Film snubs Ohioans' role breaking Enigma

Jim DeBrosse | Cincinnati

Jim DeBrosse is a former Enquirer film critic and co-author of "The Secret in Building 26," a nonfiction history of World War II codebreaking.

The box office hit "The Imitation Game" lionizes British genius Alan Turing and his team at Bletchley Park for cracking the Nazi's "unbreakable" Enigma code. What the production fails to mention is that Bletchley Park reached for help to America – and, more specifically, the National Cash Register Co. in Dayton – when they found themselves locked out of the U-boat Enigma code in 1942. The battle for the Atlantic hung in the balance.

The Enigma machine scrambled the letters of a message through a series of tumbling alphabetized rotors and crisscrossed wires to produce what seemed to be pure gibberish. On a three-rotor machine, the possible settings for a single letter of code was a staggering 150 million million million.

Even so, with the help of a clever British "cribbing" system for locating strings of words repeatedly used by the German military (such as the ubiquitous "Heil Hitler"), Turing's ingenious codebreaking machine enabled the British to read German messages on the day they were issued. But then in February 1942, the ever-wary German Navy added a fourth rotor to their Enigma. The expanded settings now required 50 to 100 days to break a single day of U-boat messages. Meanwhile, the undetected wolf packs were dispatching millions of tons of Allied shipping, as well as thousands of brave merchant seamen, to the ocean bottom.

Strapped for resources, the British swallowed their pride, and their worst security fears, by asking the "loose-tongued" Americans for help in building a more powerful codebreaking machine, dubbed a bombe. The U.S. Navy turned to NCR, where chief research engineer Joe Desch had designed the world's first electronic calculator using thousands of his own miniaturized gas tubes that could count a million pulses per second. NCR's Building 26 was turned into a top-secret factory with nearly a thousand workers.

Like Turing, whose war work led to the discovery and persecution of his homosexuality, Desch paid a steep personal price for his contribution. The son of a German immigrant mother, Desch was placed under 24-hour surveillance and ordered to cut off all contact with his family for the duration of the war. Like Turing as well, Desch toiled countless hours and yet was blamed by his Navy supervisors for Allied losses every day his machine was delayed.

Turing visited NCR in late December 1942 to offer his advice and to snoop on America's progress. Not surprisingly, he had little good to say about the Desch design. But when the NCR Bombe came on line in May of 1943, it was two to three times faster than the British machine and more reliable, thanks to U.S. Navy WAVES who patiently soldered thousands of delicate wiring connections.

The British ended up ordering 50 of the 120 machines for their own and by late 1943 ceded all the bombe work on the Enigma to the Americans. Historians estimate the combined Allied codebreaking effort, known as Ultra, shortened the war by at least two years and saved millions of lives.

While working on several Japanese codes in late 1944, Desch cracked and walked off the job. Although he was persuaded to return several weeks later, he never fully recovered from his breakdown. In 1947, in a secret ceremony, Desch was awarded the highest civilian honor for wartime service, the Presidential Medal of Merit. He died in 1987 at age 80, seven years before the project was declassified, and took his secret to the grave.

Turing and his team at Bletchley Park were, indeed, the theoretical masterminds behind breaking the Enigma. But let history also remember the valiant efforts of the codebreakers on this side of the Atlantic, just 54 miles up the road from Cincinnati.