The Imitation Game (2014)

Lanx said:

you sure that wasn't movie fantasy? cuz they were already looking at weather reports and they don't change much and they both have the same info

"it's fucking cloudy today, i wonder what the enigmaa thinks cloudy looks like"

Click to expand...

Wasn't it that they could manually decode messages using weather reports to break that day's code, but it took a long time because of how complex the encoding and decoding processes were.

So they needed to invent computers to do it quickly enough to be useful?

basically german ciphers sucked. And germans didn't realize that they'd been broken.

Or if they did realize it, arrogance would not permit them to change. But, and it's been about 20 years since I read it, I seem to remember a long segment of Rise and Fall of the Third Reich dedicated to the question of "did they realize their ciphers were not secure?" and all the internal communication (which the nazi's kept) indicated that they did not.

To expand a bit on what others have said:

The Poles had broken the early German Enigma, in ~1932-33, which was used in the prewar years. They even developed a clone Enigma box, called the Enigma Double, and had human computers to crunch the numbers and develop shortcuts, to work on the daily keys. In 1938, roughly a year before the invasion of Poland, the Germans added 2 more wheels to their Enigma machine. The Polish government could not or would not fund the project well enough to break the new complexity that these two added wheels introduced. German intelligence probably learned all this after taking Warsaw. At any rate, the high command acted as though they had no doubts about it unbreakability.

In the months before the start of WW2, the Poles invited UK and French teams to a meetings to unveil their work (share intelligence) with their allies. With the German Blitz of Poland the UK scrambled to send in a team to evacuate the Polish code breakers, ending up in neutral Romania (where they were shortly detained). After their eventual release from Romania, they traveled on to France, until it was overrun, by the Blitz. For some reason, after the fall of France, they worked under cover in Vichy France until 1942, when they Germans occupied Vichy. The remaining Polish team then made their way through Spain, on to Portugal, down to Gibraltar, and finally to England, where they joined the Polish Army in exile.

Building on information acquired from the Poles in 1938-39, the UK pored enough resources into the project, as to break the new code, albeit rather slowly (at Bletchley Park). The captured cipher books confirmed they were right, but the Germans changed books regularly and ultimately, the Germans didn't care if their books were captured, as they would shortly move to another one.

Turing's machine simply allowed the code to be broken faster, turning it into more easily actionable intelligence. Which means it helped save more Allied lives and kill more German ones (a.k.a. a major cog that helped win the war).

I haven't watched this movie in a long time, but as with most historical movies, they usually get the overarching things, like people, places, and dates correct, but everything else is made up Hollywood shit. I wouldn't put much stock in dialog and character arcs. Even movies that are seemingly ~90% accurate, like We Were Soldiers, drop the ball at the end and fuck up the account, as told by the book.