The Ultra Secret – Superb Slow Burn Films on Enigma
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In 1974 a book, The Ultra Secret, was published. The contents were nothing short of sensational for anyone who bought it. Lest people thought it was a joke, more documents under The Thirty-Year Rule were released on the topic. Simply put, The British were reading ALL GERMAN-CIPHERED SIGNALS, SOMETIMES IN NEAR REAL TIME. It was the ultimate dream of every Politician, General or soldier. If you knew what your enemy was GOING TO DO, you could easily counter it or act. Or not act as some myths have suggested to safeguard the secret. The writer F F Winterbotham said in his book that the British had advance warning of a devastating raid on the town of Coventry but Churchill expressly forbade warning the town to preserve the secret – a myth that refuses to die with arguments for and against the myth continuing for a long time.
The Enigma looked like a portable typewriter with three rotors connected internally through various wires and a telephone-style plug board. Messages enciphered with this machine were supposedly unbreakable. Combining three rotors from a set of five, each of the 3 rotor settings with 26 positions, and the plugboard with ten pairs of letters connected, the military Enigma has 150 million million (- this is not a typo – ) possible combinations. The Germans were satisfied that messages sent on this machine were unbreakable since both the sender and receiver had to follow the “daily settings” for rotor and plugboard positions.
As Sherlock Holmes said, what one man can invent, another can discover. In this case, it was The Poles from the Polish Cipher Bureau who almost cracked the machine before they were invaded by the Germans. Luckily the secret stayed with them as they went to France. When France was invaded, the entire team went to England, where at Bletchley Park, a dedicated team of brilliant scientists, mathematicians, crossword puzzle experts, and every type of oddball sat together with one goal – crack the settings and decipher the messages.
The two English language films show how real intelligence is collected and how crucial it can be in the overall strategy , and has nothing to do with drinking Vodka Martinis
The Imitation Game (2014) – Slightly “filmi” yet superb
Today Alan Turing has been given a rare posthumous honour and his reputation has been rehabilitated. Yet the man who managed the cracking of the Enigma underwent immense humiliation and harassment due to his homosexuality. So, the film starts in the mid-1950s when he is caught by the Police and then switches back and forth with Alan Turing – a brilliant Benedict Cumberbatch – assembling a team to crack the cyphers, including a woman named Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley). (There were as many women as men at Bletchley Park).
They have “decoded” the dots and dashes to meaningless jumbled letters but have not “deciphered” what these meaningless letters mean. They only wait for a “crib” – a message or group of letters that ALWAYS mean the same thing. They followed many such cribs and put them through the electromechanical Bombe and Colossus – the first electromechanical computers ever used in War. Soon, they get a lucky break – a German operator who starts and ends his messages the same way, and the breaks start coming in.
The “filmi” part shows a somewhat unwritten romance between Turing and Clarke. It also builds on one of the persistent myths of the war that the British had advance warning of a devastating raid on Coventry and let it go ahead, resulting in one of the most horrific German air raids on England. In this case, the team’s youngest member, Peter, tells Turing to reroute a convoy about to be attacked by German U Boats as his younger brother is travelling in one of the ships about to be attacked.
Such drama apart, Cumberbatch is simply superb as Turing, who was also given to fits of stammering during serious conversations. In keeping with the “Turing as Hero” theme of the movie, all other higher-ups in the chain of command, especially Alistair Denniston (Charles Dance), are made out to be thoughtless, unintelligent plodders. It does get one aspect of history correct in that one of the team members John Cairncross (Allen Leech), was a Soviet Spy who was leaking all deciphered messages to the Russians. This fact came to light only in the 1970s but is made out as if British Intelligence Head Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong superb as always) knew about it and allowed Cairncross to carry out the copies to the Soviets. The vast team of cryptanalysts is also not shown but that can be excused as cinematic logic as the five people are “representative” of the entire team at Bletchley Park.
Performances are superb, with Cumberbatch and Knightly in superb form. The film is Free on YouTube and is also available on Amazon Prime
Real History/ Historical Background – 3 out of 5
Script – 4 out of 5
Story – 4 out of 5
Direction – 4 out of 5
Photography – 4 out of 5
Total – 3.8 out of 5
Enigma – 2001
During mid-1943, at the height of the Battle against the U Boats, Bletchley Park and the Admiralty were suddenly in the dark! They could not decipher any German Naval messages (while they could still solve the Army and Air Force messages). The German B-Dienst, the German equivalent of Bletchley Park, suspected that their messages were being read by the British and so added a fourth rotor and new settings to the Naval version of the Enigma, leading to a prolonged “blackout” of Naval Signals.
The film uses this as the premise and starts when Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott) suffers a total burnout and nervous breakdown due to a combination of work and a failed love affair with a fellow worker, Claire Romilly (Saffron Burrows). He asks Claire’s roommate, Hester Wallace (Kate Winslet), to give him more information so that he can try to find out why she has disappeared so suddenly. Meanwhile, everyone is panicking with the new cypher proving tricky to crack. Jericho and his team assemble to watch a convoy battle and note down all the messages that go back and forth, using these to further progress in decoding the German Naval Codes. The trail to find Claire grows more and more torturous, with dark hints about her working for the enemy or her “own side.”
The film is based on a Robert Harriss book, which had some of the actual messages decoded in 1943 as part of the overall story, leading to an incredible authenticity. The performances are fine.
The historical context is messed up by introducing a Polish traitor who is leaking the deciphered data for his own purpose – about the Katyn massacre – while all available records show that the Poles were fiercely and even rabidly anti-German and anti-Soviet. This caused a lot of heartburn among historians and Poles who derided the messing with history. That apart, it is a fine film, though a slow burn with an unusual twist in the end that leaves us with a feeling, that what we saw may not be the entire truth.
Unfortunately, it is available only on Amazon Prime USA and not in India.
Real History/ Historical Background – 3 out of 5
Script – 3 out of 5
Story – 4 out of 5
Direction – 4 out of 5
Photography – 4 out of 5
Total – 3.6 out of 5
Sekret Enigmy
Sekret Enigmy , a 1979 Polish film with English Subtitles, is free on YouTube, and a quick viewing shows the high Polish contribution to the overall unravelling of the Enigma and its ultra-secret
Tailpiece: 1. U – 571 – DON’T watch this travesty of history and waste your time. It’s more filmi than a Hindi film and has been the subject of bitter criticism from British Historians and even The British Parliament which questioned how on earth a truly all-British effort was made into a “filmi” American effort and showed the Americans capturing an Enigma machine intact from a submarine in 1943 while it had been already done by the British in 1941 when America was NOT at war.
2. The Bletchley Circle is an interesting TV Serial that ran for two seasons wherein a group of women who worked at Bletchley Park reassemble in the mid-1950s to crack a serial killer who is using codes and cyphers related to their work during World War 2. Season 1 is good while Season 2 is fairly okay.