Impact of Revealing the Ultra Secret

I read a paper, The Historical Impact of Revealing the Ultra Secret by Dr Harold C. Deutsch.

It was published in 1977, in Parameters, Journal of the US Army War College. It was Approved for public release; distribution unlimited

I read this paper because, as a sci fi fan, I’ve read Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon twice. From this one book, I know that the USA and UK cracking German and Japanese codes and ciphers during WW2 was the way the war was won.

Naturally, when I happened upon a paper that promised to grapple with the effect of having deciphered German communications, I jumped on it. It was a decent read, focusing on what effects knowing a lot of what the Nazis were communicating might have had on the European conflict portion of WW2. Cryptonomicon spends a lot of time on the Pacific theater, Deutsch doesn’t touch that at all.

Deutsch seems to have a thesis, that the ULTRA deciphering of Nazi Germany’s Enigma machine had a major effect on how WW2 turned out, at least in what he calls the “middle part” of the war, summer 1940 - summer 1943. He doesn’t seem to want to say that outright. Instead he wrote a bunch of coy, academic rubbish like

It remains for history to determine whether or not the latter deserves credit as having played the most decisive role, but it appears at least plausible that this will be the ultimate verdict.

Deutsch also uses the word “avers” multiple times in the paper. It’s kind of jarring.

As far a Cryptonomicon goes, this paper may be the inspiration for Stephenson’s heavyweight 1999 novel. There’s “new and far deadlier submarines”. madmen working as if possessed to crack ciphers, the British secret of radar, ULTRA people having to “concoct cover stories” to avoid inadvertent disclosures that Enigma could be deciphered. The major plot devices of Cryptonomicon are present in this paper, but you have to have read the book to see them. They’re not prominently displayed. Deutsch died in 1995, so he did not get to read Cryptonomicon.

Deutsch did anticipate James “Kibo” Parry by many years:

There is no more effective device for compelling reluctant people to write or talk than to compose something they regard as iniquitous or false that is then welcomed with popular acclaim.

If that’s not the essence of Kibo’s high-brow trolling, I don’t know what is.

Official citation

Harold C. Deutsch, “THE HISTORICAL IMPACT OF REVEALING THE ULTRA SECRET,” Parameters 7, no. 1 (1977), doi:10.55540/0031-1723.1102.

Parameters

The journal in which this paper was published, Parameters, bills itself as

a refereed forum for contemporary strategy and Landpower issues. It furthers the education and professional development of senior military officers and members of government and academia concerned with national security affairs.

Strange sort of journal, for a strange institution. The US Army War College is a postgraduate degree-granting institution of higher learning, run by the US Army.

Typography

To the modern eye, accustomed to two-column papers typeset with modern typesetting systems like TeX, or at the very worst, Microsoft Word, the paper is rough going. The text is justified. It has quite a few bizarrely spaced lines, like the third and fifth lines of this excerpt:

There’s also a few examples of whatever typesetting system they used in 1977 transcending the bounds of kerning and spacing good practices:

The spacing of “far deadlier” distracts me.

They might actually have used a Linotype machine to typeset the magazine. The last newspaper to print with a Linotype did so until 2023. I think. The Army War College may have used some kind of computer typesetting system. The Unix troff typesetting system was certainly available by 1977. Mike Lesk wrote Typing Documents on Unix, which constituted a troff manual, in 1974.

These typesetting oddities really remind me of troff typeset documents. The author biography block quite closely resembles those of Bell Labs papers of the 1970s and 80s, as well. I remember fiddling with troff input in the mid-to-late 1980s to get rid of goofy between-word and between-character spacings.

The Impact of the author on consideration of this paper

Dr Harold C. Deutsch is important enough to have his own Wikipedia page.

The article’s author bio has Deutsch as a teacher at the US Army War College, beginning in 1974. He’s got a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from University of Wisconsin, and a master’s and a PhD from Harvard. His wikipedia page has him with much, much more education.

A polished academic, he had spent 1971-73 at the National War College, and was on the faculty of University of Minnesota, chair of the department of history, 1960-66. By 1938, when Deutsch was 34, he’d written and published a weighty tome on Napoleonic Europe.

I wish there was a more consolidated timeline for Deutsch. He was born in 1904, so he was 14 when WW1 ended. He didn’t see combat in the trenches. He would have started college in 1922 or 23, something of a boom time for the US, and finished his bachelor’s before the Great Depression. He had to have been in grad school during that depression. He was 37 or 38 when WW2 started.

He was “chief of the Political Subdivision for Europe, Africa and the Middle East” of the Office of Strategic Services" during WW2. How did a died-in-the-wool academic get into that kind of position? East coast boy’s club sort of thing? What frat was he in at Wisconsin? History demands to know!

The OSS was a precursor to the CIA. As near as I can tell from Wikipedia, OSS was a big spy agency during WW2, and also did dirty tricks, like propaganda and subversion. It must have been kind of weird to have him as a college professor. That OSS work also throws the whole paper in a different light: Deutsch was clearly in a position to know about how intelligence from ULTRA influenced things. But how much did the CIA have a hold on him in 1977? Did that change what he wrote in this paper? Once you know about how the US intelligence community functions, it’s kind of hard to decide what’s true and what’s deliberate lies, what’s good and what’s rubbish that was secretly promoted as good, for arcane reasons.