How did they get over the catch-22 that if they used the information that Nazis could guess it came from breaking the code but if they didn’t use the information there was no point in having it.
EDIT. I tagged this as mathematics because the movie suggests the use of mathematics, but does not explain how you use mathematics to do it (it’s a movie!). I am wondering for example if they made a slight tweak to random search patterns so that they still looked random but “coincidentally” found what we already knew was there. It would be extremely hard to detect the difference between a genuinely random pattern and then almost genuinely random pattern.
In: Mathematics
Spies! The resistance kept reporting and sending messages. If they acted on an intercept that hadn’t been «seen» by anyone, the secret would be blown.
Well after they captured the German sub with the machine on it, we took all members of that sub to a concentration camp/jail in Louisiana, but didn’t tell anyone. That’s sort of against the laws or war. Germany figured the sub went down. Then after the war we shipped all those Germans home. LOL
There was one instance where the allies knew of an impending air raid on a particular city in the UK.
To not tip their hand, the allies conducted an emergency response training session in the area. The air raid happened as normal, but the aftermath was greatly reduced because there were plenty of emergency workers and supplies nearby.
[super cool movie about it](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2084970/)
the imitation game.
while I’m sure not 100% accurate, it’s pretty close when it comes to the code breaking parts.
PS: The brits did Turin dirty.
The Engima was probably the biggest secret the British kept during the war but it was not the only one.
Other people have answered this question pretty well, sending out a spotter plane to “find” the U-boat, who then sends a message that they have been spotted.
Britain is an island, and they did a masterful job of capturing German spies and feeding them misinformation for them to report back or turning them into double agents.
Some times the British did nothing, allowing an attack to occur without stopping it.
But I want to go back to my first point. Part of the ruse the British would create “answers” to the obvious questions. Britain had food rationing but one thing they could grow in abundance was carrots. So they made the lie that their pilots had better night vision because they ate carrots. They ate so many carrots that their skin turned orange – this is not an exaggeration. Having the defenders of homeland eat carrots encouraged the British people to eat more carrots. Supposedly this is where Bugs Bunny eating a carrot came from. Anyway, the carrots story was believed by the Germans so much they fed their pilots carrots until they turned orange. The carrot ruse was designed to hide that Britain had developed Radar. Knowing when the Germans were crossing the channel was huge. They hid the existence of Radar as long as they could. Then once the Germans had some understanding of it, the Brits used Radar as the ruse to hide other still secret things. The Germans learned through British sources that Radar could be used to successfully “find” the conning tower of a submarine on the surface. Now maybe this is true, but maybe it is not, but it helped hide from the Germans that the Brits knew where the U-boat was because of Enigma. The Germans moved to nighttime bombing because they learned that the British pilots might know their general area because of radar but could not engage without visually spotting the German aircraft. This is where the British lie about carrots was formed. That carrot ruse was created because the Brits developed radar small enough to put on aircraft. So after several successful nightime bombing missions the Germans were surprized to find that the British were getting really good at finding their invading planes at night. First ground radar was the British excuse then carrot infused pilots were the excuse all to hide aircraft based radar, which would have been sacrificed on the alter of secrets to keep enigma hidden.
Part of the plot of the novel “[Cryptonomicon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon)” is about a special unit set up to specifically perform operations that give alternative explanations for successes achieved from Enigma intelligence.
Can’t say that’s what the Allies did, but it certainly makes sense.
Mostly they’d just come up with some other way they might have known where the enemy troops were, and plant information that seems to confirm that instead of the real reason.
For example, if they knew that a Nazi naval unit would be in a certain place, they’d make sure an Allied spotter aircraft flew over shortly before they attacked it. The Nazis would report that they’d been spotted by aircraft, and that was the end of it. The Allies also sent out a lot of fake messages to and from non-existent units of spotter planes, making it seem like there were many more than there really were, so the Nazis wouldn’t wonder why so many of their units were spotted.
This is gonna go into conspiracy territory.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11486219
TLDR: A number of historians state that in an attempt to hide the fact that the code had been broken, the hard decision was taken to let some people die. The article I linked attempts to shed light on the subject and even try to refute it, but really, no one knows for sure.
[This isn’t for the enigma code but I thought it was a good use/example of propaganda by the RAF divert the enemy from knowing your capabilities](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-wwii-propaganda-campaign-popularized-the-myth-that-carrots-help-you-see-in-the-dark-28812484/)
American code breakers learned where Admiral Yamamoto’s plane was going to be. It was actually quite a distance from the nearest US air base, and very long range fighters were needed to reach and destroy his plane. Afterward, to keep the Japanese from becoming suspicious, they had to fly patrols along the same route for a while so the Japanese would think it was simply very bad luck for them that the Americans were patrolling that area and just happened to find Yamamoto’s airplane.
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