Joseph Desch, Alan Turing and the US Bombes

Two documents written by the late  Joseph Desch and Dr. Alan Turing on the construction of the US Bombes.

DOCUMENT INFORMATION:
The documents have been entirely retyped by the three editors, Ralph Erskine, Philip Marks and Frode Weierud. 

The documents are formatted for A4 (290 × 210 mm) size paper and are made available in Adobe's Acrobat PDF format.

DOCUMENT SOURCE:
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Record Group 38, 
Crane Library, File: CNSG 5750/441.

VERSION INFORMATION: Version History

• Joseph Desch’s Memo on His Plans for the US Bombes.
• Alan Turing’s Report on His Visit to NCR.

Other US Navy Bombe papers:

• The US Navy Bombe: OP-20-G’s First Thoughts
• History of the Bombe Project courtesy of The Mariner’s Museum

Andrew Hodges has published a Web page on Turing’s Report in his The Alan Turing Internet Scrapbook. The Scrapbook page also contain a complete facsimile copy of the report.

• The Dayton Codebreakers by Deborah Desch Anderson

Further information on Joseph Desch, NCR and the US Navy Bombe is available in a recently published article in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing :

John A.N. Lee, Colin Burke, and Deborah Anderson,
The US Bombes, NCR, Joseph Desch, and 600 WAVES: The First Reunion of the US Naval Computing Machine Laboratory,
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 22, No. 3, July / September 2000, pp. 27-41. See Abstract.

For more details about Enigma and the US Navy Bombe see the Letter to the Editor, Review of US Bombes by Ralph Erskine, Philip Marks, and Frode Weierud, in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 24, No. 3, July / September 2002, pp. 85-87. The full version of this letter and the reply of John A.N. Lee, Colin Burke, and Deborah Anderson is available on the Annals Web page.

For more information about Alan Turing and his cryptanalytical work on the Enigma please consult Turing’s Treatise on Enigma.

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