The first major job of the newly formed Tunny section (see 14A (b)) was to
break the August wheels. The indicator method described in 42E was applied and
for the first 10 days the traffic responded well, except for the bad corruption
caused by exceptionally poor intercept conditions. But from the 11th onwards only
a very few messages seemed to produce the stereotyped openings. By working only
from those messages which were using the regular and predictable openings progress
was made until it became clear that the others opened with German words, - the
padding sentences or quatsch which continued as the invariable preliminary to the
message text throughout Fish history. It was often possible to predict the next
letter of partially obtained words and thus progress was made, using much more
material than required in previous months, until a X5 had been built up by the
time the Germans sent a depth on the 27th.
To meet the introduction of quatsch, research into German plain language in
its teleprinter impulse form was carried out, and it was thought that the
indicator method was still possible though immensely slow and difficult. But the
findings were never put to the test for on September 5th a depth was sent which
provided easily enough key to break the wheels on the recently evolved Turing
method (see below 43B). At this stage the position of only one indicator on each
wheel was known (that of the depth) whereas the indicator method had enabled a
number of indicators to be placed on the wheels as soon as the full patterns were
obtained. The initial stage of setting individual messages (for method see 42A )
was therefore more difficult. The last month of the indicator era, October,
was broken from a near depth.
43B. TURINGERY.
The original method of key breaking clearly became useless as soon as the
Germans introduced the condition ab = 1/2. So research was done by A.M. Turing on
the key from which the July wheels had been broken by the indicator-cum-depth
method, and a method was evolved which produced the correct wheels. The
introduction of QSN's (later QEP's) in November 1942 dealt the death blow to the
indicator method and left Turingery as the only known way of breaking wheels.
Turingery introduced the principle that key differenced at one, now called
Delta-K , could yield information unobtainable from ordinary key. This Delta
principle was to be the fundamental basis of nearly all statistical methods of
wheel-breaking and setting. Many improvements and refinements of technique have
since been made enabling very much shorter lengths of key to be broken than the
500 or more required by original Turingery. The technique of modern wheel-
breaking from key is given in Ch.26. The original method is described
here. The description gives a certain amount of rationalisation of the process
which could certainly not have been given at the time since the principle involved
had not been studied and understood to the extent that they were later.
The property used throughout is simply P(Delta-PSI'(i,j) = .) = b or in
different terms, Delta-K(i,j) - b --> Delta-X(i,j) .
Delta-K is written out in ink on squared paper. The 5 rows