The British Bombe

The original document is held in The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) 8601 Adelphi Road, College Park, Maryland.

NR 857 CBCB28 1153A BRITISH bOMBE

This Report was written by members of the United States 6812th Division seconded to Eastcote in North London, England to operate one wing of Turing Bombes, the machines that helped break Enigma.

It was found in the National Archive by Tony and Margaret Sale on the last day of their visit in November 1996 and Margaret slaved over a photo copier to copy 120 pages and 50 photographs before rushing to catch the flight home.

Having this detailed Report and its photographs was one of the factors in making the rebuild of a Bombe a reality.

Formatted for HTML and PDF by Tony Sale © January 2002

Note: These pages should be read only as a convenient web-based overview of the document and not as a definitive edition. As you will be able to see from those portions of the document left as GIF scans, the report was typed, informally with some characters blurred. Handwritten marginal notes were added.

A technique has been developed using Optical Character Reading, and translation into HTML format, which attempts to display each page as closely to the original as possible.

The HTML page numbering corresponds to the physical pages in the archive document. The Report page numbers start after the indexes and are, in general, five pages behind the HTML page numbers in Chapter 1 and eight to twelve pages behind in Chapter 2 and fifteen behind in Chapter 3.

This first upload is just Chapter 1. (45 pages)



Click here for PDF version of the first Chapter (1.2Mbyte!!!)



The second upload is of Chapter 2. (25 pages)


Click here for PDF version of the second Chapter (900Kbyte!!!)


The third upload is of Chapter 3. (20 pages)


Click here for PDF version of the third Chapter (700Kbyte!!!)

Go to document start or browse using the original chapter index

Back to the index page for Tony Sale's Codes and Ciphers in the Second World War.

This page was originally created by the late Tony Sale, the original curator of the Bletchley Park Museum, and Secretary of the Bletchley Park Heritage Society.