Using Ultra to research the Luftwaffe

[Larry deZeng]

Thanks for posting the two HW5 samples, Andreas. With the sole exception of Oblt. FUMKE and his unidentified Gruppe en-route to Vitebsk, all of the other intercepts in those two pages are exactly the sort of signals that were sent by Bletchley Hut 3 to the field commands and are currently in those 143 rolls of microfilm that I mentioned earlier. In fact, several of them looked familiar. I don't know which HW series currently incorporates those 50,000+ signals to the field commands, but evidently they replicate many of the HW5 signals. As the stream of daily decrypts made its way through Hut 3, the RAF officer intelligence analysts would mark those messages having tactical value for immediate retransmission to the commands in the field and off they went using the RAF's special key that employed some double encryption. For example, every X. Fliegerkorps daily report that was intercepted was among those forwarded to Middle East Command and one or two others in the Mediterranean.

L.