When a German U-Boat Sent a Message That Made No Sense for 64 Years

In November 1942, a German U-boat tapped out a short Enigma signal into the North Atlantic. The Royal Navy copied down every letter and could not read a single word of it. That message stayed unreadable for sixty-four years. When it was finally broken in 2006, the captain who sent it had been dead for four months. This is the true story of U-264, Kapitänleutnant Hartwig Looks, and one of the last German naval Enigma messages of the Second World War to give up its secret. It runs through the "Shark" blackout of 1942, when the German navy slid a fourth rotor into its Enigma machines and blinded Bletchley Park for ten months while the U-boat wolf packs tore through the convoys of the Battle of the Atlantic. It runs through the night three sailors from the destroyer HMS Petard climbed down into a sinking U-boat off Port Said to seize the codebooks that would crack the cipher, and the two of them who never came back up. And it ends with a German software engineer, a network of idle home computers, and a volunteer project called the M4 Project that finished a job the codebreakers of Hut 8 had started six decades earlier. What the decoded message actually said, after the lives it cost and the effort it took to recover, is the part almost no one sees coming. IN THIS VIDEO Why the four-rotor "Shark" naval Enigma went dark to Bletchley Park in February 1942 The capture of U-559 and the codebooks that ended the blackout, and the George Cross awarded to Tony Fasson and Colin Grazier How U-264 and Hartwig Looks fought through the worst months of the Battle of the Atlantic The M4 Project and how thousands of volunteer computers cracked a four-rotor Enigma message in 2006 What the recovered signal contained, and why it was worth so much to recover so little SOURCES & FURTHER READING Ralph Erskine's work on naval Enigma and the original intercepts published in the journal Cryptologia (1996) The M4 Project (Stefan Krah), distributed-computing decryption of three Kriegsmarine M4 signals, 2006-2013 uboat.net service records for U-264 and U-559 David Kahn, "Seizing the Enigma" Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, "Enigma: The Battle for the Code" If you want more lesser-known stories from the codebreaking war and the Battle of the Atlantic, subscribe. #WW2 #Enigma #BattleOfTheAtlantic #UBoat #History