Code Breakers and Cyber Warfare 1708

I found this interesting. Despite the heroism of American and British soldiers, sailors and marines, the second World War was really won by code breakers. No doubt without those soldiers the war could not have been won, but the code breakers put the right forces in the right places at the right time.

The British forced a German submarine to the surface in 1940 and captured an enigma code machine and the documents to decode the messages that were sent by the German navy on it. The enigma was so well designed that it was impossible to decode messages sent with it, but with a machine and the decoding books they were able to know where the German subs were and when they would be attacking British merchant ships.

The American codebreakers had already figured out the Japanese naval codes before the war and knew every transmission the Japanese sent and could decode those messages. The reason they did not know about the attack on Pearl Harbor was because the attacking force assembled without any radio traffic and went all the way to Pearl without a single radio message sent. All of their other traffic  sent later in the war and was decoded immediately, allowing the US navy to be there and ready to respond to the threat.

The US marine corps used Native American code talkers throughout the Pacific theater to send messages. The native languages were unknown to the Japanese spies so they were never able to figure out the language and/or the codes they used.

Information has always been important, for advertising, campaigning, and winning wars. In 2016 the Russians used cyber war techniques to change the results of our American election process by planting fake news or exposing strategies available through the internet. The US used cyber warfare to disrupt the Iranian nuclear progress and destroy their centrifuges used in the nuclear process.