The Bombe: The Machine that Defeated Enigma

by Dermot Turing

During the Second World War, the German Armed Forces sent thousands of messages encrypted by the Enigma machine every day, converting crucial strategic information. To crack this seemingly unbreakable cipher, the Allies turned to an electromechanical machine to do the job - the Bombe.

The Turing-Welchman Bombe was a marvel of engineering and ingenuity. The first bombe was put into operation in August 1940, and by the end of the war more than 200 of these machines had been built. By uncovering the daily 'key', they allowed as many as 5,000 messages to be deciphered each day.

This remarkable guide explains how the Bombe works in easy-to-understand language and walks you through the entire codebreaking process. With helpful diagrams and photographs throughout, The Bombe is the essential guide to the machine that changed the course of the war.

64 pages, Paperback

About the author

British solicitor and author. Nephew of Alan Turing.

Reviews

[Joe Hirsch · Rating 5 out of 5]

We were able to visit Bletchley Park and the National Computing museum in June of 2024 and I became fascinated with how the bombe really worked. The museum helped a lot with tons of interactive boards about cribbing and the like. But this book really brought it altogether. While most of the information is still over my head (I am NOT a mathematician or that smart), this book really helped me get closer to grasping how this ingenious device really worked.