Enigma/Ultra intercepts for research

Just a quick one to thank everyone for the most helpful responses. My PC has finally crumbled and I am sending this from a friend’s PC.
Niall I will be in touch fairly shortly when I am up and running again.
Many Thanks again to all
Keith

Another source of evidence you might wish to consider is the interrogation reports of prisoners as well as the secret recordings of prisoners that were made. A book has just been published (I have no interest other than academic in the book) “Soldaten” by Sonke Neitzel and Harald Welzer. This book is heavily based on secret recordings of German and Italian prisoners, looking at the culture, perceptions and prejudices of soldiers, including airmen and ground crews and shows what you might be able to find, in general, for your specialism. I think Neitzel has written another book on high level intelligence overheard from conversations of very senior officers previously.

Keith

There is a substantial amount of Ultra material at the The National Archives in Kew – albeit a tiny fraction of the whole.

There are 2 main series of records
1. DEFE3: these are (mainly) the teleprinted copies of the original decrypts as sent to the Office of Naval Intelligence. They are primarily naval in nature, but do throw a little light on some Luftwaffe operations where the Luftwaffe communicated its intentions to the Kriegsmarine (e.g. maritime recon) and throw a lot of light on Fighter and Coastal Command’s anti-shipping efforts. Within DEFE3 there are also several series of material from the Middle East (the “Cairo series”), a series of decrypts of the Hagelin C38 cyphers used by the Italian navy and some Japanese material. There are just over 1,000 files in total containing, I’d say, over 500,000 individual decrypts. Within each series the material is arranged in chronological order of time of intercept. There is no index of any description, but browsing through the TNA online catalogue will give you a view of what’s there. As part of the NA’s Digital Microfilm project the entire DEFE3 series has been digitised and is available for download from the NA website. They are currently free to download. Each file is around 250 Megs.
2. The HW1 and HW5 series: HW1 is a small subset of messages that it was thought Churchill ought to see and HW5 contains Ultra-based reports sent to allied commanders (primarily regarding Luftwaffe and army). These contain a mass of directly transcribed material from decrypts. They haven’t been digitised so you’ll have to visit Kew to view them. Again the TNA catalogue will give you an idea of what material is where.

Author Nick Beale has posted an article called “Using Ultra for Luftwaffe research” on his website www.ghostbombers.com which gives a lot more detail on the available record than I can here, although his primary interest is I think in a different period and theatre to yours.

Personally I don’t think Ultra was a particularly significant source of intelligence about the Luftwaffe in Western Europe during the early years of the war. In contrast to the Kriegsmarine, which had to use radio to communicate with ships at sea, or the campaigns in, say, the western desert, East Africa or Balkans where a lack of comms infrastructure forced both sides to make copious use of radio, the Luftwaffe inherited a perfectly good telephone/ teleprinter network in France and then greatly expanded it. It simply didn’t need to make such extensive use of radio for high-level signals and therefore relatively little of its traffic was vulnerable to interception.

Far more valuable I suspect was the product of Y Service: interceptions of plain language and low level cypher communications with Luftwaffe aircraft in flight. Again a great deal of this material is at Kew in the AIR22 class (and some in the files of the Air Min Directorate of Intelligence in AIR40). The Y service daily reports start at AIR22/476 (for September 39 through March 1940) and carry on from there in date order. If you want to see a sample of this material just PM me.

HTH
Niall

These monthly diary pages might be a good starting point.

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/archive/index.rhtm

And about 18 months ago after Bletchley had acknowledged that they were in ‘modern’ existence I emailed them looking for any lists of staff who may have been involved in Met work to see if any of them co-incided with any of the RAFVR Met Branch officers who appeared to have ‘disappeared’ off the radar! No response.
6 months later I sent a hastener. Eventually they replied saying that they did not have the staff to undertake this sort of work.
Hope you have more luck! You may have more success with a FOI request – but the process is tedious and tiresome. And, on this subject, there are far too many LBW trays for your request to gather mould!
HTH
Resmoroh

Despite providing some otherwise inaccessible information, it was some time before Ultra made any significant contribution to the war effort. Although, thanks to the information from the Poles, the British had learned to read parts of the Wehrmacht’s signals traffic, regular decrypts only became possible in the Norwegian campaign – and then they were of marginal operational use.

Within a wider context, two Luftwaffe ciphers were broken, but the information gained was of little effective use. Similarly, Ultra’s role in the Battle of Britain was limited: better grade intelligence came from prisoners, captured documents and improved air reconnaissance.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/enigma_01.shtml

Moggy

It would be interesting to know the contents of messages Dowding had access to. Unless they have already been published ?

Ask Bletchley?