M-209 broken in WWII

[Peter Hendrickson]

Hadmut Danisch quoted "As a german codebreaker in World War II":
> Even experts didn't know until some years ago that german
> deciphering specialists broke ciphers of the allied in the second
> world war.

German success against the M-209 is discussed in David Kahn's "The
Codebreakers".  It cites a 1962 letter as a source, so presumably this
information was in the 1967 edition.  In other words, German
cryptanalytic success has been public for a long time.

Kahn's book has quite a bit of good information on Axis cryptanalytic
efforts.  Germany was particularly successful, and was using
automation to assist their work.

One little gem is that Italy managed to pull off an active attack
against the Yugoslav Army.  They had been reading Yugoslav traffic for
awhile, got into a difficult situation, and convinced two divisions
they had been ordered to retreat using fake messages.  By the time
this was discovered and resolved the game was over.

Peter

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