This film tells the story of Alan Turing as he works with a team of mathematicians to crack the Nazi’s Enigma code.
World War II is at its darkest, and Britain is struggling. Their only hope may lie in solving this Enigma code, which changes each day to one of with 159 million million million possibilities.
This is powerful film. Benedict Cumberbatch’s acting is extraordinary, utterly convincing us as we go through the ups and downs of his race to break Enigma, and his whole life. The ‘science’ of breaking Enigma isn’t explored quite as much as expected, with a lot of focus on Turing’s prosecution, and subsequent suicide, because of his homosexuality.
Enigma
The Enigma machine was what the Germans used to send encoded messages during World War II. Only another Enigma machine could decode a message sent on Enigma. Everything from weather forecasts to planned attacks on civilian ships was sent using Enigma machines – the Germans were convinced that Enigma could not be solved. It seemed impossible that anyone or anything could break a code which changed each day and had 159 million million million possibilities.
When the team at Bletchley Park cracked the code, it was kept a secret so that the Germans wouldn’t know. The British only countered German attack plans discovered from Enigma when it was absolutely necessary in their fight to win the war. This ensured that the Germans didn’t realise their code was no longer secret and switch to another – the team at Bletchley Park would have had to start again in their code breaking, and the chances of British victory in the war would have been depleted again.
Poland gave Britain a head start on breaking enigma. The country had been working to crack the code before the war started in 1939 – they partially broke the code. When Poland realised the scale of the threat from the Nazis, they decided to share their information on enigma with their allies, Britain and France.
Enigma was broken by the first programmable digital electronic computer, Colossus, which incorporated ideas by Alan Turing. All ten Colossus computers were later destroyed because Winston Churchill was afraid the advanced computers would fall into the hands of the Russians, during the Cold War.
Alan Turing created a crossword at one point to recruit new members for the code breaking team. You can try some of the actual questions from this by going to theimmitationgamemovie.com and clicking on ‘Crack the Code’ (bottom right).
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