C. E. Wynn-Williams - Wartime

Wartime

On the eve of the Second World War, Wynn-Williams, like many of his scientific contemporaries, was recruited to work on the developing discipline of radio detection and ranging (RADAR) at the Telecommunications Research Establishment, later the Royal Radar Establishment, Malvern.

On 1 February 1942, the Allied success in breaking Nazi German naval Enigma messages suffered a serious setback. This was due to the adoption, for the North Atlantic U-boat traffic, of an Enigma machine with an additional rotor — the four-wheel Enigma. This increased the time required of the Turing-designed Bombe machines by a factor of 26. Higher speed bombes were therefore needed and Wynn-Williams was called in to contribute to one of the streams of development of high-speed Bombes. The Post Office team developed a Bombe attachment for a standard three-wheel Bombe containing high speed wheels and an electronic sensing unit. It was attached to the Bombe by a very thick cable and was dubbed the Cobra Bombe. Twelve were made at the Mawdsley engineering factory in Dursley, Gloucestershire, but turned out to be unreliable, so the other stream of development at the British Tabulating Machine Company at Letchworth was preferred. Both machines were subsequently overshadowed by the great success of the US Navy Bombes.

Towards the end of 1942 the previously experimental non-Morse transmissions from teleprinter cipher machines were being received in greater numbers by the British Signals Intelligence collection sites. The one using the Lorenz SZ 40/42, code-named Tunny at the Government Code & Cypher School at Bletchley Park, was used for high-level traffic between German High Command and field commanders. A young chemistry graduate, Bill Tutte worked out how it could in theory be broken. He took the idea to his boss, the mathematician Max Newman, who realised that the only feasible way to apply the method, was by automating it. Knowing of Wynn-Williams' work on electronic counters at Cambridge, he called for his help. He worked with a team from the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill, which later included Tommy Flowers. They constructed a machine to do this that was dubbed Heath Robinson after the cartoonist who designed fantastical machines. The series of Robinson machines were forerunners of the ten Colossus machines, the world's first programmable digital electronic computers.