The modernization of German military communications: The German development and use of the Enigma machine and its impact on their U boat campaigns in World War II

The military in their attempt to more efficiently wage war are constantly looking to modernize their forces and the equipment that they used. The efforts nations and planners made towards modernizing their forces made them realize that they could not limit the changes to arms and tactics alone. The rapid pace of the modernization of the military and how they now fought their conflicts dictated that the planners improve their methods of communication to insure that their forces in the field would always be able to keep in contact with their leaders to share information about the situation. The age old standard of using secret code communications needed to be reexamined and brought up to date to keep pace with the modern military.;This research will demonstrate through a series of step by step developments just how this system was conceived, created and how the German Military, specifically the German Navy implemented it for use by their forces in the years prior to and during World War II. The intent of this paper is to show just how effective this method of communication was and the role it played in enabling the German Forces, again specifically the German Naval U Boat Forces to operate as they did. This paper will show the massive amount of time, manpower and energy which was devoted by the Allied powers to compromising this mechanical cipher system.;The German Military High Command realized during the latter portion of World War I that the present methods of communication used by the modern army needed to be as innovative as the times yet simple or basic enough so the method of communication did not impede the transmission of the message. The traditional methods of using secret codes was of limited value and no real match for the needs of the modern military force. They all had the basic flaw of requiring the presence of multiple copies of the code book to allow for translations. They realized that the loss of a code book might not be immediately evident and that any action taken to switch to a new code to insure against compromise would be time consuming and offer no clear guarantee of maintaining secure communications. They realized late in the war that they needed to implement a method of coded communications that freed them from the restrictions of a code book but somehow insured that if a copy of the message fell into enemy hands it would be unreadable. The end result of this quest for a better coded communication system was the vaunted Enigma Cipher Machine.