The Secret of the Code Breakers, Part 2

The Secret of the Code Breakers, Part 2

The Secret of the Code Breakers, Part 2
Reading Level

	edHelper's suggested reading level:	grades 6 to 8
	Flesch-Kincaid grade level:	6.22

Vocabulary

	challenging words:		bomba, bombe, breakers, cryptologists, deadlock, encode, heil, housing, dispatches, invasion, hastily, naval, triumph, estate, intellectual, posed
	content words:		Bletchley Park, Heil Hitler, Even Rejewski, Alan Turing, Then Turing, Like Germany, Pearl Harbor

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The Secret of the Code Breakers, Part 2
By Toni Lee Robinson

¹     After the invasion of Poland, Britain became the center of Allied code breaking activities. Actually, the British had been pounding away at the Enigma ciphers for months. The cryptologists (code experts) had had no luck. Then came the meeting with the Poles. They shared Marian Rejewski's research and methods. This brought the first step forward for the western Allies. After the war, a British code expert acknowledged the gift:

²     "[Our efforts to crack Enigma code] would never have gotten off the ground if we had not learned from the Poles, in the nick of time, the details of the ... Enigma machine..."

³     Then the code breakers hit a road block. There was a change in the German ciphers. The Polish methods didn't work any more. The experts realized that the Nazis had changed the way they used Enigma. There was a time of "black out." The Allies couldn't read the German messages. The code breakers buckled down to crack the code again.

⁴     The British set their brainiest people to work on the Nazi codes. There were the usual math "wizards" in the group. Along with them was a strange mix of intellectual types. There were language specialists and chess experts. There was even a crossword puzzle whiz or two in the crowd.

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