Mavis Lever

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In this building (English: The Cottage ) in Bletchley Park, Mavis Lever worked with Dilly Knox on the deciphering of the Enigma

Mavis Lillian Lever (married Mavis Batey ; born  May 5, 1921 in Dulwich , a district of London ; †  November 12, 2013 in Bognor Regis , West Sussex ) was a British cryptanalyst . During the Second World War she carried in the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) (German about: "Staatliche Code- und Chiffrenschule") in the English Bletchley Park , so the military office, which is successful with the deciphermentof German communications, contributed significantly to the breakdown of the German rotor key machine Enigma .

Life

When the war broke out, Mavis Lever was studying German at University College London . From there, 18 years young student was in April 1940 as one of the women at Bletchley Park (BP) in the services of the 70 km northwest of London situated GC & CS recruited. From her new boss, the well-known codebreaker Dillwyn Knox (1884–1943), who was called “Dilly” by everyone, she received the usual brief greeting, which also had to serve as an introduction to the new task: “Hello, we're breaking machines. Have you got a pencil? Here, have a go. "(" Hello, we're breaking machines. Do you have a pencil? Here, try it out. ")

When she analyzed an Italian radio message in 1941, she was given a special feeling of happiness as a “ code breaker ”. It came from the Italian Navy, which used the German Enigma machine for encryption ( model K with changed wiring of the rollers ). Mavis Lever recognized that the ciphertext did not contain the letter "L" once, and intuitively and correctly concluded that it was a " filling phrase " that did not contain any meaningful text, but only " Blender " and was used for this purpose to simulate radio activity to the opponent and to occupy him with senseless cryptanalysis . Mavis also suspected due to the missing "L" in the saying and the well-known property of the Enigma that a letter can never be encrypted in itself ("Nothing is ever itself") that the author of the radio message conveniently called on the keyboard of the Enigma had chosen the letters at the bottom right in order to generate the filling phrase as simply as possible.

The Abwehr's Enigma G had a special set of rollers and a rotating reversing roller

He presented Mavis Lever with an extremely long crib ("probable word") and thus allowed her to analyze the operation of the machine and the wiring of the rollers extremely precisely. This knowledge led her to decipher another Italian radio message on March 25, 1941, in which she correctly assumed the Crib SUPERMARINA (Italian term for the then high command of the Regia Marina , i.e. the Italian Navy) and to which she received the message “Oggi 25 marzo est giorno X-3 ”(“ Today, March 25th, is the day X minus three ”). In fact, only three days later, on March 28, 1941, their decipherments contributed significantly to the victory of the Royal Navy over the Italian fleet in the sea ​​battle at Cape Matapan . Her achievement helped the Commander-in-Chief of the British Naval Forces in the Mediterranean, Admiral Andrew Cunningham , to success in one of the most important naval battles of World War II.

On December 8, 1941, Mavis made another important breakthrough in cryptanalysis. Under the direction of "Dilly" Knox and together with her colleague Margaret Rock, she "cracked" a message encrypted by the German Abwehr (secret service) using a special Enigma model (G) for the first time . She said: "Nothing equals the sight of a cracked encryption, it really is the best of the best." (In the English original: "There is nothing like seeing a code broken, that is really the absolute tops.")

Your boss very much appreciated the work of his two capable employees, who were highly respected in BP as "Dilly's girls", and praised them with the words: "Give me a lever and a rock and I will move the universe." me a lever and a rock , and I'll move the universe ", as a play on the surnames of his two co-workers: Lever means lever and rock means rock, also read as" Give me a lever and a rock , and I will become the universe move ”- with unquestionable reference to the quote attributed to Archimedes on his law of leverage :“ Give me a fixed point and I will turn the world off its hinges ”).

In November 1942, Mavis Lever married her fiancé Keith Batey , who worked in Hut 6 , the neighboring organizational unit of BP, which, under the direction of Gordon Welchman and his deputy Conel Hugh O'Donel Alexander , was responsible for the deciphering of the German army and of the Air Force dealt with the Enigma I encrypted radio messages. She has been called Mavis Batey ever since .

After the Second World War, Mavis worked for many decades as a writer and was involved in the Garden History Society , a British institution that deals with the history of gardening and cares for the preservation of historic gardens. For her services there she was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal in 1985. In 1987 she was also accepted as a Member (MBE) of the Order of the British Empire . Still in 2011, two years before her death, she continued her former boss, the puns so loved, a literary monument with the biography "Dilly - The Man Who Broke Enigmas" ( German  "Dilly - The man who Enigma broke"; but can also be read as: "The man who solved riddles " ).

Mavis died at the age of 92, three years after her husband Keith, and had three children.

Fonts

  • Mavis Batey: From Bletchley with Love 1968.
  • Mavis Batey: Alice's Adventures in Oxford . Pitkin Pictorials, 1980, ISBN 978-0-85372-295-3 .
  • Mavis Batey: Oxford Gardens: the university's influence on garden history 1982.
  • Mavis Batey: Nuneham Courtenay: An Oxfordshire 18th-century Deserted Village 1983.
  • Mavis Batey: Reader's Digest Guide to Creative Gardening 1984.
  • Mavis Batey: The Historic Gardens of Oxford & Cambridge 1989.
  • Mavis Batey, David Lambert: The English Garden Tour - A View Into the Past . John Murray , 1990, ISBN 978-0-7195-4775-1 .
  • Mavis Batey: Horace Walpole as Modern Garden Historian 1991.
  • Mavis Batey: Regency Gardens . Shire Books, 1995, ISBN 978-0-7478-0289-1 .
  • Mavis Batey: Story of the Privy Garden at Hampton Court 1995.
  • Mavis Batey: Jane Austen and the English Landscape 1996.
  • Mavis Batey: The World of Alice 1998.
  • Mavis Batey: Alexander Pope: The Poet and the Landscape . Barn Elm, 1999, ISBN 978-1-899531-05-9 .
  • Mavis Batey: Dilly: The Man Who Broke Enigmas 2011, ISBN 978-1-906447-15-1 .
  • Mavis Batey: The Gardens of William and Mary .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ BP Roll of Honor (PDF; 138 kB) Accessed: June 9, 2011.
  2. ↑ Interview with Mavis from January 24, 2008 ( Memento from June 17, 2012 in the Internet Archive ). Accessed: March 26, 2010.
  3. ↑ Mavis Batey -obituary , accessed on 13 October 2014
  4. ↑ Michael Smith: Enigma decrypted - The "Codebreakers" by Bletchley Park . Heyne, 2000, p. 67. ISBN 3-453-17285-X
  5. ↑ Gordon Welchman: The Hut Six Story - Breaking the Enigma Codes . Allen Lane, London 1982; Cleobury Mortimer M&M, Baldwin Shropshire 2000, p. 11. ISBN 0-947712-34-8
  6. ^ Hugh Sebag-Montefiore: Enigma - The battle for the code . Cassell Military Paperbacks, London 2004, p. 118. ISBN 0-304-36662-5
  7. ↑ Women Code Breakers - Forgotten by History.Retrieved June 11, 2015.
  8. ↑ Michael Smith: Enigma decrypted - The "Codebreakers" by Bletchley Park . Heyne, 2000, p. 88. ISBN 3-453-17285-X
  9. ↑ Robert Harris: Enigma . Novel. Weltbild, Augsburg 2005, p. 71. ISBN 3-89897-119-8
  10. ^ Hugh Sebag-Montefiore: Enigma - The battle for the code . Cassell Military Paperbacks, London 2004, p. 121. ISBN 0-304-36662-5
  11. ^ Hugh Sebag-Montefiore: Enigma - The battle for the code . Cassell Military Paperbacks, London 2004, pp. 118 ff. ISBN 0-304-36662-5
  12. ↑ Friedrich L. Bauer: Deciphered secrets. Methods and maxims of cryptology. 3rd, revised and expanded edition. Springer, Berlin et al. 2000, p. 457.
  13. ^ Hugh Sebag-Montefiore: Enigma - The battle for the code . Cassell Military Paperbacks, London 2004, p. 130. ISBN 0-304-36662-5
  14. ^ Hugh Sebag-Montefiore: Enigma - The battle for the code . Cassell Military Paperbacks, London 2004, p. 129. ISBN 0-304-36662-5
  15. ↑ Michael Smith: Enigma decrypted - The "Codebreakers" by Bletchley Park . Heyne, 2000, p. 58. ISBN 3-453-17285-X
  16. ↑ Mind of a Codebreaker from NOVA Online, accessed on October 13, 2017
  17. ↑ Mavis Batey: Dilly Knox - A Reminiscence of this Pioneer Enigma Cryptanalyst. Cryptologia , Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia PA 32.2008,2, p. 124.
  18. ^ Hugh Sebag-Montefiore: Enigma - The battle for the code . Cassell Military Paperbacks, London 2004, p. 119. ISBN 0-304-36662-5
personal data
SURNAME Lever, Mavis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lever, Mavis Lillian (full name); Batey, Mavis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British cryptanalyst and author
DATE OF BIRTH May 5, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Dulwich , a borough of London
DATE OF DEATH November 12, 2013
PLACE OF DEATH Bognor Regis , West Sussex