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The Enigma Code Breakers
The British set up a massive team of code-breakers, specially selected from some of the cleverest people in the country. Seven thousand of them worked at a place called Bletchley Park, working in shifts around the clock to try to crack the 3,000 Enigma code messages they received every day. They used one of the first computers ever to be built, called Colossus. This computer was the size of a room, and could read and check coded messages at the rate of 5,000 letters a second. Even with the help of Colossus, however, the messages could take up to ten hours to work out. Can you imagine how frustrating it was and how much concentration it took to spend ten hours on the same problem, day after day after day? It makes doing your homework for an hour or two in the evening look pretty easy!
You'd think that it couldn't get any harder, but in 1942 the Germans added an extra rotor to the Enigma machine. This not only made the messages even more difficult to decode, but also meant that much of the hard work done already was useless. It took a further 10 months for the British to break the new code!