The news has been announced that Jerry Roberts, one of the Bletchley Park code-breakers has passed away: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26759034#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa My he rest in peace!
RIP. Can't be many, if any, cryptographers left now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcaHpvznC7g#t=360
Jerry Roberts - obituary Jerry Roberts was a Bletchley Park codebreaker who cracked Hitler’s secret messages and warned of an attack on Kursk Captain Jerry Roberts Photo: Bletchley Park Trust/PA Wire Find out if anything is affecting your credit rating. Check your free credit score with Experian here. Advertisement 7:01PM GMT 27 Mar 2014 Comments Jerry Roberts, who has died aged 93, was one of a small group of Bletchley Park codebreakers who read Hitler’s messages to his generals, providing unprecedented details of the German preparations for the D-Day landings. The German High Command’s teleprinter messages, which were broken in part with the help of Colossus, the world’s first large-scale electronic digital computer, also provided the German plans for the Battle of Kursk, now seen as the turning point of the war. “I can remember myself breaking messages about Kursk,” Roberts recalled. “We were able to warn the Russians that the attack was going to be launched and the fact that it was going to be a pincer movement. We had to wrap it all up and say it was from spies, that we had wonderful teams of spies, and other sources of information. We were able to warn them what army groups were going to be used, and most important, what tank units were going to be used.” Provided with the information by the British, the Red Army pre-empted the German attack, launching an all-out assault that destroyed the German forces aligned against them in what led to a Soviet advance that did not stop until it reached Berlin. Related Articles Mavis Batey 13 Nov 2013 Sarah Baring 15 Feb 2013 Keith Batey 02 Sep 2010 Peter Calvocoressi 05 Feb 2010 Raymond Clarke Roberts (always known as Jerry) was born in Wembley on November 18 1920. His father was a pharmacist, his mother the organist in the local chapel. He was educated at Latymer Upper School, Hammersmith, before studying German and French at University College, London. His ambition was to join the Foreign Office, but his German professor, Leonard Willoughby, who had been a leading member of the Admiralty’s First World War code-breaking unit Room 40, put him forward for “work of a secret kind” which could not be discussed in advance. Roberts found himself facing an enigmatic recruitment process at a War Office building just off Trafalgar Square during which he was asked by an anonymous major if he played chess. When he responded in the affirmative, the major asked if he could also “tackle crosswords”. Another nod of the head was sufficient to see him sent to the codebreakers’ “War Station” at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, where John Tiltman, the chief cryptographer, recruited him into his research section, warning him that “absolute silence must be preserved” about what happened there. Queen Elizabeth II speaks with code breaker Captain Jerry Roberts during a visit to Bletchley Park in 2011 Roberts was initially put to work breaking the Double Playfair hand cipher used by German police troops operating on the Eastern Front. The deciphered messages revealed the early stages of what would become known as the Holocaust, with German generals seemingly vying with each other to tell Berlin about the tens of thousands of Jews their men were killing. Churchill requested a special series of reports on the atrocities and, despite the danger that it might lead to improved German cipher security and hinder Bletchley’s successes, publicly denounced the killings as “a crime without a name”. The team working on the police messages was headed by Ralph Tester; and in July 1942 Tester and his team were put to work on a new problem — the enciphered teleprinter messages being sent between Hitler and his generals. German teleprinter messages had first been intercepted in the second half of 1940, but little had been done with them until it became clear, in late 1941, that they were being used more frequently. The messages were enciphered with the Lorenz SZ40 system, which had two sets of five cipher wheels, making it even more complex than the most difficult of the Enigma ciphers, which had one set of four. Tiltman looked at the early messages, trying to find a way into them, initially without success. In August 1941, however, a German operator sent the same message twice on the same settings, shortening some of the text in the second message to save time. This allowed Tiltman a way in; and in an extraordinary piece of code breaking he worked out the texts of the messages, giving a stream of 4,000 plain text letters and their cipher equivalents which might help to reconstruct the operation of the Lorenz machine. For two months the research section tried without success to use Tiltman’s decrypt to break the enciphered teleprinter messages, which were code-named Fish by the codebreakers. Then, in October, it was given to the young chemistry graduate Bill Tutte. Jerry Roberts in later life “He used to sit staring into the middle distance, twirling a pencil about in his fingers,” Roberts recalled. “I used to wonder whether he was getting anything done. My goodness, he was.” In a stroke of genius, Tutte managed to find a way in, allowing the research section to reconstruct the Lorenz machine. The combined efforts of Alan Turing and Tutte were described in an internal GCHQ history as “one of the outstanding successes of the war”, not least because of the high standard of intelligence the Fish messages produced. The teleprinter links ran between all the major German front line headquarters and Hitler’s command posts in Berlin or at the Wolf’s Lair, his forward command post for the Eastern Front at Rastenburg in East Prussia. Tester and his team, including Roberts, by now commissioned into the Intelligence Corps, were put to work on breaking the Fish messages on a regular basis in July 1942. “The people the messages were going to and coming from would be given at the beginning of the message,” Roberts recalled. “So you would have General so-and-so sending to Army HQ in Berlin.” The Testery, as it was known, began with Roberts and five others actually breaking the messages, but grew to be 118-strong, including among its numbers Peter Benenson, who later founded Amnesty International, and Roy Jenkins, who went on as a Labour politician to become Chancellor of the Exchequer and was subsequently Chancellor of the University of Oxford. Jerry Roberts receiving his MBE from the Queen in 2013 One of its early members was Max Newman, who had been Turing’s tutor at Cambridge. Newman realised that one part of the code-breaking process for the Fish ciphers could be done by the kind of machine Turing had described in their discussions. That belief led to the creation, by the GPO telecommunications engineer Tommy Flowers, of Colossus, which greatly speeded up the breaking of the Fish ciphers ahead of the D-Day landings, when the codebreakers were able to read details of Hitler’s conversations with Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, the German commander in France. “Some were signed by Hitler,” Roberts said. “I can remember myself deciphering at least one message − he called himself: 'Adolf Hitler, Führer’. I suppose I should have been unhappy that I wasn’t fighting the true fight. But this never bothered me. One knew that this was immensely more important than any other single contribution that you could make as a soldier, or as an officer.” After the war Roberts spent two years in Germany with the War Crimes Investigation Unit before being demobilised in 1947 and beginning a career in market research which would take him all over the world. In 1970 he set up his own companies, working for a number of high-profile clients including British Gas, Reebok, DuPont, American Airlines, Chrysler and Holiday Inn. Roberts sold his companies in 1993 and retired. Two years later, he married Mei Li, an artist and book illustrator. He spent his later years campaigning for greater recognition for Flowers and Tutte, which led to a BBC documentary on the latter’s work breaking the Fish ciphers, and for the preservation of Bletchley Park. He was appointed MBE in the 2013 New Years Honours “for services to the work of Bletchley Park and to code breaking”. He is survived by Mei and their daughter, and by a son and two daughters of two previous marriages. Jerry Roberts, born November 18 1920, died March 25 2014 www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10727735/Jerry-Roberts-obituary.html
good day ritsonvaljos.sm.26 march,07:31pm.re:jerry roberts, blechley park.he saved many lives by his code craking,may he rest in peace.regards bernard85
