The Secrets of Station X Read Online Free PDF

mathematician from Brasenose College, Oxford, who started work immediately.
    ‘When I joined GC&CS in early February 1939 and went to join Dilly Knox to work on the German services’ Enigma traffic, the outlook was not encouraging,’ Twinn recalled. Knox and the other leading GC&CS codebreakers were largely classicists or linguists, he said.
    They regarded mathematicians as very strange beasts indeed and required a little persuasion before they believed they could do anything practical or helpful at all. The people working on Enigma were the celebrated Dilly Knox and a chap called Tony Kendrick, quite a character, who was once head boy [Captain of the School] at Eton. There was a slightly bizarre interview from Dilly who was a bit of a character to put it mildly. He didn’t believe in wasting too much time in training his assistant ; he gave me a five-minute talk and left me to get on with it, which was actually rather good for me. Before I arrived Dilly was a lone hand, he always was, assisted by one secretary/ assistant and enjoying a total lack of other facilities – though it is by no means clear that he would have used any. He was notorious for being very secretive about his ideas and I am not sure whether he had any hopes of ultimate success.
    Dilly Knox was an exceptional man whose brilliance has only rarely been acknowledged. With the possible exception of John Tiltman, Knox was the only codebreaker of this era who proved as adept at breaking the old-fashioned codebooks of the First World War as the machine cyphers of Second World War. The son of a bishop, and the brother of the Roman Catholic theologian Ronnie Knox, he was fifty-five at the start of the war and so wildly eccentric as to put his fellow codebreakers in the shade. A fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, he walked with a limp, theresult of a motorcycle accident, and wore horn-rimmed glasses without which he could see nothing. Knox was so absent-minded that he forgot to invite two of his three brothers to his own wedding. He believed so strongly in the relaxing powers of a bath to give him inspiration that during the First World War he had a bath installed in a room in the Admiralty. A fellow codebreaker recalled how, early in the war, the fellow lodgers in Knox’s billet became so concerned at the length of time he was spending in the bathroom that they felt compelled to break in. ‘They found him standing by the bath, a faint smile on his face, his gaze fixed on abstractions, both taps full on and the plug out. What was passing in his mind could possibly have solved a problem that was to win the war.’
    Knox was in fact very close to breaking Enigma and there was just one major thing that was holding him up, Twinn recalled.
    What we did not know was the order in which the letters of the keyboard were connected to the twenty-six input discs of the entry plate. Dilly, who had a taste for inventing fanciful jargon, called this the QWERTZU. We had no idea what the order was. We had tried QWERTZU, that didn’t work. There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet. Our ordinary alphabet has them in a certain order, but the Germans weren’t idiots. When they had the perfect opportunity to introduce a safe-guard to their machine by jumbling it up that would be the sensible thing to do. After all, there were millions of different ways of doing it.
    The introduction of mathematicians to help Knox in his investigations of the Enigma problem was fortunately not the only good thing to come out of that first meeting with the Poles in Paris in January 1939. Knox might not have been initially impressed with the Poles, but they were certainly impressed with him and specifically asked that he be present at a second meeting between the Polish, British and French codebreakers,to be held at the Bureau Szyfrow , the Polish cypher bureau, in the Pyry Forest just outside Warsaw, in July 1939. It was only then that the Poles revealed the full extent of the progress they