Learning About the Enigma Machine: WWII/Cryptography Timeline

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WWII/Cryptography Timeline

1912 June 23 - Birth of Alan Turing, Paddington, London
1918 Nov 11 - World War One ends with German defeat.
1921 July 29 - Adolf Hitler becomes leader of National Socialist 'Nazi' Party.
1923 - Arthur Scherbius incorporated "Chiffriermaschinen Aktiengesellschaft" to make and sell his Enigma machine.

1928 - Polish intelligence steals and copies an Enigma machine from Germans
1929 - Lester S. Hill published "Cryptography in an Algebraic Alphabet" in which a block of plaintext is enciphered by a matrix operation.
1930 Sept 14 - Germans elect Nazis making them second largest political party in Germany.
early 1930's - Marian Rejewski and two other polish mathematicians work to break the Enigma code. (For more information, click here, and see the bottom of this page.)
early 1930's - Polish intelligence was able to read most German military traffic, with the exception of the Kriegsmarine (navy), which always used an additional rotor in their machines.
1930's - the British TYPEX machine was an offshoot of the commercial Enigma purchased by the British for study in the 1920's. It was a 5-rotor machine with the two initial rotors being stators, serving the purpose of the German Enigma's plugboard.
1932 Nov 8 - Roosevelt elected President of the United States.
1933 Jan 30 - Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany.
March 12 - First concentration camp opened at Oranienburg outside Berlin.
March 23 - Enabling Act gives Hitler dictatorial power.
July 14 - Nazi party declared only party in Germany.
1934 Aug 19 - Adolf Hitler becomes Führer of Germany.
1936 - The Turing machine: On Computable Numbers... submitted for publication.
1937 - The Japanese Purple machine was invented in response to revelations by
Herbert O. Yardley and broken by a team headed by William Frederick Friedman. The Purple machine used telephone stepping relays instead of rotors and thus had a totally different permutation at each step rather than the related permutations of one rotor in different positions.
1938 March 12/13 - Germany announces 'Anschluss' (union) with Austria.
Sept 30 - British Prime Minister Chamberlain appeases Hitler at Munich.
1938-39 - In 1938 the Germans added an additional rotor to all their machines and changed settings. The exception to this was the SD, the military police. Up to September 1939 the Poles could read about 10 percent of German traffic, which was enough (along with more mundane forms of intelligence) to identify and locate all major German units committed to the attack as of August 26, 1939.
1938-39 - Turing returns to Cambridge. Introduced to German Enigma cipher problem
1939-40 - Devises the Bombe, machine for Enigma decryption
1939-42 - Breaking of U-boat Enigma cipher by cryptographers in Bletchly Park, saving battle of
the Atlantic.
1939 - Polish intelligence passes their work on the Enigma to the French and British
March 15/16 - Nazis take Czechoslovakia.
Aug 23 - Nazis and Soviets sign Pact.
Aug 25 - Britain and Poland sign Mutual Assistance Treaty.
Sept 1 - Nazis invade Poland.
Sept 3 - Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand declare war on Germany.
Sept 5 - United States proclaims neutrality; German troops cross Vistula river in Poland.
Sept 10 - Canada declares war on Germany; Battle of the Atlantic begins.
Sept 17 - Soviets invade Poland.
Sept 27 - Warsaw surrenders to Nazis; Reinhard Heydrich becomes leader of new Reich Main Security Office (RSHA).
Sept 29 - Nazis and Soviets divide up Poland.
1940 Jan - Enigma code broken by British.
May 10 - Nazis invade France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Netherlands; Winston Churchill becomes British Prime Minister.
June 3 - Germans bomb Paris; Dunkirk evacuation ends.
June 14 - Germans enter Paris.
July 1 - German U-boats attack merchant ships in the Atlantic.
July 10 - Battle of Britain begins.
Aug 1 - German bombing offensive against airfields and factories in England.
Aug 23/24 - First German air raids on Central London.
Sept 15 - Massive German air raids on London, Southampton, Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool and Manchester.
Sept 27 - Tripartite (Axis) Pact signed by Germany, Italy and Japan.
Nov 5 - Roosevelt re-elected as U.S. president.
Nov 14/15 - Germans bomb Coventry, England.
1941 Aug 12 - Roosevelt and Churchill sign Atlantic Charter.
Aug 20 - Nazi siege of Leningrad begins.
Sept 3 - First experimental use of gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Dec 7 - Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor; Hitler issues Night and Fog decree.
Dec 8 - United States and Britain declare war on Japan.
Dec 11 - Hitler declares war on United States.
1942 Jan 13 - Germans begin U-boat offensive along east coast of USA.
June - Mass murder of Jews by gassing begins at Auschwitz extermination camp.
Dec 2 - Professor Enrico Fermi sets up atomic reactor in Chicago.
1943 Feb 2 - Germans surrender at Stalingrad in the first big defeat of Hitler's armies.
March 16-20 - Battle of Atlantic climaxes with 27 merchant ships sunk by German U-boats.
May 22 - Dönitz suspends U-boat operations in the North Atlantic.
1944 March 4 - Soviet troops begin offensive on Belorussian front; First major daylight bombing
raid on Berlin by Allies.
June 6 - D-Day landings.
1945 Feb 4-11 - Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin meet at Yalta.
April 12 - President Roosevelt dies. Truman becomes President.
April 16 - Soviet troops begin final attack on Berlin; Americans enter Nuremberg.
April 2 - Soviets reach Berlin.
April 30 - Adolf Hitler commits suicide.
May 7 - Unconditional surrender of all German forces to Allies.
May 8 - VE (Victory in Europe) Day.
June 5 - Allies divide up Germany and Berlin and take over government.
June 26 - United Nations World Charter of Security signed in San Francisco.
July 16 - First U.S. atomic bomb test; Potsdam Conference begins.
July 26 - Atlee succeeds Churchill as British Prime Minister.
Aug 6 - First atomic bomb dropped, on Hiroshima, Japan.
Aug 8 - Soviets declares war on Japan and invade Manchuria.
Aug 9 - Second atomic bomb dropped, on Nagasaki, Japan.
Aug 14 - Japanese agree to unconditional surrender.
Aug 15 - VJ (Victory over Japan) Day.
Sept 2 - Japanese sign surrender agreement on USS Missouri, Tokyo Bay.
1954 June 7- Death of Alan Turing by cyanide poisoning, Wilmslow, Cheshire.

Some recent news:

2000 September

WARSAW, Poland (AP) - Britain's Prince Andrew has given Poland's leader a World War II-era encoding machine, thanking the country for helping crack Nazi Germany's Enigma code.

``The Enigma codes would not have been broken if it were not for the knowledge of Polish mathematicians,'' the prince told Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek as he presented an encoder taken from a captured Nazi submarine.

Poland has long said its mathematicians broke the Enigma code used by the Nazis to send secret orders and messages. Until the mid-1970s, the British had claimed it was solely their achievement, a version that still appears in the respected Encyclopaedia Britannica.

References:

The History Place, WWII in Europe
CME's Cryptography Timeline
Alan Turing-Home Page
e-mail from John Radzilowski.

aboufade@gvsu.edu