"John K. Taber" wrote:
>
>
> For Carrol Cox: I was intrigued by your mention of your
> work in cryptanalysis. Maybe you would be interested in the
> American Cryptogram Association? (shameless plug by me).
That was long ago and in another country as it were. And while my little triumph was a solitary one, it presupposed a collective effort existing over several years. The last time I was looking at some cryptographic material, everything fell at the extremes -- either two easy or way above my head. And probably now even a Playfair square would make me sweat.
Was Enigma a complex polyalphabetic cipher or a scrambler? I remember working during training with a u.s. army machine which was polyalphabetic. It could be read fairly easily if one were sitting at a desk with leisure to spend but probably would have been pretty difficult to read if shells were bursting around, no desk at which to copy the cipher text neatly on large sheets of graph paper -- and to be useful a decipherment was needed in an hour or two.
Carrol