VMs: Tiltman and Currier

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

	*The Emperor's Codes: the Breaking of Japan's Secret 
Ciphers,* by Michael Smith (Great Britain, Bantam Press, 
2000; then Penguin Books).

http://tinyurl.com/cqda3

	This book, which discusses the British decryption of 
Japanese codes and ciphers in W.W.II, a very substantial 
effort, is on-topic because it discusses two old friends, 
Brigadier John Tiltman and Prescott Currier.  Friedman's 
career is fairly well publicized but Tiltman's is not so.

	Tiltman was born May 24, 1894.  He was precocious enough to 
go to Oxford at age 13.  He served in W.W.I, earning the 
Military Cross, then went to M11b, which became the 
Government Code and Cipher School, eventually housed at 
Bletchley Park, where he became head of the military 
section.  He spent the 1920's at Simla, India, breaking 
Russian diplomatic ciphers.  After that, in England, he 
concentrated on Japanese systems.  In 1933 he broke the 
Japanese military attaché system.  He then worked on 
Japanese Army ciphers in the 2nd half of 1937.  He broke a 
superenciphered code in late summer 1938.

	In June 1939 the Japanese introduced the Navy General 
Operational Code, known in the West as JN-25, a code 
superenciphered from a random number table.   Tiltman's 
greatest achievement was his breaking of this a few weeks 
later.

	During the rest of the war, he worked on many different 
Japanese systems.  Late in 1941 he set up an accelerated 
Japanese language course to provide specialists for the 
Bletchley Park effort.  He set up the Japanese military 
section at Bletchley Park in June 1942 and added several 
expansions of it in May 1943.  Throughout the war he was 
called in for troubleshooting on many difficult operations.

	After the war, he continued to work at GCHQ to 1964.  After 
that he transferred to the American NSA as a codebreaking 
troubleshooter.  He finally died in Hawai'i in 1982.

	In the book's bibliography there is a reference to a memoir 
that I do not understand:

	John Tiltman, *Some Reminiscences* (NARA RG457 OD4632).

	Prescott Currier went to Bletchley Park as a US naval 
liaison.  He met Tiltman there in February 8, 1941 (yes, 
before Pearl Harbor).  He and Lt. Robert Weeks brought a 
PURPLE machine.  (The British had actually broken the RED 
machine in August 1935, before Friedman did, but had then 
had to turn their efforts to ENIGMA.)   In return the 
British gave the Americans a paper model of ENIGMA.  Currier 
worked there on systems other than JN-25 during W.W.II.  He 
wrote of his experience in this article:

	Prescott Currier, "My PURPLE Trip to England in 1941," 
Cryptologia, Vol. 20, No. 3, 1996.

Dennis


______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list