On a 1996 assignment to the Arctic archipelago of Spitsbergen, one of
Netropolitan鈥檚 intrepid reporters sauntered into the museum in the main
settlement of Longyearbyen. Among the relics of its whaling past and its
mining-centred present (see www.svalbard.net) was a display of Second World War
detritus left behind by the Allied and Nazi soldiers who fought over the
islands. While gawping at an enormous, rusting machine gun, our man stubbed his
foot on a wooden box. Raising its lid, he was amazed to find it was an Enigma
coding machine. Yes, on the floor. Not even in a display case. And it鈥檚 still
there, the governor of Spitsbergen confirmed by e-mail last week.
So, knowing security for these funny old machines can be slack,
Netropolitan was not surprised when another Enigma machine went missing from
Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire earlier this year (www.bletchleypark.org.uk).
The rare Abwehr Enigma was returned late last week, via the BBC. But three of
its crucial encoding rotors are still being held to ransom. You can find out how
the machines worked at www.codesandciphers.org.uk. And you can now read Alan
Turing鈥檚 notes on Enigma鈥攚ritten in his own hand鈥攁t Britain鈥檚 Public
Record Office on www.pro.gov.uk/news/InTheNews/Enigma/Enigma1.htm.
The fuss over the Enigma theft disguises the sad fact that in 1945 Winston
Churchill may have inflicted far worse damage on Bletchley Park. To hide the
centre鈥檚 secrets, which many say shortened the war by two years, Churchill
ordered all its code-breaking machines to be smashed into pieces 鈥渘o bigger than
a man鈥檚 hand鈥� and burnt. Among the items destroyed were 10 Colossus machines,
the valve-based forerunners of programmable electronic computers. Also lost were
the electromechanical Bombes, which ground out Enigma rotor settings. The loss
to computing history is incalculable. Rebuilds by dedicated computer
conservators have helped, but they are far from the real thing.
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