It was 1944, the World was at WAR . . .
and my Uncle Bill was serving with the US Army in Europe, having arrived in England with the 329th Infantry Regiment, 83th Infantry Division, eventually landing on Omaha Beach in June of 1944.
While fighting his way through the villages of France, he chanced upon some German documents in a dilapidated farmhouse that had recently been utilized by the Germans as a forward command post. As he browsed through the materials left behind, he came across a few curious documents written in German, and thought that they would make a fine memento of his experiences in this strange and dangerous land. Somehow, he managed to send the documents home to his parents and sister in the United States.
Since none of his family could read German, the documents were placed with Uncle Bill's other items to await his return from the war. Unfortunately, while fighting to capture the town of Châteauneuf-d'Ille-et-Vilaine, 5 August 1944, Uncle Bill became one more casualty of a war that resulted in the death of well over sixty million people world wide and his body rests in a military cemtery in France.
The documents remained in the possession first of his parents, and then his sister, coming eventually into the hands of his nephew. The nephew had in interest in codes and ciphers and realized that if a certain device could be located it would be possible to decode the message left behind in that abandoned farmhouse so many years ago, and to understand why the message required encryption by one the most sophisticated cryptographic devices of the time. The device is available if you are resourceful enough to locate it, and if you have the skills and perseverance to understand its use, a hard won victory will be yours.
During the war, allied code breakers labored to crack the code and eventually were able to read large portions of the German messages being transmitted to the troops in the field and ships of the German navy. You have one huge advantage not possessed by the code breakers of the Polish Cipher Bureau and the cryptanalysts Bletchley Park: When Uncle Bill was gathering his mementos, one of the pages he managed to secure, its significance almost certainly unbeknownst to him, was the page from the German code book provided below.
The story of the message and its origin is a mixture of fact and fiction but a geocache, in fact, awaits at the coordinates encrypted by this remarkable and ingenious machine.
Cache is available dawn to dusk only!