Skip to main content

Of Ultra, Sigaba, Bombe, And Other Enigmas

March 2023
1min read

“Be secret and exult,” wrote William Butler Yeats in a phrase military men and warring nations would take to heart—as a current exhibit at the National Museum of American Historyin Washington, D. C., demonstrates. The exhibit—which is on display in the museum’s Computer Hall, fittingly enough—features cryptographic machines used during World War I and World War II. Recently declassified, most of the material is on loan from the National Security Agency.

Among the devices in the show is the German Enigma, used during World War II to send out thousands of ULTRA messages that the Nazis considered undecipherable by the Allies. Also on display is a rare photograph of the Bombe, an Allied machine used to break the Enigma’s code, together with one of the intercepted ULTRA messages. Other items include the U.S. M-134C, otherwise known as Sigaba, an electric cipher machine used for strategic exchanges between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt; a World War I Navy Cipher Box; and the U.S. Army’s M-94, a disk cipher patterned after a design conceived by Thomas Jefferson.

The exhibition will run through February of next year.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "August/september 1981"

Authored by: Martha C. Brown

America’s First Native Cookbook

Authored by: The Editors

A preview of a magnificent private collection of nineteenth-century art

Authored by: Richard Reinhardt

This puckish, nearly forgotten California architect built his own distinctive style on the simple principle that beauty alone endures

Authored by: Joseph J. Corn

The Rise and Fall of a Most American Dream

Authored by: Nat Brandt

In the Meuse-Argonne, this backwoods pacifist did what Marshal Foch saw as “the greatest thing accomplished by any private’ soldier of all the armies of Europe.”

Authored by: Peter Andrews

How a Courtly Game Became Big Business

Authored by: The Editors

The Forgotten Photographs of Nancy Ford Cones

Authored by: T. H. Watkins

A HERITAGE PRESERVED

Authored by: Walter Karp

How the happy combination of a millionaire and, a parson gave us Colonial Williamsburg, a place of surpassing loveliness—and a continuing reminder of what a truly bold enterprise our Revolution was

Authored by: John H. White, Jr.

The John Bull Steams Again

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

Often thought to have been a weak President, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or political fallout.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.