WWII Code-Breaker Dies At Age 95 (washingtonpost.com) 120
An anonymous reader quotes an article from the Washington Post:
Jane Fawcett, a British code-breaker during World War II who deciphered a key German message that led to the sinking of the battleship Bismarck -- one of Britain's greatest naval victories during the war -- died May 21 at her home in Oxford, England. She was 95... Fluent in German and driven by curiosity, Mrs. Fawcett -- then known by her maiden name, Jane Hughes -- found work at Britain's top-secret code-breaking facility at Bletchley Park, about 50 miles northwest of London. Of the 12,000 people who worked there, about 8,000 were women. Bletchley Park later became renowned as the place where mathematician Alan Turing and others solved the puzzle of the German military's "Enigma machine," depicted in the 2014 film "The Imitation Game"...
The sinking of the Bismarck marked the first time that British code-breakers had decrypted a message that led directly to a victory in battle... Mrs. Fawcett's work was not made public for decades. Along with everyone else at Bletchley Park, she agreed to comply with Britain's Official Secrets Act, which imposed a lifetime prohibition on revealing any code-breaking activities.
Meanwhile, volunteers from The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park finally tracked down an original keyboard from the Lorenz machine used to encode top-secret messages between Hitler and his general. It was selling on eBay for 10 pounds, advertised as an old machine for sending telegrams.
The sinking of the Bismarck marked the first time that British code-breakers had decrypted a message that led directly to a victory in battle... Mrs. Fawcett's work was not made public for decades. Along with everyone else at Bletchley Park, she agreed to comply with Britain's Official Secrets Act, which imposed a lifetime prohibition on revealing any code-breaking activities.
Meanwhile, volunteers from The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park finally tracked down an original keyboard from the Lorenz machine used to encode top-secret messages between Hitler and his general. It was selling on eBay for 10 pounds, advertised as an old machine for sending telegrams.
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Keep in mind in the years and decades to come you will yourself creep closer to the years where the number of your peers dwindle or fall by the wayside.
Suddenly, 'someone old died' becomes much more important to getting an idea how much time you have left, or what the world might change like by the time you get there.
We want details.
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So, you don't care about historical geeky stuff. Then don't fucking read it.
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So, you don't care about historical geeky stuff. Then don't fucking read it.
But I think bitching about Slashdot stories is some folks major contribution.
Hard to imagine that early computing devices and the people that used them are considered not appropriate for Slashdot by some users.
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Wow. What exactly do you have to do to get rejected by Reddit?
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Yeah, why would the history of cryptography interest Slashdot readers?
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Yeah, why would the history of cryptography interest Slashdot readers?
Of course it does, but is this "history for nerds"? I'd prefer a genuine news item to lead in. The recent discovery of an encryption machine on eBay would be a slightly better example.
Miss Fawcett, was not a "code breaker" but one of thousands of of clerical workers, and whose skills were typing and fluency in German.
I'm sure her later career as an Opera singer would be far more interesting. RIP.
A "computer" meant a human before late 1940s (Score:2)
Re:Stunning news! (Score:4, Insightful)
A 95 year old woman dies. Is this what "news for nerds" has become?
No matter how interesting her early life, the death is hardly news, and not the best starting point for a nerdy discussion. So I will just moan about the editors instead.
Good job, and thanks much for your valuable input.
Consider that if Slashdot pulled every article that some guy on the internet didn't think belonged there, there would be nothing.
Re:Stunning news! (Score:5, Insightful)
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She did actually have an exceptionally interesting life after the war. But somehow, I don't think slashdot wants to talk about her musical career or conservation work.
A truly remarkable woman, but to slashdot, her death is just being used as excuse for another discussion on Bletchley Park, which of course is indeed very interesting.
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You have a 6 digit user ID
He's selling it on ebay
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No, worse. Dramatic Asperger's.
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My cynical Asperger's prevents me from laughing.
Worth a try (Score:1)
Maybe NASA can find the Apollo 11 tapes on eBay.
Propaganda (Score:4, Insightful)
Greetings from Poland. Our enigma clone and hard work of our best code breakers is yours for free. You can forget us later. Or better still, make us the bad guys when you make a film about all this.
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Im sure the real turing was more of a team player than shown in the film.
Who are you to be sure? Nowadays movies about heroes are all about emphasizing good points and hiding weaknesses/flaws. So it is likely the real Turing was even less of a team player.
Re:Propaganda (Score:5, Interesting)
A good book for example is "The Secret Life of Bletchley Park" by Sinclair McKay
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Please ignore the movies.
Doesn't work for the majority who don't read books and take everything they see in movies as factual.
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They're too trusting. Only stuff you read about on Twitter is actually real.
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There are many others too, e.g. Churchill's 2nd World War Memoirs in which he compared Germany and Poland to "vultures landing on the dying carcass of Czechoslovakia."
The Polish contribution to Enigma helped a little to make up for their previous vile treachery and acting as "Hitler's jackals" in 1938.
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No problem. We have almost forgotten that Poland and Germany invaded Czechoslovakia together in 1938.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It was all fun and games then, wasn't it!
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They Polonized their little bit in Czechoslovakia and threw out the local leaders.That wasn't done to appease the Germans at that time.
No doubt that Poland was treated absolutely appallingly by the Nazis later. But Poland's vile actions also meant that several later allies baulked at entering sooner.
ROT13 (Score:5, Funny)
EVC
ROT13 (Score:2)
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True that; double true!
I wonder about the morals of this. (Score:4, Informative)
"We said 'Thank you very much, how much was it again?' She said '£9.50', so we said 'Here's a £10 note - keep the change!'"
The ethics of doing that, as opposed to informing the owner that she has a possibly valuable artifact are murky for me. I'm not questioning legality, but morality. I think that, in some way, Mr. Wetter tricked that woman out of the difference between 10 pounds and whatever she could have gotten at an auction not in eBay but at Sotheby's.
One can argue that she didn't do her due diligence, but the piece was a very specialized one. One can argue that Mr. Wetter's efforts in getting his specialized knowledge grants him the possible boons of that knowledge, like in the joke of the engineer and the 10.000 dollar bill for turning a screw. One can argue that Mr. Wetter didn't want profit himself, but wanted to preserve the artifact for the community. All these are valid points.
But in the end, the basis of morality boils down to "Do unto others". I know I wouldn't like that happening to me, and so wouldn't Mr. Wetter, I'd guess.
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Re:I wonder about the morals of this. (Score:4, Insightful)
Hell, I'd have paid her 100 for it, and I'd bet others would have paid a 100 times that. Just my $.02 (sorry, no quid in my wallet), but he should have given her at least 10% of it's actual value.
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That's part of the problem. People actually interested in the history wanted the device. If they had shown up and offered $1000 for it the seller would know something was up; price would be raised, lots of people would take notice, and then there's a good chance it would end up in the home of a collector or some cheezy museum.
Re:I wonder about the morals of this. (Score:4, Interesting)
It would have been a simple matter to make the purchase, and then hand her another check for the additional "finders fee", and explain why. At that point the sale's concluded, and the seller has no claim to the item. For that matter, what's keeping them from doing so now?
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Lack of money's what's keeping them from doing so now.
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For me the price would depend on where you plan to put it.
A museum? Here, it's yours, and here's a cup for the road.
Your private collection? The price is 200 billion dollars in cash and your firstborn's heart on a platter. Only the heart. You can keep the rubbish.
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To add complication, they recognised it as a Lorentz machine, but they didn't realise exactly what they had bought until they got it back to the museum and cleaned it.
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One can argue that Mr. Wetter didn't want profit himself, but wanted to preserve the artifact for the community. All these are valid points.
She deserves to get only the ten quid in exchange for almost selling a historical artifact to a scrap dealer, which is what would have happened if nobody figured out what it was and bought it.
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I wonder about the morals of this story too. But it looks that the value of the artifact was not preserved by that woman, or by the people that owned the artifact before, and that value was restored by Mr. Wetter - I mean it doesn't have any value if nobody knows what it is and who can put it to use.
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Ohhh, can I be there when you try to tell that to a Russian WW2 veteran? Pretty please?
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Like, oh, I don't know, the United States?
Besides, the Winter War was in full swing by the end of 39, maybe that could count for something.
Re: But....but.... (Score:2)
Or a finn fighting off the russians.
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But never forget that by the end of the war over half of the Bombes were being built and run in the US.
Poland figured out how to break Engima.
Britain worked out how to do it on a industrial scale.
The US provided a large part of the industrial effort.
And, before we get all starry eyed about Bletchley Park, don't forget the the Government cipher school became GCHQ and the American side became the NSA.
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Why? Nobody really gave me a sensible (!!!) answer to that question. And before "why" is answered sensibly there is exactly zero reason to continue the discussion.
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Because (roughly) half of all the people in the wold are women, and only an idiot wastes half of all his resources.
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So, those women decided to choose other career fields. Does that mean they chose incorrectly? Does that mean those career fields are in some way inferior? Your statement assumes those resources aren't already put to good use, doing something that they actually desire instead of some politically correct idea that all women want to be like men.
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Until we figure out, we just won't ever know. This is the entirety of the issue, which you seem to have missed entirely.
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Until we figure out, we just won't ever know. This is the entirety of the issue, which you seem to have missed entirely.
Yeah, maybe my 40+ years working in computing, with women, for women, and hiring women, makes me clueless. And fwiw, I was raised by a single mom, was a single dad with a daughter, and married a women who's in the field and makes more than me. So, no I'm sure I don't understand the issues...other than the fact that SJWs think they can change nature. I'm all in favor of giving women equal opportunities. What I'm not in favor of is doing so at the expense of others. Nor am I in favor of social experiment
Re:This is all well and good (Score:5, Interesting)
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It's not location either, it's time. America had a lot more women in computer science, math, and engineering discliplines 30 years ago.
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other than the fact that SJWs think they can change nature
Oh, dear. You're one of "those". End of conversation.
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other than the fact that SJWs think they can change nature
Oh, dear. You're one of "those". End of conversation.
Apparently, you're one of "those" who can't handle the truth.
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Not only that, talking to "old school" feminists you can get a load of hatred towards this kind of "equality". And I can understand it. Imagine struggling throughout your life to have your achievements and exploits recognized, only to be now brushed aside as the "token woman" who allegedly got her promotion not based on the countless hours she invested or the good work she does, but being marginalized AGAIN and seen as someone who could only get ahead and promoted by getting handouts and freebies.
It sure wo
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Sorry, I didn't get the memo that forbade women to enter STEM fields, when did Saudi Arabia start dictating our laws?
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Computer science isn't much about science anymore, and only a passing recognition of computers. It's all about programming and IT now. So you have major universities treating their computer science departments as mere trade schools. In the past I saw lots more women in computer science, my first after-college job was half men half women.
It's not aobut promoting the best and brightest though. Because every where I've worked there are men who are utter morons who get promoted quickly. In my view you won't
Really?? (Score:5, Interesting)
...that led to the sinking of the battleship Bismarck -- one of Britain's greatest naval victories during the war...
Really? Sinking one dreadnought, that was one of the highlights of British WWII naval operations? I realise that there wasn't much traditional dreadnought on dreadnought action for the British surface fleet in the European theatre of operations during WWII since the Germans hardly bothered to build any dreadnoughts but the importance of the hunt for the Bismarck has quite frankly been blown up to quite ridiculous proportions. This epic conflict between the Bismarck and the Royal Navy is a bit like the epic football rivalry between Germany and Britain, it's very important to the British while the Germans hardly know it exists (They are obsessed with beating the Dutch). To the Germans the Bismarck was just another warship that was sunk during WWII albeit a pretty big and expensive one but it's not the national trauma that you'd think given what an epic status the Bismarck hunt has attained in the UK. The Norwegian campaign proved once and for all that he who rules the seas is he who can project the most air power over strategic distances, not he who owns lots of battleships because aircraft will slaughter dreadnoughts in the absence of carrier cover; so why build dreadnoughts? Germany, with a tiny surface navy, occupied Norway in a series of amphibious and airborne operations that left it painfully clear that even if the British fleet had the firepower to intervene they were not able to do so because the fleet lacked even the airpower to simply figure out what was going on let alone challenge the Luftwaffe for air superiority over the battlespace. Even if the Royal Navy had had a couple more carriers available during the Norway campaign the Germans still would have swept their aircraft from the skies because the Luftwaffe would still have outnumbered the Royal Naval Air Arm by 5:1, they could project way more airpower over strategic distances. If there was anybody left who believed that dreadnoughts were still part of the future of modern navies (Ronald Reagan was one of the last hold-outs I think) then that illusion was dispelled by Pearl Harbour, Midway and other carrier battles in the Pacific. The Bismarck was just one more nail in the coffin of the dreadnought and the death of the big battleships hit the British quite a lot harder than the Germans if only because they had invested ridiculous amounts of money in them. The Americans on the other hand quite matter of factly phased the dreadnought out in favour of carriers and, apart form Reagan bringing the USS Missouri out of mothballs for a while in a fit of romanticism and nostalgia, they never looked back. Of course the Americans could afford that in the aftermath of WWII while the British could not afford to modernise and transition to a carrier navy that could hold a candle to the old dreadnought navy in terms of size and relative firepower.
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This epic conflict between the Bismarck and the Royal Navy is a bit like the epic football rivalry between Germany and Britain, it's very important to the British while the Germans hardly know it exists (They are obsessed with beating the Dutch).
And the rest of the world, even the soccer-loving world, doesn't give a shit about either.
So yeah, your analogy is VERY accurate.
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If you had changed the tone of this post slightly, it would have come across as being interesting and informative.
As things stand, you sound like a arrogant loudmouth trying to promote some kind of non-neutral viewpoint.
And you forgot to use paragraphs. Better luck next time you post.
I just think that while the sinking of the Bismarck was interesting and important propaganda wise it was of limited importance in the grand scheme of things since the Bismarck and the Tirpitz were a liability to the Germans in every way. There are many British naval victories more deserving of being put on the list Britain's greatest naval victories of WWII than the sinking of one dreadnought. The way the Bismarck hunt gets plaid up today you might think they sank some sort of super ship that could have sun
Re:Really?? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think you quite understand what the Bismark was meant to do...
By itself, it might not have been successful, but it would have been very painful had they not stopped her.
Germany came very close to cutting the convoys off from Britian, a few more U-Boats, the Bismark and Tirpitz, and she might have done it.
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I don't think you quite understand what the Bismark was meant to do...
By itself, it might not have been successful, but it would have been very painful had they not stopped her.
Germany came very close to cutting the convoys off from Britian, a few more U-Boats, the Bismark and Tirpitz, and she might have done it.
U-boats yes, Bismarck and Tirpitz... ummm... no! Roughly calculated the Germans cold literally have built 45 Type X submarines or 105 Type VIIC subs from the steel that went into the Bismarck and Tirpitz. Just to make clear what that means, the German navy mobilised every available sub including obsolete training subs to cover operation Weserübung, that submarine force counted 35 boats. They would have been better off taking the money that went into those dreadnoughts and pouring it into high-tech subm
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Hardly the only time the Germans made a "bigger is better" mistake involving military production during the war. Hell, if they had stuck to one consistent tank design instead of trying to make supertank after supertank.... of course, it didn't help that the German tanks were such precision vehicles that they were very difficult to repair in the field.
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By 1943 Germany did have hundreds of U-Boats, so they could have had both, had they been prepared for war.
The advantage to Bismark and Tirpitz is their speed and firepower. A few destroyer escorts would not have been all that useful. Had Bismark come across a large convoy, she might have sunk the whole think.
Even in cases when a wolfpack of 6 U-Boats encountered a large convoy, they only ever could sink part of it and had to run away when the escorts engaged.
The battleships also could have hunted the real
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Re:Really?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? Yes really.
I don't think you've understood the conditions of the time nor the battle of the Atlantic very well.
The problem wasn't the Bismark being some big super-weapon on the loose. Yes, everyone knows that carriers, especially now and even then to some extent are a better projection of power. But that wasn't the point. The UK is an island nation, and part of Germany's tactics was to cut off shipping to the UK, and additionally cut off supplies to Russia which didn't really have it's act together.
The role of the Bismark was commerce raiding. It was large enough to deal with just about any convoy escort (though the good guns on otherwise obsolete WWI era ships like the Ramilles were often a sufficient deterrent), fast enough to chase down any convoy and had better endurance and was substantially faster than the then state of the art aircraft carriers, so it could stick around sinking convoys far longer.
Also, the sea is big, really big. And back then with the state of the art locating tech, a small commerce raiding party could hide very well in the Atlantic. Merchant ships were not designed to hide and gave off smoke, making them much easier to find. But land based aircraft didn't generally have the range to find and attack a distant battleship, leaving it only open for aircraft carriers. The North Atlantic is also much harsher than the Pacific theatre, and there were a lot of very long nights, providing excellent cover for ships.
The Bismark would likely have been very dangerous if it had had escaped to be able to perform commerce raiding, as such the Bismark was a big threat.
While it's true that WWII was the clear end of the battleship as the top dog of the sea, most of WWII was not fought top-dog to top-dog. Much of the battle of the Atlantic was U boats and commerce raiders versus merchant ships, merchant ships armed with guns obsolete in WWI and outdated warships. The UK couldn't afford to commit new capital ships to escort duties, so it hardly matters what the best capital ship was.
As for the other comment, neither side in the war had a carrier planes that were anything like a match for the land based fighters of the time.
When it came down to actually hunting a capital ship it was different. There, the British Navy could afford to deploy serious force. And naturally enough, the the fatal blow to the was in fact dealt by an aircraft carrier.
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Also, the sea is big, really big....
That bit sounds you borrowed a line from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
The Bismark would likely have been very dangerous if it had had escaped to be able to perform commerce raiding, as such the Bismark was a big threat.
A large surface navy has never made sense for Germany unless it was at peace with or allied with Britain. With Britain as an enemy the only naval forces that make sense for Germany are smaller surface vessels, long range naval aviation and a large numbers of submarines. The Bismarck was a big capital ship with a very limited life expectancy once it got into the open Atlantic. Yes, the Bismarck might have mauled a few convoys before
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That bit sounds you borrowed a line from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Well spotted :)
A large surface navy has never made sense for Germany unless it was at peace with or allied with Britain. With Britain as an enemy the only naval forces that make sense for Germany are smaller surface vessels, long range naval aviation and a large numbers of submarines.
That's true, but those ships weren't tasked for engaging equally matched ships. Also, the long range naval aviation wasn't up to much. It was enough t
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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After the Bismarck sank HMS Hood, large parts of the British Navy were moved around (or kept in port) depending on where Bismarck was. This put big constraints on Navy operations. Early in WW2, air power did not extend into the middle of the Atlantic (due to lack of range) leaving surface ships free to wreak havoc on convoys which were not equipped to deal with a battleship.
Given the thin margin of supply Britain operated under, leaving Bismarck free to hunt British convoys would have been a major mistake.
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After the Bismarck sank HMS Hood, large parts of the British Navy were moved around (or kept in port) depending on where Bismarck was. This put big constraints on Navy operations. Early in WW2, air power did not extend into the middle of the Atlantic (due to lack of range) leaving surface ships free to wreak havoc on convoys which were not equipped to deal with a battleship. Given the thin margin of supply Britain operated under, leaving Bismarck free to hunt British convoys would have been a major mistake.
I still do not see how one dreadnought and it's bodyguard would have caused more trouble than the U-boats. The Bismarck was tracked by reckon aircraft it's departure would have been quickly detected and even if the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen had gotten into a couple of convoys they were still sitting ducks once they were tracked down by a carrier group. Whenever this is discussed British and US historians don't mention fact that German Navy war-games in 1940-41 that investigated the feasibility of sending
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I still do not see how one dreadnought and it's bodyguard would have caused more trouble than the U-boats. The Bismarck was tracked by reckon aircraft it's departure would have been quickly detected and even if the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen had gotten into a couple of convoys they were still sitting ducks once they were tracked down by a carrier group.
The Scharnhost and Gneisenau repeatedly sortied prior to the Bismark. They weren't tracked down by a carrier group on any of these occasions, and weren't sunk by air power. It was a LOT harder to track ships back then than one might suppose. The most famous commerce raider, Atlantis, would survive for over 600 days. (Scharnhorst would later be sunk by the battleship Duke of York and her escorting destroyers, Gneisenau would survive the war: carrier groups again did not play the dominant role one would s
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You're right, of course.
The battle was a big deal for the British since the Bismark had just sunk the Royal Navy's "invincible" battlecruiser, HMS Hood.
(Which actually was a pretty poor ship).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
To your point about ai rpower, it is unlikely that the RN would have sunk, (or even found), the Bismark without aircraft - both land and carrier based. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Sink the Bismarck (Score:2)
It might have been a strategic victory, but a very pyhric one.
The Hood went down with only 3 survivors
Code breaking was more important in the fight against U-Boats
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I realise that there wasn't much traditional dreadnought on dreadnought action
Well, maybe they didn't feel like being dreadnaughty...
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Others have corrected you on the Battle of the Atlantic - so, I'll tackle this one. No, only armchair experts had their illusions dispelled by those carrier battles in the Pacific. Every one of them that resulted in the loss of a battlewagon came down
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The Norwegian campaign proved once and for all that he who rules the seas is he who can project the most air power over strategic distances, not he who owns lots of battleships because aircraft will slaughter dreadnoughts in the absence of carrier cover; so why build dreadnoughts?
Not at all true.
In fact, during the Norwegian campaign the British aircraft carrier Glorious was sunk by two unaccompanied German battleships, with huge loss of life.
The battleships won that one (aided by radar controlled anti-surface guns, allowing them to achieve some of the most remarkable shooting of any navy during the entire war).
The most decisive naval battles of the Norwegian campaign were actually fought by surface units at Narvik - including a British battleship, which an incredibly ballsy admiral
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The Bletchley Circle (TV series) (Score:3)
--
.nosig
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The reality is, most of the 'codebreakers' at Bletchley Park (men and women) had no need of any particular analytical skill... Ninety percent of them just used a recipe written by the boffins or (later) operated machines that operated according to said recipe. If a reada