The History of Hut Eight


and read about 100 messages. The indicators and window positions of four (selected) messages for the 5th were

IndicatorWindow start
KFJX EWTWP C V
SYLG EWUFB Z V
JMHO UVQGM E M
JMFE FEVCM Y K

The repetition of the EW combined with the repetition of V suggests that the fifth and sixth letters describe the third letter of the window position, and similarly one is led to believe that the first two letters of the indicator represent the first letter of the window position, and that the third and fourth represent the second. Presumably this effect is somehow produced by means of a table bigramme equivalents of letters, but it cannot be done simply by replacing the letters of the window position with one of their bigramme equivalents, and then putting in a dummy bigramme, for in this case the window position corresponding to JMFE FEVC would have to be say MYY instead of MYK. Probably some encipherment is involved somewhere. The two most natural alternatives are i) The letters of the window position are replaced by some bigramme equivalents and then the whole enciphered at some 'Grundstellung', or ii) The window position is enciphered at the Grundstellung, and the resulting letters replaced by bigramme equivalents. The second of these alternatives was made far more probable by the following indicators occurring on the 2nd May

EXDP IVJOV C P
XXEX JXJYV U E
RCXX JLWAN U M

With this second alternative we can deduce from the first two indicators that the bigrammes EX and XX have the same value, and this is confirmed from the second and third, where XX and EX occur in the second position instead of the first.

It so happened that the change of indicating system had not been very well made, and a certain torpedo boat, with the call sign AFA: had not been provided with the bigramme tables. This boat sent a message in another cipher explaining this on the 1st May, and it was arranged that traffic with AFA: was to take

-15-


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