Yes, every rotor was wired identically, meaning every I rotor was the same, every II rotor was the same, etc., up to rotor XIII. So every German unit that had an Enigma machine had 8 rotors numbered I through XIII (using Heer as an example), and every III rotor was wired the same as every other III rotor, and so on.
But the message settings included: rotor number and order, initial external setting (which was different for each message and was determined by the sending operator) and internal setting (electrical offset) for each of the 3 rotors, and plugboard settings. If a rotor IV in a given unit got a broken wire, and rotor IV was the middle or leftmost rotor of the day and the initial position of rotor IV happened to be the letter that was broken, you probably couldn't decrypt any messages you received that day. You would either have to repair the broken rotor or get another good one somehow. So I'm wondering if each unit had two sets of rotors, for this possibility.
And I imagine that repairing a broken rotor was beyond the capability of field units.
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8 years ago
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shepherd-26
8 years ago
I have to wonder what happened to the other 35,500 and all the rotors thereof!
I have read that Hitler ordered them all destroyed, like Bletchley destroyed the bombes.
I'm sure replacement for faulty rotors would be no problem for large enough military field units as they would I'm sure carry well-secured duplicates
I have also read that Germany assumed that the allies would obtain access to the Enigma machine, and presumably its rotors. That was a correct assumption. Sometimes Enigma machines were rescued from sinking uboats, but Bletchley already had a machine a knew how it worked. A much more valuable discovery was the monthly sheet of daily keys. Sometimes (but rarely) that happened and that certainly made the codebreakers job easier (for that month at least).
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huwdj
8 years ago
I read somewhere that quite few Enigma machines ended up being used by other nations for diplomatic traffic. Meanwhile Britain was supposed to have several Colossus machines chugging away in Cheltenham reading said traffic. Who knows, apart from selected spooks, there might still be the odd machine tucked away in some dusty corner.
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