May 9th 1941, North Atlantic, South of Iceland - The sea is gun metal grey, the sky sunless. Dense smoke belches into the air from the funnels of three ships – a dot of black in a cinereous morass. The chase is coming to an end. Two claps of thunder under the lapping waves – the coup de gras. One hundred and twenty metres below the surface Fritz-Julius Lemp, Kapitänleutnant of the Type IXB German submarine U-110 barks a final order over the sound of buckling metal and the hiss of steam from ruptured pipes: “Last stop, everybody out!. As he herds his crew to safety, petrified radio operator Heinz Wilde sends a final transmission: “The U-boat is sinking”. With a third of his crew lying dead in the bowels of the crippled vessel, Lemp assumes his boat will be another piece of furniture in Davy Jones Locker within minutes. Oh, Captain Lemp, never assume. Although seriously damaged, U-110 will sink the following day - enough time for the vessel to be boarded and ransacked. And it is there, in the diesel-spattered corridors of that wounded sea beast, that a Royal Navy boarding party makes a series of war-changing discoveries: an intact Enigma machine, its cipher keys and accompanying code books. Ferried back to an international team of code breakers at Bletchley Park in Britain, these materials will enable the Allies to read U-boat traffic for weeks, and will facilitate the breaking of new keys that will, in time, help to defeat the Axis powers in “The Battle of the Atlantic”. Today, 73 years ago, the foundation was laid for the world’s first computer hacking to take place, something that is costing the global economy up to $400 billion a year and will sting the oil and gas industry by up to $1.87 billion by 2018. Who’d have thought that it would have all started from a little wooden box full of cogs…
Posted on: Fri, 16 May 2014 08:18:59 +0000
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