Did KG 26 hit the cruiser Molotov in 1942?

[Paul Thompson]

Originally Posted by Nick Beale

DEFE3/185, German Naval messages deciphered 5–10 August 1942, and /186 (10–16 August) might be a good place to start.

Thank you for the hint, Nick! I have now skim-read quite a bit of DEFE 3/185 and found not a hint that any messages from the Black Sea were intercepted. I wonder whether there is a card index for these files. The files would have been almost useless for wartime operations without indexing, so do you think there is an index somewhere at Kew?

Does Schmidt indicate that II./KG 26 flew more bombing that torpedo-bomber missions?

Warm regards,

Paul

[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by Paul Thompson

Thank you for the hint, Nick! I have now skim-read quite a bit of DEFE 3/185 and found not a hint that any messages from the Black Sea were intercepted. I wonder whether there is a card index for these files. The files would have been almost useless for wartime operations without indexing, so do you think there is an index somewhere at Kew?

Does Schmidt indicate that II./KG 26 flew more bombing that torpedo-bomber missions?

Warm regards,

Paul

They didn't start a specific Russian Front naval message series until October 1943 (with the ZTPGR prefix) unfortunately' so all you can do is read a few thousand signals, allowing for the possibility that the decrypt occurred after some delay.

A card index? In your dreams! There was one at Bletchley Park but it may not have survived. Alternatively it may be among the 3,000,000 pages of material that the Bletchley Park Museum is digitising, with no word of an end date. Meanwhile, why wouldn't a person want to read thousands of decrypts?

[Paul Thompson]

Originally Posted by Nick Beale

They didn't start a specific Russian Front naval message series until October 1943 (with the ZTPGR prefix) unfortunately

A card index? In your dreams! There was one at Bletchley Park but it may not have survived. Alternatively it may be among the 3,000,000 pages of material that the Bletchley Park Museum is digitising

Most of the important events in the Black Sea were long past by October 1943, but ZTPGR may prove useful anyway, thank you.

It takes 6 years to fight a catastrophic World War, but 71 years and counting to find one of the card indexes created during the conflict! Given just how much information there is in the various decrypts, it is a great shame that the card index has either been lost or is yet to be rediscovered.

Warm regards,

Paul