I have noticed an increased interest in puzzle caches among some active cachers in our area lately. That got me thinking that maybe it was time to try a new puzzle that I have always wanted to do!
I know I am losing some of you already and this one is already going on your IGNORE list…...but WAIT!! Let me finish……I am going to try to make this one as painless as I possible can. Everything that you need to solve this one is located on this page. So let me introduce you to my newest puzzle!
The Enigma Machine
An Enigma machine is any of a family of related electro-mechanical rotor machines used for the encryption and decryption of secret messages. The first Enigma was invented by German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I. This model and its variants were used commercially from the early 1920s, and adopted by military and government services of several countries—most notably by Nazi Germany before and during World War II. A range of Enigma models were produced, but the German military model, the Wehrmacht Enigma, is the version most commonly discussed.
The machine has become well-known because, during World War II, Polish and British code breakers were able to decrypt a vast number of messages which had been enciphered using the Enigma. The intelligence gleaned from this source, codenamed ULTRA by the British, was a substantial aid to the Allied war effort. The exact influence of ULTRA on the course of the war is debated; an oft-repeated assessment is that decryption of German ciphers hastened the end to the European war by two years.
Though the Enigma cipher had cryptographic weaknesses, in practice it was only in combination with other factors (procedural flaws, operator mistakes, occasional captured hardware and key tables, etc.) that those weaknesses allowed Allied cryptographers to crypto analyze so many messages.
Now on to your puzzle!!
Cipher Text:
JCWHF HIXFG RIBYS APTGE NSHZW
COLRO TNZVW ROXHC SHBIF NFESJ
GKTUJ KSLNP QYAJI UGDQX QCLDP
CYNVH MKIDD CYSGC PSJSO XUNYT
YRNIX WRBUF PHNYZ FUQGP QOGBL
ENWIC SFWCJ KDPZG WPAAB WKWMY
BKBPY DFBPY HBMKW BOPNN GOOQN
LSVWJ GJ
Some Potentially Useful Information:
Enigma Machine Visit Link
Machine Type: Wehrmacht
Umkehrwalze: C
Walzenlage: V II IV
Ringstellung: 26 06 23
Steckerverlendungen: BO AT QM WG KZ EV JH YN CS XI
Message Grundstellung: LMR
If you solved this puzzle you now have the coordinates. The cache is a SKL and will be an easy find, free of muggles. I hope that in working on this puzzle you have some feel for the complexity of the Enigma machine. Please consider the task faced by the Allied cryptanalysis. They routinely broke similar messages without any of the information that I have given you. If you are not in absolute awe of this achievement, then you don’t understand the magnitude of the problem they faced.