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
Cryptanalysis of the Enigma follows. The US Army also produced a version of a bombe. It was physically very different from the British and US Navy bombes. A contract was signed with Bell Labs on 30 September 1942. The machine was designed to analyse 3-rotor, not 4-rotor traffic. It did not use drums to represent the Enigma rotors, using instead telephone-type relays. It could, however, handle one problem that the bombes with drums could not. The set of ten bombes consisted of a total of 144 Enigma-equivalents, each mounted on a rack approximately long high and wide. There were 12 control stations which could