Re: The Macintosh is a girl's computer!

In message <1hw1faj.vak72ey6advN@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (J. J. Lodder) wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Graeme Wall <Graeme@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[snip]

My father was a Met Air Observer flying out of Iceland over the North
Atantic, he was producing the reports that were compared with the
enigma traffic. Probably the youngest person to be cleared into the
Ultra secret.

<stunned> I'm astonished that they let someone like that into it - what
if the other side had caught him? Always a risk on that kind of job.

How would the Germans have gone about capturing him while flying out of
Iceland over the North Atlantic?

What is surprising about the story is that he would have been told.
Why not just collect the weather reports and send them to Bletchley,
where the comparing was done?


Having got some more info out of him, he was actually cleared for Ultra while
working with the PRU squadrons based at Benson. That was a non-flying post.
Flying out of Iceland was not a great risk from the security point of view.
The main risk was being shot down by either a U-boat or a FW Kondor. He was
lucky, he never saw either. Nearly depth-charged a whale on one occasion but
that's another story.

The point about using the weather reports was that a fairly simple code is
used to send the reports, called a synop code, it uses, IIRC, 5 groups of 5
numbers. Each group refers to one aspect of the report. EG one group refers
to cloud cover, one to wind speed and direction[1] and so on. These codes
are an international standard. So if you intercept a U-boat weather report
recoded on enigma, you can compare a British report from the same area and
that will tell you what the code is.

[1] An easterly wind at 10 knots could be encoded as 09010 for instance.

--
Graeme Wall

My genealogy website:
<http://www.greywall.demon.co.uk/genealogy/index.html>
.

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