The British Typex cipher machine

In 1926, the British Government set up an Inter-Departmental Cypher Committee to investigate the possibility of replacing the book systems then used by the armed forces, the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office and the India Office with a cipher machine. It was understood that a cipher machine would be inherently more secure than the codebook system and much faster to use in encoding and decoding messages. Despite spending a considerable amount of money and evaluating various models by 1933 the committee had failed to find a suitable machine. Yet the need for such a device continued to exist and the Royal Air Force decided to independently fund such a project. The person in charge of their programme was Wing Commander Lywood, a member of their Signals Division. Lywood decided to focus on modifying an existing cipher machine and the one chosen was the commercially successful Enigma. Two more rotor positions were added in the scrambler unit and the machine was modified so that it could automatically print the enciphered text. This was done so these machines could be used in the DTN-Defence Teleprinter Network.

The new machine was called Typex (originally RAF Enigma with TypeX attachments). The first experimental model was delivered to the Air Ministry in 1934 and after a period of testing 30 more Mark I Typex machines were produced in 1937. The new model Typex Mark II, demonstrated in 1938, was equipped with two printers for printing the plaintext and ciphertext version of each message. It was this model that was built in large numbers and the first contract for 350 machines was signed in 1938. Typex production was slow during the war with 500 machines built by June 1940, 2,300 by the end of 1942, 4,078 by December 1943 and 5,016 by May 1944. By the summer of 1945 about 11.000 (8.200 Mk II and 3.000 Mk VI) had been built (1).

Update

I have added the National Institute for Defense Studies articles ‘Japanese intelligence and the Soviet-Japanese border conflicts in the 1930s’ and ‘Japanese Intelligence and Counterinsurgency during the Sino-Japanese War: North China in the 1940s’ in the sources of Japanese codebreakers of WWII.

Update

I added information from ‘Report on interrogation of Walter Schellenberg 27 June- 12 July 1945’ (which can be found in British national archives folder KV 2/95) in Intercepted conversations - Bell Labs A-3 Speech scrambler and German codebreakers, Reich security service and OKW/Chi reports and Allen Dulles and the compromise of OSS codes in WWII.

Also added information from the report E-Bericht Nr. 3/44 der NAASt 5 (Berichtszeit 1.4-30.6.44) in German intelligence on operation Overlord and The American M-209 cipher machine.