Expert dismisses WWII pigeon cracked code as 'nonsense'

Source : ANI
Last Updated: Thu, Dec 27, 2012 06:10 hrs

The historical advisor to Bletchley Park has said that the Canadian historian's solution to the World War II cipher that was found strapped to the leg of a dead carrier pigeon is just silly.

Gord Young won global headlines two weeks ago when he argued that the cipher was based on a World War 1 code, and that he worked it out in minutes by referring to his great uncle's Royal Flying Corp aerial observers' book.

GCHQ had previously said that the 27 five letter blocks were impossible to decipher, the Independent reported.

But Michael Smith, the Buckinghamshire home where the German Enigma code was cracked during World War II, said the solution was nonsense.

The mystery began in November when David Martin found the remains of a World War II carrier pigeon while renovating his chimney in Bletchingley, Surrey, with the message attached to its leg.

GCHQ said the code as impossible to crack without the relevant code books and threw open the challenge to the public.

They have since received hundreds of attempts, none of which they say are credible.

Young, from Peterborough, Canada, proposed his solution earlier this month saying it took him just 17 minutes to work it out but Smith poured cold water on the suggested solution.

According to Smith, the idea that a World War One code would have been used during the second world war is just silly because it would have been well known to the Germans and insecure.

He added that it is impossible to crack because the letters are purely random and that all the only thing known is that the code was carried by two pigeons, one registered in 1937 and one in 1940 and that the code was sent between 1940 and 1945, probably from behind enemy lines by a special operations unit such as the SAS or SBS. (ANI)

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