THE
CODE
BOOK
not live long enough to see the successes and failures of his cipher system. In 1929, while driving a team of horses, he lost control of his carriage and crashed into a wall, dying on May 13 from internal injuries. CRACKING THE ENIGMA
In the years that followed the First World War, the British cryptanalysts in Room 40 continued to monitor German communications. In 1926 they began to intercept messages that baffled them completely. Enigma had arrived, and as the number of Enigma machines increased, Room 40’s ability to gather intelligence diminished rapidly. The Americans and the French also tried to tackle the Enigma cipher, but their attempts were equally dismal, and they soon gave up hope of breaking it. Germany now had the most secure communications in the world. The speed with which the Allied cryptanalysts abandoned hope of breaking Enigma was in sharp contrast to their perseverance just a decade earlier in the First World War. Confronted with the prospect of defeat, the Allied cryptanalysts had worked night and day to penetrate German ciphers. It would appear that fear was the main driving force, and that adversity is one of the foundations of successful codebreaking. However, in the wake of the First World War the Allies no longer feared anybody. Germany had been crippled by defeat, and the Allies were in a dominant position; as a result, they seemed to lose their cryptanalytic zeal. One nation, however, could not afford to relax. After the First World War, Poland reestablished itself as an independent state, but it was concerned about threats to its newfound sovereignty. To the east lay Russia, a nation ambitious to spread its communism, and to the west lay Germany, intent upon regain120