American 6813 Division History October 1945 Page 26

Tony Sale's Codes and Ciphers

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statistics.


Then too the theory of bulge algebra should be men-

tioned to future mathematicians if they read the archive. It is
a modern algebraic definition of the finite field of the Baudot code as
applied to the Fish machine and took over a year to develop. It finally
gave proof why so many of the motor runs for M3 had never given successful
results despite the fact that calculations were thought to be correct.


IV. HUT THREE


Nothing in signal intelligence quite corresponds to the layman's

vision of cloak-and-dagger skulduggery or brain-cudgelling lucubrations over
coffee and aspirin, but perhaps the nearest approach was Hut Three into
which poured the output of Hut Six, Block F and Sixta. Here a collection
of people, viewing the war always from the enemy standpoint, read all the
available German wireless correspondence and from it extracted that infor-
mation calculated to be useful for allied purposes in planning and prosecuting
the war.


Task of Hut Three. Upon receipt of decryptographed messages from

Hut Six and Block F the task of Hut Three consisted of sorting traffic into
various catagories of urgency to ensure that messages were processed with
requisite speed; emendation of cipher or code text to yield comprehensible
German text; translation of text into English; in collaboration with special-
ist consultants, making the necessary interpolation and annotations; prepara-
tions by military, naval or air advisers of signals to commands in the field
and/or to the ministry concerned containing the intelligence derived from
the processed decode. Less urgent signals did not receive this treatment
but were passed to commands or ministries by pouch after publication.


Throughout the war the Hut maintained the fiction that the in-

formation forwarded to commands or ministries was derived from a "source"
other than signal intelligence. "Coimmunications" (never "messages" or
"signals") were "found or seen by source". W/T evidence was never presented
as such
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