The History of Hut Eight
ceased in general using QWERTZUIOP numerals but these numerals continued to be used for certain types of figure weather and notably for certain observations affecting gunnery. As a result we received messages of this sort:
NUEMBERG VVV WEWA SWINEMUENDE LUFTBALTA 05 UHR:
The letters enclosed in the boxes are constant. The bigrams in columns 1 and 2 are the station indices and the 13 letters which follow are the observations from each station: the Ys are commas and the second half of the observation always has a one as its first digit - hence the Q. The stations were always listed in the same order and so we had right through a long message a series of known letters in fixed relative positions. The crib would look something like this: PP?????YQ?????YPT?????YQ etc...... These cribs were good and were successfully used but unfortunately usually lived for a short time only. The example given, for instance, was dependent on the Nuemberg being out exercising. Occasionally similar messages occurred with the numerals written out in full but were less useful in most cases owing to the varying lengths of numerals.
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