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+--- Thread: Today's Weird News Item (/showthread.php?tid=9975)
Today's Weird News Item - Bob Schroeck - 09-17-2009
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... h-spy.html]JRR Tolkien trained as a British spy.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
- robkelk - 09-17-2009
"Tolkien. JRR Tolkien."
Nah, doesn't have the right ring to it...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
- DHBirr - 09-17-2009
"Spy" is going a little far for a code-breaker. I was in Intel during my Army time, and nobody would've called me a spy
except my sister (a college professor and therefore a Communist fellow-traveller) and anybody hostile to the U.S. who'd captured me. Well, yes, there was
that time in East Berlin, but that was unofficial and strictly amateurish.... Note that if he had worked in Bletchley Park, he likely
would've done more damage to the Nazis' operations than many an actual spy.
-----
Big Brother is watching you. And damn, you are so bloody BORING.
- Black Aeronaut - 09-18-2009
Eh, I'm not at all surprised, considering that he created and entire language to give characters in his books more depth.
Oh, and this simply does not ring true to me.
Quote: Its staff - which included Alan Turing, the gay codebreaker - would later decipher the 'impenetrable' Enigma machines.Uhm... Sorry, the USN was happily intercepting U-Boats and busting up their infamous Wulf packs long before Enigma was broken. Thing is, U-Boat
This saved Britain from German conquest by allowing the Navy to intercept and destroy Hitler's U-Boats.
captains communicated their positions to their corresponding packmates on a religious frequency - that gave them the coordination that made their
attacks so devastating. But the USN twigged to it and, even though they couldn't understand the encoded communications, they listened in and
triangulated the sources, thus rendering a submarine's greatest asset moot.
Later on, the breaking of Enigma did help out the war effort, but the Navy was winning on their front long before that. In fact, it was the USN, again, that
was the greatest contributor to the effort to break Enigma in taking a German U-Boat. Intact. Codebooks and all. And killing only two of the crew.
I'm not certain if Mr. Turing had much to do with that, but if he did, I'm certain that the codebooks recovered by the USN was the primer he needed.
- Jinx999 - 09-18-2009
Only if you get your knowledge of WWII from Holywood movies.
IIRC, the first work and captured Enigma machines were by the Poles in 1939. (Looking at Wikipedia - apparantly 1932 - they gave the results to Britain in
'39)
The Naval capture of a U-boat was the U-110 , captured by the Royal Navy in May 1941. You're confusing the film U-571 with real history. According to
Wikipedia the US Navy did capture an Enigma machine in 1944, by which time we were already routinely reading their traffic.
"It ain't what you don't know that trips you up, it's what you think you know that ain't so."
- Star Ranger4 - 09-18-2009
That 1944 capture would be the capture of the U-505, the first US naval boarding action in over 100 years. and yes, by then enigma was a mostly open book,
though Capt Gallery of the Guadacanal ( the escort carrier who's task group made the capture) didnt know that. However, let us not forget that while you
can break the enigma coding, unless you know what the code groups mean (ie, meet me at grid square x-y) it still doesnt do you much good. For that you really
want the codebooks. and both the 110 and the 505 captures gave them the keys to what the decoded messages MEANT, because the germans changed what meant what on
a fairly regular basis, one of the other common tricks in coding messages. this means that even if someone cracked both the cyper and the code, next week when
we go to code b that info is useless.
Just how much and where credit should go to the codebreakers and other dirty tricks departments is a hot enough topic that it qualifies for the politics and
other hot topics forum...
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children
- Black Aeronaut - 09-18-2009
All the same, between using their coms against them by triangulation, and the RSN's innovative Hedghog system, U-Boat crews had relatively short life
expectancies towards the end of the war.
- Star Ranger4 - 09-18-2009
Yup. Eat drink and be merry, for tommorow we sail and probobly wont return.
There are many different opinons as to who really won the battle of the atlantic.
Mine? No one 'group' but rather all of them, working in concert. The codebreakers and Radio intercepts warned of where and when. Naval assets did the
fighting, and the merchant sailors? the hardest job of all... to be willing to keep sailing into that cauldron, especially in 1941-1943 when the U boats were
at their most successful. No one group can take credit. They all had to work together to pull this off and we should remember that when looking at it later.
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children
- Jinx999 - 09-18-2009
Everyone in German uniform had a fairly short life expectency towards the end of the war. That's what winning a war by superior firepower means. What was
important was the early and middle parts of the war, when it looked like Germany was winning and Britain was efficively under siege. Unless you think that
America could have lauched D-day all the way across the Atlanntic, without being able to stage in Britain.
- DHBirr - 09-19-2009
An Australian writer did a book, The Big One, later expanded into a series, in which the U.S. couldn't stage in Britain
because Lord Halifax had capitulated to the Nazis in 1940. So instead, we sent our troops to fight beside the Russians -- 1.3 million Americans dead on the
Russian front -- until 1947 when we were ready to launch a massive strategic nuclear bombardment with B-36 Peacemakers. There's no longer a Germany in that
world.
Edit: fixed grammatical error
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Big Brother is watching you. And damn, you are so bloody BORING.
- Evil Midnight Lurker - 09-19-2009
Ah yes, that's the author of Armageddon?! and Pantheocide. TBO also had its start serialized on Stardestroyer.
--Sam
"This is graveness."