army commanders, or naval leaders, towards a broader better balanced intel gathering & analysis.

Imagine if the US 1st Army had not assumed German radio signals were normal & anticipated the Ardennes offensive by just a few hours or days?

 

Can that be right though? As the Ultra source was not revealed to practically anyone below general staff level, it was so secret it remained so until the '70's. There was always caution in releasing even the most useful snippets in case the game was given away that the German codes were insecure. If I remember right Ultra info was inserted very discreetly only where it was needed and it's true origin never given.
So for commanders to slacken their conventional intelligence gathering would be somewhat remiss, and surprising, since they didn't even know of the project?

Cheers,
Adam.

 

Right now, I am watching a program on the Dayton codebreakers. Many of the things developed there are the basis for today's computer. Interesting was the naval officers complete lack of comprehension about the difficulties of developing such a system and their haranging the engineers with insults about their incompetence. I think that is the problem with efforts like this. You have lower intelligence bureaucrats dictating the scientific progress and usage. When you have a melding of the two, you can achieve great things.

The NRC machines designed by Desch were able to decipher the 4 rotors enigmas. These machines were responsible for the capture of U-505 and its Enigma. Every transmission made by the subs was being read within a few hours. Even more interesting was the flexibility the machines had to adapt to changes in the enigma designs. After the German effort was subdued, the Joe Desch NRC machines were refocused to take on the Japanese codes.

 

"Can that be right though? As the Ultra source was not revealed to practically anyone below general staff level, it was so secret it remained so until the '70's. There was always caution in releasing even the most useful snippets in case the game was given away that the German codes were insecure. If I remember right Ultra info was inserted very discreetly only where it was needed and it's true origin never given.
So for commanders to slacken their conventional intelligence gathering would be somewhat remiss, and surprising, since they didn't even know of the project?"

General knowledge of how Ultra worked went down to the Army level. Both the commanders and their senior operations and intel staff officers had to understand it in order to use it correctly. Bradley refers to it & his use/understanding as a Army & Army Group commander in his second auto biography. How far down it went in Air Force or Naval levels I dont know.

In late 1943 or early 1944 there was a bit of excitment when a USAAF Brigadier General (Varnum?) went on a bombing mission over Germany and was downed. He flew against a standing order that anyone with direct knowledge of Ultra would not place himself at risk of capture.

One example of over reliance on Ultra was Eisenhowers intel officer in Feb-March 1943. The German orders pertinant to the attack that developed into the Kasserine Pass battle were not passed over the radio. In retrospect the evidence of a incipient offensive against the US II Corps & the adjacent French corps was there. But the intel analysis passed to II Corps was largely based on Ultra material and contained no projection of a Axis attack. Ground and air reconissance plus info brought across the lines by French agents had evidence of a concentration of Axis divsions, and supply preperations for an attack.

Patton expressesed skepticism of Ultra and intially thought it unreliable. It appears he may never have completely trusted it & required his intellegence staff to do a complete workup of all sources seperate from the Ultra information.

In general the Allies did much better than the Germans at the intel game, but they were still far from perfect.

 

How about the three sevices had the latter, but unfortunately in war people make mistakes and that eventually codes would have been captured intact.

 

After the Battle of Crete 1941 we made a mistake leaving documents not destroyed fall into German hands, lucky for us they were dismissed. But if we defended Crete as we could have done.......

Well who knows, the Germans could have lost or there would had been a greater lost of lives when finally they took Crete. In both cases this could have sent German alarm bells ringing if Ultra was used 100% in Crete.

 

The Germans had the alram bells go off many times. The many upgrades to the encryption system were in response to those alrams. The fundamental problem was the Germans thought in terms of staying ahead of the Allies, that they were precluding solutions to the decryption challenge by keeping several steps ahead. At the most basic level The various users of the Enigma system never subjected it to the sort of attack the Poles did. Uraveling the mathmatics would have shown the Germans how some of their basic assumptions were wrong. ie: That the Stecker feature added a true level of complexity.

The Poles unraveled the mathmatics, copied one or more Engima machines, obtained operating manuals from the French, and combined all that with over fifteen years of analysis of encrypted messages. Even before the war started the Poles had placed the Germans steps behind in this battle, which the Germans never comprehended.

The difficulties the Germans had in breaking into similar Allied encryption systems misled them as well. While they broke several it was never on the same scale as the Ultra effort. There was also the engmatic role of Admiral Canaris. He was in the best position to grasp how Enigma had been compromised, but seems to have ignored his evidence.

 

To be honest Canaris seems to have been doing alot of favours to the Allied side and cause. Just wish the documents would be opened...