Frozen desserts

Usage examples of bombes.

Even a message enciphered on a three-rotor enigma might take twenty-four hours to decode, as the bombes clattered their way through the billions of permutations.

Nothing is ever itself: that was the great guiding principle in the breaking of Enigma, the infinitesimal weakness that the bombes exploited.

And what's the point in having three hundred and sixty bombes if there's nothing to put in them?

Exactly the same story: not enough clerks, not enough typists, the factory at Letchworth that made the bombes - it used to make cash registers, of all things - short of parts, short of manpower .

Bonnyman wore mildew-coloured tweeds with a set of pens in his breast pocket and Jericho guessed he might be an engineer on the bombes.

The first three wheel-settings will be solved in the usual way on the existing bombes - that is, electro-mechanically.

But now another, secret England, secluded in the grounds of stately houses -Beaumanor, Gayhurst, Woburn, Adstock, Bletchley - an England of aerial farms and direction finders, clattering bombes and, soon, the glowing green and orange valves of Turing machines ('it should make the calculations a hundred times, maybe a thousand times as fast'}.

No fewer than twelve bombes - Logie had the personal guarantee of the Hut 6 bombe controller - would be placed at their disposal the moment they had a worthwhile menu to run.

Elsewhere in the hut a score of other bombes were churning away on other Enigma keys and the noise and the heat were how he imagined a ship's engine room might be.

Eight miles north of the Park, in a hut in a clearing in the forested estate of Gayhurst Manor, a clutch of tired Wrens near the end of their shift were being ordered to halt the three bombes running on Nuthatch (Berlin-Vienna-Belgrade Army administration), strip them and prepare them for Shark.

And at Wavendon Manor, three miles northeast, a similar story: four bombes in a dank and windowless bunker were abruptly pulled off Osprey (the low-priority Enigma key of the Organisation Todt) and their operators told to stand by for a rush job.

Maybe tomorrow evening or maybe on Thursday, the bombes would give them the Enigma settings for the day now ending.

And when they've got ten times the bombes we have - which won't take very long, I reckon, six months at the outside - what chance do we stand?

We must then analyze the new intercepts using the bombes, and figure out the day’s new codes.

These Typex machines—which merely do a mechanical deciphering operation—are a completely different thing from the bombes, which actually break the codes.