Thursday, December 21, 2017

Overview of 2017

2017 turned out to be a very productive year. During 2017 I copied material from government archives in Germany, US and UK, I received a lot of material from the NSA’s freedom of information act office and I also benefitted from the release of interesting files that were uploaded to the NSA and CIA FOIA websites.

Some of my friends also shared important reports with me and I did my best to repay them by giving them some of my material.

1). Regarding original essays, I wrote the following:













2). I also added new information and pics in various older essays:

The American M-209 cipher machine (I added notes and information from various sources)

Wartime exploitation of Turkish codes by Axis and Allied powers (I added decoded Turkish diplomatic messages)

Soviet partisan codes and KONA 6 (I added information from the TICOM report I-26)

The Japanese FUJI diplomatic cipher 1941-43 (I rewrote parts and added information from TICOM I-181)

Japanese codebreakers of WWII (I added new links and uploaded a PDF file with the decoded US diplomatic messages)

Svetova Revoluce and the codes of the Czechoslovak resistance (I added information from the report ‘Dopady lúštenia šifrovacieho systému čs. londýnskeho MNO z rokov 1940-1945 na domáci odboj’ and the essay ‘STP cipher of the Czechoslovak in-exile Ministry of Defence in London during WWII’)

Decoding Prime Minister Chamberlain’s messages (I added information from TICOM DF-241 and from ‘British Intelligence in the Second World War- volume 2’)

Soviet cipher teleprinters of WWII (I added information from the TICOM reports DF-240 and DF-241)

Compromise of Soviet codes in WWII (I rewrote parts and added information from various sources)

The Slidex code (I added the British Air Support Signals Unit card No. 1)

3). I uploaded the following files and links:



American Cryptology During the Cold War 1945-1989, Book I (NSA website)






















4). I posted the following book presentations:





Sunday, December 17, 2017

Criticism by Nigel Askey of the ‘Myth of German superiority on the WW2 Eastern Front’


My opinion on this matter is given in the following comparisons:






Also note the following statements by Christopher Lawrence in ‘War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat‘, p48:

We conclude from the Kursk comparison that the Germans had a clear advantage in combat capability that showed itself in both offensive and defensive casualty effectiveness and mission accomplishment. The difference appears to be a factor of 3. This difference appears in the middle of 1943, after the Soviet Army had two years of wartime experience, was using experienced units, and had time to rest, train, and rebuild before the German offensive. Yet there was still a very clear performance difference between these armies’.

and in page 50:

One cannot help but note that the relative combat performance of the Israelis and the Arabs in 1956-73 was similar in disparity to that between the Germans and the Soviets in 1943’.

Understandably the truth hurts…

Additional information: Comments on “Deutsche Militärische Verluste” by Rüdiger Overmans

Friday, December 1, 2017

Compromise of State Department communications in WWII

In the course of WWII both the Allies and the Axis powers were able to gain information of great value from reading their enemies secret communications. In Britain the codebreakers of Bletchley Park solved several enemy systems with the most important ones being the German Enigma and Tunny cipher machines and the Italian C-38m. Codebreaking played a role in the Battle of the Atlantic, the North Africa Campaign and the Normandy invasion. 

In the United States the Army and Navy codebreakers solved many Japanese cryptosystems and used this advantage in battle. The great victory at Midway would probably not have been possible if the Americans had not solved the Japanese Navy’s JN25 code.

On the other side of the hill the codebreakers of Germany, JapanItaly and Finland also solved many important enemy cryptosystems both military and diplomatic. The German codebreakers could eavesdrop on the radio-telephone conversations of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, they could decode the messages of the British and US Navies during their convoy operations in the Atlantic and together with the Japanese and Finns they could solve State Department messages (both low and high level)  from embassies around the world.

Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States did not have impenetrable codes. In the course of WWII all three suffered setbacks from their compromised communications. One of the worst failures of US crypto security was the extensive compromise of State Department communications in the period 1940-44.