tartare (#20), [Wiki].
Bit late for BoB, I'm afraid.

Danny.

I stand corrected Danny - thank you.

The Bombes were more directly responsible, as the important traffic telling where U-boats would be, were largely sent by naval Enigma cipher. Britain made several Bombes to break the Enigma codes, then the US helped out with several HUNDRED high-speed bombes built by the NCR company. These ran about 60 times faster than the British version, and by using dozens of machines in parallel, they could solve the arrangement of rotors used at the beginning of the day very quickly. Once that was determined, it did not change for a whole day, and then the machines could be run individually to crack different messages.

If you knew where the U-boats would be, you could either try to sink them, or just route the ocean convoys around them. Since the U-boards were slow, and REALLY slow when running deeply submerged, the ships didn't have to divert very far to avoid the U-boats.

The British used strategies to avoid revealing the messages were being cracked. When they knew a sub would be meeting a tender to refuel, they'd send a patrol plane over that spot, so the crews could not help but know they'd been seen. The Germans must have thought the Brits had an amazing number of patrol planes scouring the oceans for them.

The Colossus was designed to crack the VERY much more difficult Lorentz SZ42 cipher, the Brits called it "Tunny". This was used to send much higher level messages from/to the OKW (German high command) and was of much greater strategic importance, as it revealed planning for the next several months.

Jon

Secret Weapon
 

Not one 'secret weapon' but a combination of many that made the 'system' work.
Often overlooked is the humble telephone which was responsible for most of the messages from sighting (Radar and Observer Corps) right through to the telephone in the dispersal hut.
Probably the Telephones finest hour !!!

Hello Stanmore I have some trade for you

A great confirmation of this is the Kenley ops room painting, (there all on the phone)

The really clever thing about Dowding's version of UKADGE was that it networked the vox and telex telecomms in a way which was actually a precursor if the internet.

The real secret of that part of the war, though, was the fact that the Luftwaffe's intel was crap.

Luftwaffe fighter comms were also very poor, both A/A and A/G. The arrogant Galland had decided that they didn't need radios at all in the Bf109 and could rely on wing-waggling etc. But eventually some RT became available, although of short range and interference prone - RT discipline wasn't very good either as few pilots had any RT training. Frequently the escorting fighters couldn't talk to the bomber formations they were accompanying, as they were on different frequencies, so couldn't warn them of any threats.

A good job for Britain that the Luftwaffe's comms were so poor during the Battle.

I though the secret weapon was the Boulton Paul Defiant?

Probably more Hitler at Dunkirk and Goring during the BoB?

When you look at the reporting and control system the RAF had in place, the first of its kind anywhere, you can't help but feel a little sorry for the Germans in trying to tackle it.

Maybe.

Danny4C:
Thanks for the correction on the dates of the Chipmunk, but I was trying to be ironic!

Before he designed the Chipmunk its designer Wsiewolod Jakimiuk had designed the PZL fighters that the Polish air force fought the Luftwaffe with in September 1939. So at least it does have a fighter pedigree.

pettinger93 (#29),

Sorry ! - I was being too pedantic (shouldn't have joined if I can't take a joke !)

Danny.

The Spitfire pictured above the Chipmunk photo is a later Griffon-powered example too. A rather more subtle error though!

Perhaps the secret weapon was the received wisdom of taking Met. forecasts with a large large pinch of salt.

The suckers' gap was surely a BoB construct.

At least we had the advantage over Germany of much of the "weather" moving from west to east, but many a forecast has been ruined by taking too much notice of Irish coastal actuals.

I think the integrated air defence system which Dowding put together of radar, observers, resilient comms and centralised battle management was the key not just any part of it. Remarkably far sighted and un-British , presumably why he was sacked as soon as the threat passed.

Not sure how it resembled the internet in any way other than resilience through redundancy which is pretty much a feature of all types of critical application telecom networks.

Did Bletchley play any part in BoB, I have not really ever seen any reference to it , was it too early in the war or was the Bletchley operation focused solely on the Atlantic , I assume the Luftwaffe had an enigma variation !

pb you may well be right as the first working bombe did not get up and running until the autumn of 1940. However Bletchley Park did play an important role in collecting and collating Sig. Int. from the various signals intercept units. The Germans were not good at coding a lot of low level traffic and often used plain language. Orders to specific airfields in France giving no's and type of aircraft, plus bomb loads were often transmitted in plain in the late afternoon of the day before the raid. This information was of significant value to Fighter Command, so much so that perhaps only Dowding was trusted with it.

Hear, hear!

I believe, and stand to be corrected, that another advantage to the RAF was the fact that the Me109 had a very short range, therefore little combat time. Add to that the fact that any German airman who bailed out was a prisoner, whereas an RAF pilot was back to ops pretty quickly. The same applied to damaged aircraft; the German was a total loss, whereas the British ones could be recovered/repaired.

The Luftwaffe had minimal anti-shipping capability in 1940; certainly no torpedo aircraft to speak of. As for bombers, the RN lost only four destroyers from air attack during the entire Dunkirk evacuation. See here for the RN's myriad MTBs, MGBs, armed trawlers and drifters, minesweepers, destroyers, cruisers etc., that would have created mayhem for any German landing craft, towed lighters and river barges:Their wakes alone would have been enough to capsize most troop carrying vessels and I doubt they would have presented clear targets to aircraft when mixing it with the invasion force. Most of the German surface fleet had already been sunk during the Battles of Narvik.

REPULSE and POW were sunk off Malaya in Dec 1941, over a year after the Battle of Britain and more than two years after the start of the Battle of the Atlantic. These vessels were totally bereft of air cover when they were saturated by Japanese aircraft which had taken a leaf out of the Fleet Air Arm's book and specialised in attacking ships. For all that, the two capital ships managed to evade over 40 of the 49 torpedoes launched against them and as few as six (but possibly eight) found their target (link).

Interestingly, the initial wave of 25 Japanese aircraft dropped a total of 33 bombs (17 x 500 kg and 16 x 250 kg) on the two ships but only achieved a single hit with a 250 kg bomb. This started a small fire on the hangar deck of REPULSE. Several high level bombers also straddled the capital ships during the later torpedo attacks but, again, only achieved a single hit with a bomb that fell among the wounded gathered in POW's hangar and caused extensive casualties. Neither of these bombs succeeded in penetrating the ships' armour.

Nine other Japanese aircraft mistook one of the three escorting destroyers for a battleship. They each dropped a 500 kg armour-piercing bomb but all missed their target. The destroyer was left unscathed and subsequently helped rescue the survivors from the battleships. In the absence of RAF air cover, a supporting carrier might have made all the difference, especially as the Japanese bombers had no fighter escort owing to the distances involved.

Pax,

Did the Swedes provide any intercepted Enigma Messages with the UK during the early years of the War?

Their Intelligence Service had broken the German Codes by 1940 due primarily to the work of Arne Buerling.

His work was simply amazing....as he did it using his genius math skills and some pencil and paper work.


I have read that Bletchley was reading German Air Force Codes in mid-1940.

Of all the comments at the bottom of the article, I found this one to be the most amusing/pertinent:

Shame the Daily Mail supported the other side.