A couple notes: - The documentary is definitely very old, that's why you have so many people telling of their own work, they were still alive! I guess it was made in film, something that I thank sooo much! That is also why they only had a mockup of the Bombe, instead of the beautiful machines they have today at Bletchley. - As others have said, the Poles deserved much more credit, they did break several versions of Enigma, and they had the knowledge to keep breaking it at the very start of the war. They had build 2 different machines types called "bomba" (from there the British named their machine "Bombe") to execute their exploit electromechanically. These were specific to the double repetition of the key exploit, which was not in itself a failure of the machine but a procedural issue of the Germans. For those who minimize their contribution, nothing relevant would have shown up in Bletchley without their kickstart. I attribute the lack of mention to the age of the documentary, at that point at Bletchley they were still trying to get recognition themselves. The Polish only started get more recognition in the last decades. Until the Polish Bomba everything was done with pen and paper, using a machine was a huge breakthrough. - There were other machines not mentioned in Bletchley, before the Bombe and before Colossus. - Late in the war, the US was building hundreds of Bombes on their side of the pond, based on the same principle, but an entirely homemade design. They would receive the "program" from Britain, that is how to wire the back of the machine, and the switches, all this created based on some messages and the expected crib, the would process it and send the list of possible keys back. I believe one of them survived and is in display in the Smithsonian. They somehow invented remote computing ;) - The Bombe did not produce a single set of keys, but many sets of probable keys, which had to be tried, the shorter the crib the more false keys it would produce, that's why they loved those very long cribs they mentioned in the interviews. - The way to build the "program" is very involved, with math graphs, this is not procedural programming or anything like that. - In here narrator incorrectly calls "fish" to the Lorenz traffic. In reality they called "fish" in general, to all the encrypted traffic that they had "fished" from the air, regardless of encoding/encryption. They would give different names to the different codes, for example they mentioned here "Shark" for the uboats, "Tunny" was for the Lorenz, and there were others obviously. - Wherever they mention "modulo 2" in here, that's just another name for XOR. - The teleprinter traffic (the Lorenz) was recorded by the Y listening stations with a paper oscillograph, I always find that funny, as it literally shows the electric signal. - The engineer Bill Tutte was an absolute master, he was given an example message both encrypted and plaintext from the Lorenz, and with that he correctly deduced the entire machine design, number of rotors, rotor mappings, rotor skipping, etc All this by seeking for repetitions in patterns with pencil and paper mostly by aligning it in a square. That was a humongous task. - Another quite relevant part of Bletchley was how they managed the archiving, the messages both encrypted and plaintext as well as the information gathered from them, was monstrous, most of the traffic was low level tactical traffic, making sense of that is no easy feat. - It was a pleasure seeing Tony Sale telling us the history here, he himself deserves an entire documentary. - If I keep adding notes, I will end up writing a new documentary ;) BTW, that movie "The Imitation Game" is a whole piece of s***.

Proud that my aunt served at Bletchley Park, although the Official Secrets Act meant she never spoke of her work.

I visited Bletchley Park and had a tour, absolutely fascinating, these people deserved the highest recognition for their work.

I appreciate this documentary mentioning and giving credit to the Polish codebreakers, many accounts of cracking the Enigma barely mention or forget about them entirely despite their enormous importance to future British and Allied success. They deserve their own doc, the Polish contribution to the war effort as a whole doesn't get enough media representation in the west as it is. For anyone interested, the series World on Fire is a good start in that regard, the scenes set in Poland are in Polish which is the first time I've seen that in a UK show

Glad they made a movie about Turing. At least he got honoured now and millions know how much we all are indebted to his genius.

Long ago, when I first learnt of Turin’s involvement and how he was subsequently treated by the country he served with utmost love and reverence , I was disgusted, utterly shocked and bewildered. The whole team at Bletchley gave so much, we, as British people, owe them so much

Just when you think you must have seen every documentary out there on this, another one pops up, and I think this one is one of, if not, the best. Many thanks for sharing.

My mum was a WRNS ans she was a cypher clerk there from 42 till 46. Till the day she died, she would not say much about it

Not enough credit to the Poles, or the Signals Intelligence guy - I forget his name - but he contributed as much as Turing to the War effort

This story should be in every history book in every high school or secondary schools across the west. Why it's not is beyond me.

This episode is AWESOME!!! What more can I say? The saddest part is the stupid waste of the genius of Turing and Flowers. Such a terrible shame.

I am very proud of my father who helped end World War II and never got to tell me about it.

I've read about Enigma and Bletchley Park, but this documentary explained more of the "how" the Enigma machine and its operators had weaknesses and how the codebreakers were able to exploit those. At one time, I worked for IBM, and of course the company told us employees that it had invented computers. The information about Mr Flowers and Colossus was very interesting.

52:05 - "Wir unten im Boot hatten keine Ahnung davon, wie es da oben aussah, aber der Kommandant oben auf der Brücke, der rief dann ständig 'raus, raus, raus'. Wir haben gefragt was soll denn geschehen mit den Geheimsachen? Bekam den Order alles liegen zu lassen und nur danach (something that I don't understand), ich weiß nicht, daran kann wohl keine Kritik geübt werden, kein Mesch kann sich die Situation vorstellen der nicht selebst dabei war" = Us people at the bottom of the boat had no idea what was happening above, but the commander up on the bridge just kept shouting "[get] out, [get] out, [get] out!". We asked what we should do with the secret documents? They ordered us to leave everything and afterwards (didn't understand this part). I don't know, no one can imagine the situation without being in it themselves."

My grandfather served on the British merchant ships and he made many crossings across the Atantic during WWII. I never realised how much he must have gone through before seeing documentaries such as this. Now I know why he recieved quite a few medals.

The man who does not get enough credit (In this video) is Anthony Edgar "Tony" Sale, FBCS (30 January 1931 - 28 August 2011). Just goes to show you how old this documentary is. Tony helped get Bletchley Park recognised as the place where secrets were broken and was essential in coordinating the COLOSSUS rebuild and more besides.

What they did to Alan Turing after the war was little short of an international outrage.

Bletchley Park & the Y Stations are my #1 reason for wanting to visit the UK. Along with RAF museums and HMS Victory. So much to see so little money to spend.

The original version of this was Broadcast by Channel 4 in 1999 in the UK. It originally had FOUR Part of 50mins each (making 200 mins with Commercials removed). so this is a edited down version. But is very good quality at 1080p. Hopefully, one day the FULL series will be released in this quality. However , this is still the best documentary on Enigma. I visited Bletchley Park in 2016 and can assure everyone , its well worth the visit. You really feel you are gripped by history when you step onto its grounds..

Good god.The ability to read your enemy's diary in wartime must be absolutely priceless to the military.

Fantastic documentary! Very rarely do you hear a mechanical breakdown of *how* coding or algorithmic processing works. (To be clear, I'm not a coder myself, but the analysis of the method[s] by which coding was processed in its "primitive" age was very fascinating and enlightening.)

Tommy Flowers used his own savings to build some of Colossus. The first version had 1500 valves and the subsequent ones 2300 valves. Two were moved to GCHQ but the destruction of the rest really set the country back post war. Had Flowers been able to take one to the GPO Research Station and reveal it as a post war invention a few months later, Britain would have led the world in computing and telephony technology. As Tommy Flowers tried to build an electronic exchange but was told that machines with hundreds of valves didn't work. He couldn't argue that he had built them with thousands of valves because it was secret.

As brilliant as Alan Turing was, it is nice to see a Bletchley Park/Station X documentary that shows the whole scope of what was done there, and not just a doco on Turing's input.

The debt the world owes to Turing cannot be quantified. His treatment at the hands of the British state was abominable and a warning to us all about unjust laws and persecution.

Very very sad what they did to Alan. Just a tragedy. He was a true genius that could have given the world so much more. I'd like to say the world is a better place today. But only just. Time and again it's all too clear those values held then are still held by many now.

Absolutely the best history/explanation of the code breaking I've ever seen and/or read. Many thanks.

A woman in Turkey also handed on another copy. The millitery attache at the Cairo US office made, extensive, detailed and frequent reports to Washington. These went by radio beaming directly over Rommel's interception centre and he received decrypts within several hours. When the attache was recalled, there were no further leaks. Many men died and ships sunk because of his work.

Some subtitles on the German part of the interview would have been helpful.

Now you need to do more concerning the Y Stations, not just in Britain but located throughout the British Empire. The beloved HRO Receivers from America and the whole interesting subject of capturing/receiving code so it could be given to BP. Without the secret listeners sometimes risking injury and disease, language experts, and code literate/expert people, without the radio amateurs, the young people with their fascination for electronics, BP would not have had the raw material to do its work. This is the story of young men literally listening to German signals from a wireless hidden in their parents front room. Truth was more exciting than fiction during these heady days.

There's another famous X called camp X in Canada, check it out. It was in the spy business as well and played an important and largely forgotten role in the war.

These human beings helped to save humanity. Their good efforts cannot be praised enough. Long Live The Greatest Generation in our hearts. Let them be remembered in our deeds today!!! Carry Strength Brothers and Sisters.

Tommy Flowers was rightly mentioned and he helped build the computer off his own back pretty much. It was a team effort not just Flowers or Turing they couldn't have done it themselves. I do wonder why Turing always get the laurel leaf crown and Flowers seems to get ignored ? The people in Bletchley knew it was a team effort anyway.

Why do they never say the original date of these programs??? Tommy Flowers, brilliant , ahead of his time, but forgotten What an awful thing to have to destroy his computer 🙏🏼

It is VERY sad that no mention of Poland’s Security service, who initially created the basis of the German code and passed them onto the British.

Fascinating content. Real shame that you did not voice over or subtitle the spoken German interviews into English.

Great documentary. Just wish the names of those speaking were up on screen.

At (52:14) how come there is no captions, translating the German the guy was speaking, into English? I mean the entire documentary was done in English, the title is in English. Like it happened before that as well. Stuff like that should not get past any decent editor. The rest of this documentary was just phonemonal. Thank you. This was an absolute delight to watch and I thought I knew the guts of the story but wow was this covered well. I so eagerly await, and embrace all the content from this channel. God bless all those honorable, brave men from all sides of this horrific war. So many poor people died needlessly. History seems to never learn lessons and just war is always ubiquitous.

I was a cypher tech during the Cold War. I think it taught me how to talk about other things besides work, I guess . Working inside a vault sucked, but there were worse jobs in the green.

Such a well-made documentary about a very complicated time in history. The folks whose minds are outside the proverbial box absolutely changed the world. I couldn't help but think that no wonder every man I ever met that was in WWII drank.

⚠️ I didn't see on this documentary, that the allied forces got one or more enigma machines from U-boats, which is the truth. They talk only about the code book retrieved, but indeed along the war, several enigma machines were also retrieved and studied, and this facilitated a lot of decoding and understanding how the enigma machine worked. 🙏👍

We can only thank these wonderful talented people for giving us all a tomorrow, god bless them all.

This is by far the best coverage of this story I've ever seen. Nice work.

Imagine being Georg Högel, and subsequently realising that your rescue of the love poems rather than the code book almost single handedly lost the war!

As an American who doesn't speak German I feel like I'm losing a lot of the punch behind the former German militaries input because I don't know what they're saying because somebody forgot to put subtitles

While overall this is an excellent source of information it would have been nice to see German translation in the subtitles. Maybe they could be added at a later date. Overall a well done documentary.

These code breaking stuff are very alluring to me. I feel I'm similar to Alan Turing. I find people are often scared or angry at me for my behavior, for I dont make eye contact and other social norms. I'd like to wear a gasmask in public like him! Ow my nose hurts from smells most people dont seem to notice. But so many times I go outside, I find myself being approached by cops again and again because some stranger called them because I was weird or something. P.S. I'm not making a cry for pity. I speak my mind and I wish for acceptance of odd-behaving people. If I creep anyone out, I'd like them to leave me alone so I can carry on with my life.

Station X had the first programmable electronic computer in the world. It was kept so secret that UK never had its own electronic computer industry.

This is one of the most interesting & intriguing war stories I've ever heard! Absolutely fascinating

From way back when there were actually great, fascinating and serious historical documentaries on TV with real content and depth, which took their viewers seriously instead of fooling around constantly and even expected them to focus their attention 🤗

The Poles made the first breakthrough by understanding the enigma machine.

The moving floor training was surprising…

A most interesting and well-presented documentary telling the story of Bletchley and the breaking of the Enigma coding system but, sadly, we still don't know how many souls were sacrificed to give the Germans the impression that we were not aware of their plans and most likely that was why Churcihil had all the records burned.

Years ago, I had the opportunity to visit GCHQ on business. I saw an enigma machine inside a display case while I was there.

Polacy przed wojną czytali Enigma.! Ale zajmowało to 3 tygodnie pracy.! Zanim zbudowano kopie tej maszyny. Częściowo kupionej przez szpiega, częściowo zbudowanej przez polskich inżynierów.! Oczywiście Niemcy udoskonalali Enigme. Mało tego Polacy czytali w 1920 w wojnie z Bolszewikami ich kodowane rozkazy.! Dzięki temu Polska wygrała bitwę Warszawską.! I wojsko Polskie wiedziało że jest to ważna sprawa złamać kody wroga.!

A wonderful story, well told. Thank you.

This is the best of the many renditions of the Ultra story that I have seen and read. Thank you very much.

After the war the British government handed out Enigma machines to embassies around the world so that they could read the dispatches being sent, while the users of the Enigma machines were still under the impression it was impossible to crack.

51:17 - "Es fiel sofort das Licht aus, es ist ja kein gutes Gefühl wenn man im Dunkeln sitzt .... und zu überlegen, kommt irgendwo Wasser" = The lights went out immediately, and it's not a good feeling when you are sat in the dark (the rest is in a dialect that I do not understand) .. and to realise that water is coming in[to the ship]"

My mothers brother worked at Bletchley park along with another Uncle who was from the Navy who was called all over the war footprint to interrogate captured pilots and the like

You guys make phenomenal documentaries! 👏

Rommel was not only losing because of his disruption to logistics, he was also losing because he encountered the Australian 9th Division Infantry who fought the Germans to exhaustion. 🇦🇺

Thanks for your wonderful talk about Czech Bata'amen in HKVDF. It gave me and my two sons new information about my father and their grandfather, Alois Jjricek, and added to our heritage knowledge and identity. Helenka Jjricek, Adelaide, South Australia.

These brilliant codebreakers are 100% responsible for the allies winning the war. the lack of gratitude and recognition is breathtaking. they deserve much more recognition than they ever received. and every schoolchild should be taught about this.

Would have been better with translation subtitles, was interested in what the German soldier had to say.

One of the greatest true stories in all of history. Never tired of hearing about it.

The radio officer could identify accents from the messages he was receiving. He also said they went mad!

We have to read a dozen books to get a picture of how Enigma was broken.

Absolutely brilliant documentary. Thank you very much.

I wish the german sailors words were subtitled into english.

they must be awarded also bcoz of them many lives they save by cracking that code they are the legend hacker at that time..i really love hearing storiesof all veteran and survivor of war at that time..thank you for your service

They were all heroes Many of us wouldn't be here if not for Alan Turing and all of his fellow workers

It's a pity no attempt to translate the German dialog into English was made. This documentary was an otherwise wonderful production. Please consider it in future programs.

Not Geofrey sheets but Zygalski's sheets. They were the idea of Zygalski.

Very informative and music edited in keeping with this Documentary excellent 👏👍thank you 🤗

In the 1920s Alan Turing proved that any problem that could be solved by mathematics could be solved by a machine that could read, write, and perform logical operations AND, OR, and NOT. That was his PhD thesis. That is the philosophical underpinning of all modern computers. US code breaking of Japanese signals was independent of Station X, and the product of the US breaking of Japanese ciphers was called "MAGIC".

Monty didn't chase Rommel down after driving his army out of Egypt because most of the time, Rommel had had long supply lines that were easy target for the RAF. He didn't relish being in the same position and vulnerable to the Luftwaffe.

Brilliant documentary. Best I have seen

Back in the '70s my old man - a WWII history buff - gave me a book about Enigma. Fascinating and amazing.

Brilliant and fascinating documentary on breaking the Enigma code !

55:29 - Das kann ich jetzt im nachhinein nicht mehr.. ich musste mich drauf verlassen wie die befehle waren, na, und nach dem dem Befehl eindeutig war das drin zu lassen.. und.. nach oben zu steigen oder zu klettern... da gab's keinen anderen Weg. = In retrospect I can't .. I had to rely on what the orders were, well, the order was to leave it [in the boat] .. and.. to get out (literally, to climb).

Up the volume!

my dad was RAF and a codebreaker at Bletchly Park. He never spoke about his work, my mum knew of his work and told me some things.

Best way to get people to see and know what we know, is to start them off and smaller conspiracy theories that will maybe open them up to larger facts!

Enigma was actually cracked by Marian Rejewski in 1932.

Thank you to Howard Davidson for the fantastic music behind the documentary. I would enjoy hearing these songs again on their own.

That was amazing. What people can achieve when they work together is fantastic. If only it didn't take a World War to get this level of commitment is truely sad. Think of what could be conquerd if we always had this level of cooperation and commitment. No politics, just a common goal.

amazing !!! i was enthralled from beginning to end ! tell you what , those Brits are a crafty lot ....ain't they

I love all the comments by people who obviously didn't watch it. 🤣

The amount of combinations with enigma is lower than the amount of ads.... insane

A miracle of intelligence over might !

Meanwhile, we had the incredible Elizabeth Friedman, her husband and the code breaking group they had created solving the enigma as well. They also broke the Japanese Purple code. And much much more.

It is Station ten, not station ex.

A fantastic documentary marred by the apparent need to make it look widescreen. The people's names and the German translations are completely missing from my KZfaq view. Please don't be afraid to post such fine productions in the original 4x3 aspect ratio.

Amazing documentary!

What a fascinating and very moving tribute to such a great woman. Superb content as always Mark

Wars bring out both the very best and the very worst in humanity. I'd often heard about the complex 'Enigma' coding machine but was never aware that it's successor was far more complex. These people succeeded in decoding these machines from scratch using inginuity, patience and a little luck. Absolutely amazing. Turin was good enough to play an essential part in the team but designated a security risk because of his sexuality. A tragedy. The telephone technician who effectively designed the world's first programmable computer went back to the post office. Another tragedy. It would appear that the team never really got the acknowledgment and recognition they really deserved.

The real enigma was the roof design at Bletchly Park !!! No one could crack that 😊

Thank you for a great documentary. ❤

My brain hurts thinking about how they figured this all out.

If Turing and Flowers had been authorized to set up a company after the war Britain would have been at the forefront of the computor age and who knows what may have come of that meeting of minds with a little governmental finance and absolutely no governmental interference. Tommy Flowers never got the accolades his genius so richly deserved Turing made the idea of a computor but Flowers made the computor of use to mankind.