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Bombe (NCR )
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BOMBE (NCR)

The "bombe" was a significant development in the evolution of the Allied cryptanalytic attack on the German Enigma cipher machine. From 1928 to 1938, Polish cryptanalysts, aided by the French, solved both the wiring of the three rotors used at the time and the indicator system, and through the use of a small electrical machine using Enigma rotors, created a card file which could anticipate the 6 by 17,576 possible rotor positions used in setting up the Enigma. In 1938, however, the Germans changed this entire indicator system.

To counter this move, the Poles created a hand system with six sets of perforated sheets (each with 26 sheets) which recorded about 1,000 possibilities on each sheet. When suitable combinations of the sheets were superimposed, they enabled the Poles (and later Bletchley Park) to determine the daily settings for Enigma. At the same time, they devised a method of recovery consisting of six electrically powered sets of Enigma wheels that rotated to search for repetitions in the "message key" (the starting position of the rotors for a specific message)."

However, in December 1938 the Germans added two more rotors to the three-wheel Enigma. Instead of six ways of arranging the rotors, there were now sixty. Therefore, recovery required sixty perforated sets (each containing 26 sheets) instead of six sets. Although the Poles soon solved the wiring, they simply did not have the resources to advance further on the bombe. At this point, the British assumed leadership of the cryptanalytic attack on Enigma. Using all of the Polish data, and that supplied by the French, the British decided on an entirely different approach - a general method of recovering the wheel settings that did not depend on solving the indicator system. Alan Turing and other British analysts solved the problem, and the Turing prototype bombe appeared in May 1940. The first British high-speed bombe was produced in April 1943. It was a four-rotor bombe but Bletchley Park got no real value from it until June [1].

In August of the same year, the Americans produced their first bombe. Thereafter it was a matter of refining the technical operation of the bombe and applying as many resources to the problem as it took to maintain the production of intelligence. Production of the USN bombes was pretty constant. Eighty bombes had arrived in Washington DC by December 1943, 90 by June, and 115 by December 1944. The Germans made very few changes to the operation of M-4 naval Enigma, which was Op-20-G's primary target.

Early in WWII, President Roosevelt signed the bill establishing the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps on May 15, 1942. A few months later he signed a similar bill for the US Navy which created the Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service, more commonly known as the WAVES. Only those women meeting higher qualifications were admitted into cryptologic work and many operated the bombe.

The Navy also told their WAVES as little as possible in order to maintain secrecy. They sent some 600 newly inducted WAVES, along with 200 men, to Dayton, Ohio, to help build and train on the cryptanalytic Bombes manufactured by the National Cash Register Company . Each Bombe required sixty-four rotors to be wired to match the rotors actually used in the Germans' Enigma. WAVES performed this task. Each woman was given a wiring diagram for one side of the two-sided rotor. She spent her eight-hour shift soldering wires to rotors. Another WAVE soldered the other side. This arrangement maintained the secrecy of the rotor wiring. No WAVE would have knowledge of both sides of any rotor.