During WWII the Germans used an encryption machine called the Enigma machine to transmit coded

messages. An Enigma machine allows for billions and billions of ways to encode a message, making it
incredibly difficult for other nations to crack German codes during the war – for a time the code seemed
unbreakable.
As war broke out, a young mathematician by the name Alan Turing went to work for the British
Cryptanalytic headquarters at Bletchley Park. The people at Bletchley Park worked 24 hours a day to break a
variety of German codes and give the Allies prior knowledge of German intentions to be used on the
battlefields, skies and oceans and “see” inside the German Reich to try and understand the workings of the
murderous regime.
Eventually, Turing and his team elaborated upon the early computer designed by Poles working to
break the German Enigma machine codes. The researchers exploited a few weaknesses in the implementation
of the Enigma code and gained access to German codebooks, thus allowing them to design a machine called a
Bombe machine, which helped crack the most challenging version of Enigma.
As the war progressed, and the cyphers became more complex, Turing and the team at Bletchley
invented more complicated machines to rapidly decrypt the German communications. At its peak, Bletchley
was decrypting 84,000 communications each month.
Some historians believe that the cracking of Enigma was the single most important victory by the
Allied powers during WWII. Using information that they decoded from the Germans, the Allies were able to
prevent many attacks. However, to avoid Nazi suspicion that they had insight on German communications,
the Allies had to allow some attacks to be carried out despite the fact that they had the knowledge to stop
them.
Though many worked on this problem and others, without Alan Turing, the solution to the problem
might have taken much longer (time which the allies did not have), or may not have even happened at all. His
work undoubtedly shortened the war and saved many lives. It also laid the groundwork for the technological
age we live in today. For his work during the war, Turing was awarded the order of the British Empire by the
King, but this, like his work, remained secret for years.
As you may know, Turing was gay, and in the decades before its “de-criminalization” in 1967,
homosexuality was persecuted and prosecuted in England as well as many other nations. After WWII, and as
the Cold War began to heat up, Turing was arrested for “gross indecency”. Taking a guilty plea, Turing was
offered prison or conditional probation. He took probation. As a condition, he had to take large doses of
“hormone therapy”. The treatment had terrible side-effects on his health and wellbeing.
On June 8th, 1952, Turing’s housekeeper found his body, a half-eaten apple which was never checked
for poison, and a “To Do” list was by his bedside. The official cause of death was suicide, though many have
cast doubt upon his conclusion.
In the years following his death, Turing’s work became more and more recognized by the public and
a groundswell of support to rectify the injustice of Turing’s life came to the fore. In 2009, after intense
lobbying, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom made an apology for the treatment of Turing but he was
not officially pardoned. In 2012 many influential people including Stephen Hawking lobbied the UK
government to officially pardon Turing. In 2013 The Queen gave Turing a Royal pardon. The Prime Minister
David Cameron said: “His actions saved countless lives. He also left a remarkable national legacy through his
substantial scientific achievements, often being referred to as the father of modern computing.”
In June, 2019, the British government announced that Turing’s likeness would be placed on the 50-
pound note. The note contains an appropriately enigmatic quote from Turing: “This is only a foretaste of
what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be.”