How WWII Was Won, and Why CS Students Feel Unappreciated

Observations of the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe (May 8, 1945) included remembrances of such searing events as the struggle on Omaha Beach on D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, and at least some recognition of the enormous contribution made by the Russian people to the defeat of Fascism. Yet in all this, I suspect the role of the first "high-performance computing" capabilities of the Allies--known as Ultra in Britain, Magic in the U.S.--will receive too little attention. The truth of the matter is that the ability to hack into Axis communications made possible many Allied successes in the field, at sea, and in the air. Alan Turing and other "boffins" at Britain's Bletchley Park facility built the machine--a much-improved version of a prototype developed by the Poles in the interwar period--that had sufficient computing power to break the German Enigma encoding system developed by Arthur Scherbius. The Enigma machine was a typewriter-like device with three rotors, each with an alphabet of its own, so each keystroke could create 17,576 possible meanings (26 x 26 x 26).