Star readers take on the code-breaking challenge
Amateur cryptographers offer own theories on Second World War missive
Star readers are proving themselves crack hands at breaking the mysterious Second World War coded message found inside an English chimney.
History buffs and problem solvers spanning several generations have been analyzing the 27 five-letter code groups published in the Star last Saturday.
The handwritten message popped out of a red cylinder strapped to the skeleton leg of a pigeon found when David Martin decided to clean out the chimney of his 17th-century house in Surrey.
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a British intelligence agency, threw up its collective hands at the puzzle, saying the message from Nazi-occupied France — created with a destroyed one-time pad — was indecipherable without the second pigeon that carried the code solution.
Several Star readers agreed, but that didn’t stop them from delving further.
Rohan Manerikar, a Grade 10 student at John Fraser Secondary School in Mississauga, speculated the “110” written beside the Pigeon Service header could have been 110 Squadron Royal Air Force Bomber Command.
Each of the five-letter codes could have identified gliders used on D-Day, the Allied invasion of France on June 6, 1944, Manerikar suggested.
The “X02” as the addressee could identify the British double-cross spying committee, or XX, he said.
He also spotted two handwriting styles in a colour copy of the message.
Manerikar theorized that could mean the sender, Sgt. W. Stott, wrote one part and a French partisan wrote the other.
“I hope that one of these theories can be close to what actually happened,” he said.
“I know what it feels like to know a question but not have the answer for a long time.”
Diana Sinnige, a 48-year-old physiotherapist with a flair for problem-solving, suggested the Martin message was the key to the code, not the actual message.
“Of the 27 five-letter code groups, two are the same, the first and last,” she said. “This leaves 26 distinct groupings, just enough for each letter in the alphabet.
“The placement of the repeated group AOAKN suggests that the groupings should be read as rows, left to right, not as columns.”
From there, Sinnige broke down what each group represented but, without both pigeons, “each message is meaningless.”
Sinnige, a math and logic-puzzle fan, was the sole woman who took a stab at code-breaking for the Star.
But, interestingly, more than 80 per cent of the people who worked at the legendary British wartime code-breaking site, Bletchley Park, were women. BLETCHLEY PARK, now a museum, remained skeptical of any of the Star readers’ attempts, deferring to GCHQ.
“Both organizations remain unable to verify any of the suggested answers to the mystery — all of which so far are partial,” Bletchley spokeswoman Katherine Lynch said. “GCHQ’s modern cryptographers have applied their inestimable skills to the task, and have concluded that without access to the original cryptographic material, it is impossible to break the code.”
Jeremy Clark, a telecommunications engineer in Toronto, spent several days and referenced many sources to try to unravel the riddle. He concurred with the one-time pad encrypting method, pointing out it had been in use by most European nations since 1921.
He analyzed the frequency distribution of the letters using ScicosLab (online software for scientific computing) and a Vigenere square (a polyalphabetic substitution system using a square chart).
One decode by Clark produced the possible message: “Bittrich Second Panzer arrived Eindhoven July Fourteen.”
“That just shows how it might be done,” said Clark, 61.
Modern computing could supply the dexterity unknown to the cipher clerks at Bletchley, he added.
“If we had a code book, any code book, say one that someone who worked for (the wartime spy training school near Whitby) Camp X has left over, we could put it into a computer and figure out the combinations,” he said.
“I’d bet the codes were copied from other sources, so any code book might be a start.”
Dr. Jeff Noakes, a Second World War expert at the Canadian War Museum, said their cache of codebooks was small and mostly donated as part of someone’s personal papers.
“A lot of this material was very secret, so there was a tendency to destroy it after its usefulness,” he said.
Gordon Young of Lakefield Heritage Research in Peterborough has a code book, a First World War vintage manual that belonged to his great-uncle Allen.
Using it and his own prolific research into Canadian war diaries, he theorized that the five-letter codes were acronyms, some of them fairly common artillery terms.
“FNKTQ is always artillery lingo for ‘Final Note Known to Quarters,’ ” Young said. GOVFN could have been Go Over (previous) Field Notes, he suggested.
The sender, Sgt. Stott, was using the World War I spelling for Serjeant in the abbreviation Sjt on the message, Young pointed out, possibly because his trainer was a First World War vet.
“A simple guess but I suspect that he was dropped about 5 to 6 a.m. and reported to the U.K. that he was down and safe with his pigeons. His next message with two pigeons would have been about noon and now, this is his afternoon report,” Young said. THE TIME OF ORIGIN on the Stott message is recorded as 1522 but a number of Star readers deciphered the final part of the message as June 27 at 1526, or 3:26 p.m. GCHQ’s dismissive attitude was a sadly missed opportunity, Young said, to “engage young people in the history of the war.”
Young also uncovered a few William Stotts in military records and figured the sergeant with the Lancashire Fusiliers, who died less than two weeks later at age 27 on July 8, 1944, was likely the soldier sending the message that went astray. “It’s not a secret code, it’s artillery code,” Young told the Star.
“They’re trying to overthink it. They’re hoping it’s much more secret than that. Napoleon was using pigeons and cryptography.”
John Ralph of Oshawa agreed with the code link back to the First World War.
“We still have the last official message my grandfather, Thomas Michell Ralph of the 169 CEF (Canadian Expeditionary Force) Signal Corp., was carrying when he was wounded at Vimy Ridge in 1917,” Ralph wrote to the Star. “The message was still in the pocket of his uniform when it was returned to him after being in hospital in Buxton, England, for several months.
“Although in bad shape, it appears to have a similar letter/number code system as that found on the pigeon.”
But perhaps too many John le Carré novels and James Bond movies are getting in the way and Keith Goodrich of Guelph, Ont., has unscrambled the answer. “Please send more pigeons. I’m the last one!”