Cryptanalysis of the Enigma immense problem and it gave a great deal of trouble. Work on a high speed machine had been started by Wynn-Williams of the TRE late in 1941 and some nine months later Harold Keen of BTM started work independently. Early in 1942, Bletchley Park were a long way from possessing a high speed machine of any sort. Eventually, after a long period of being unable to decipher U-boat messages, a source of cribs was found. This was the Kurzsignale (short signals), a code which the German navy used to minimize the duration of transmissions, thereby reducing the risk of being
It Was the War of the Trenches and injustices soldiers experienced. Tardi had dealt with World War One as a subject before in "Adieu Brindavoine", published in Pilote (1972-1973) and "Le Fleur au Fusil" (1974). "It Was the War of the Trenches" is a more ambitious work for whom Tardi documented himself thoroughly, asking advice from various historians and based his drawings on numerous photographs from this period. The comic has a clear anti-war theme, reflecting the soldiers who are permanently physically and psychologically scarred and the numerous who died for a seemingly pointless cause, which are portrayed in brutal graphic detail. An English translation was published