[OT] WWII code 'may never be cracked'

[Kay C Lan]

Ah, so that's what happened to the pigeon with the back-up written order.

The first and last designators (OKAKN) simply indicate the beginning and
the end of the message. It was a way of ensuring entire messages were
received. The 27 is the character count, including the start and stop
indicators - to ensure if you had 4 halves of a message you put the correct
halves together. The message was sent at 1525 on the 6th. Pigeons normally
took less than a day to deliver from Germany to the UK so you knew what
month and year it was.

Each 5 digits represents a letter and the codes rotate so the same code
never represented the same letter. The date and time was important to know
so you knew which code sequence to start at.

To further encode the message and speed up the process there are no spaces,
punctuation or vowels, unless they appeared in pairs in the original
message, in which case only the first vowel would be included unless the
end of one word ended in a vowel and the start of the next word started
with a vowel; in which case both vowels were included.

The message is:

sndrenfrcmntswrgngtoadvnc

Poor sods, if only the pigeon had got through disaster would have been
averted.

[Pity it isn't the beginning of April, this would have been so much better.
Decoding messages is easy when you can't prove what the orginal said and
you can write the rules yourself.]

Tongue in cheek aside, my grandfather was responsible for carrier pigeons
during WW2, and he kept racing pigeons for many many years after. For those
who don't know, a carrier pigeon is faster than broadband Internet:

http://phys.org/news171883994.html

I just wish my grandfather had been around to witness it, he would have
been chuffed.