TheCodeBreakers
confirmation of twelve armored units. With few exceptions the material
could be worked up in good time and put to use."
These tactical solutions could, at best, produce local successes. The
apparent failure of German cryptanalysts to solve Russia's strategic
cryptosystems, with the valuable information that they concealed, led
one German crypt-analyst to adjudge that Russia lost World War I in the
ether and won World War II there.
A truth he never suspected may lurk in his apothegm. For the
Russians may have done as well in solving German cryptograms as in
protecting their own. By 1942 they had cracked messages in the Enigma,
a rotor machine. And the Germans themselves paid a left-handed tribute
to
Soviet cryptanalytic perspicacity when a 1943 conference of signal
officers ruefully ordered: "It is forbidden to mark the Fiihrer's radio
messages in any special way."
At the same time, the Soviet Union guarded her diplomatic flanks by