Testery
The Testery was a section at
Methods
The Testery used hand decrypting methods to break Tunny traffic. Within one year of its foundation, the Testery had deciphered 1.5 million texts by these methods. By the war's end in Europe in May 1945, the Testery had grown to nine cryptanalysts, a team of 24 ATS, a total staff of 118, organised in three shifts working round the clock.
The logical structure of the Tunny system was worked out by mathematician Bill Tutte (
After the Testery had been breaking Tunny for a year by hand, the Newmanry became active from July 1943 under Max Newman. Mathematicians in the Newmanry used machine methods to speed up breaking Tunny. Early on, a machine called Heath Robinson was produced, to help speed up one stage – breaking of the chi wheels, but the Robinson was slow and not reliable. In February 1944 a new machine called "Colossus" became operational; it was the world's first electronic computer. Colossus was designed and built in only ten months by Tommy Flowers of the G.P.O. (Post Office). This had far greater capacity and speed than the Robinson and so the whole breaking process became much faster. The Colossus was essential for making the very fast counts needed to work out the "de-chis", but the psi-wheels and motor-wheels were still broken by hand in the Testery.
The Testery was hand code-breaking Tunny for 12 months before the Robinson machine was produced and for 19 months before Colossus operated. With the help of the Newmanry, the Testery broke up to 90% of the traffic given to them to work on in the Colossus period.
The information provided by Tunny enabled the Allies to ascertain German movements, saving thousands of lives at critical junctures such as
The story of Enigma (declassified in the 1970s) is well known, but the story of Tunny, Germany's top-secret cipher machine, was only declassified in the 2000s. Most of the cryptanalysts in the Testery died before they could tell their stories. For the first time, on 25 October 2011, a BBC Timewatch programme titled Code-breakers: Bletchley Park’s Lost Heroes, about the Testery, Tunny, Bill Tutte and Tommy Flowers, was produced, featuring testimony from Jerry Roberts.[3]
List of senior executives and codebreakers on Tunny in the Testery
- Ralph Tester linguist and head of Testery (not a codebreaker)
- Peter Benenson codebreaker
- John Christie codebreaker
- Tom Colvill general manager
- Peter Edgerley codebreaker
- Peter Ericsson shift-leader, linguist and senior codebreaker
- Peter Hilton codebreaker and mathematician - joint appointment with the Newmanry
- Roy Jenkins codebreaker (later moved on to be a wheel setter)
- Victor Masters shift-leader (not a codebreaker)
- Donald Michie codebreaker - joint appointment with the Newmanry
- Denis Oswald linguist and senior codebreaker
- Jerry Roberts shift-leader, linguist and senior codebreaker
- Jack Thompson codebreaker
By the war's end in Europe in May 1945, the Testery had grown to nine cryptographers, a team of 24 ATS, a total staff of 118, organised in three shifts working round the clock.
See also
- Allen Coombs
- Tommy Flowers
- Bill Tutte
- Cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher
- Cryptanalysis of the Enigma
References
- ^ Kenyon 2019, p. 23.
- ^ Good, Michie & Timms 1945, 1 Introduction: 14 Organisation, 14A Expansion and Growth, (b) Three periods, p. 28.
- ^ "Code-Breakers: Bletchley Park's Lost Heroes". BBC. Retrieved 4 May 2015.
Bibliography
- ISBN 978-0-19-284055-4
- Gannon, Paul (2006), Colossus: Bletchley Park's Greatest Secret, London: Atlantic Books, ISBN 978-1-84354-331-2
- Sale, Tony (2001), Part of the "General Report on Tunny", the Newmanry History, formatted by Tony Sale (PDF), retrieved 20 September 2010, and a web transcript of Part 1 at: Ellsbury, Graham, General Report on Tunny With Emphasis on Statistical Methods, retrieved 3 November 2010
- ISBN 978-0-300-24357-4
External links
- "Lorenz: Hitler's "Unbreakable" Cipher Machine" on YouTube; 11:42 minutes (HTML5)
- "Bletchley codebreaker Raymond 'Jerry' Roberts appointed MBE" December 2012 on BBC Online; (Adobe Flash)