Academic literature on the topic 'The Endless Column'

This chapter follows events in the lives of Colson and his neighbors from the fall of 1789 through the summer of 1791. It takes note of the continuing moments of enthusiasm and joy, with the king’s short speech in the National Assembly in February 1790, followed by patriotic oaths throughout the city; and the Festival of Federation on July 14 of that year, the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. But it also examines the periods of fear and suspicion, notably from the perceived crime wave in Paris throughout this period; the women’s march to Versailles in October 1789; the endless rumors of aristocratic conspiracies to destroy the Revolution; and king Louis XVI’s attempted flight with his family in June 1791. The chapter ends with an account of the brutal repression of citizens attempting to draw up a petition in favor of a republic, known as the “Massacre of the Champ de Mars.”

Abstract On 30 January 1933 an official government announcement made public President Hindenburg’s decision to appoint Adolf Hitler chancellor of the German Reich. In the last hours and days preceding this move, the forces favoring democracy attempted to block the slide into dictatorship by any means at their disposal. For the German labor movement, this entailed a recourse to its traditional means of public demonstrations and parades. The most notable protest action occurred in the capital city of Berlin. One day prior to Hitler’s rise to power, on 29 January 1933, the “Iron Front,” an antifascist coalition of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the German General Trade Union Federation and the SPD’s paramilitary group, the Reichs banner, organized mass demonstrations in the streets of Berlin. The plan was to arrange for a series of feeder marches in various locations throughout that city which were, in turn, to converge on the central Lustgarten for a closing rally. The outpouring of support was truly overwhelming. Even before the feeder marches got off to a start in the working-class suburbs of Berlin, it became obvious that the response sur passed all expectations. Each assembly point turned into the scene of massive demonstrations comprising tens of thousands of protesters. A sea of banners, red flags and other symbols of opposition to the course of the German government added its own distinctive note of determinacy to this last-ditch effort to avert catastrophe. Around noon, the protests began to move toward the city center. Songs and music accompanied the endless columns streaming through the busy streets. Long before the speeches began, the central Lustgarten was filled to the brim, and the continuously advancing marchers were directed toward neighboring open spaces and streets.

Once the bombes got going, they made a massive electromechanical attack on the Enigma’s daily-changing key. But with limited numbers of bombes, the demand on them had to be minimized. For the Naval Enigma, Hut 8 used a cryptanalytic process called ‘Banburismus’ to reduce the amount of processing that the bombes had to do. Banburismus was largely a manual process—although with a vital contribution from the cardsorting machines in the Hollerith section—and employed a handful of the best cryptanalysts, with a large supporting team of WRNS (‘Wrens’) and civilian ‘girls’. The startling recent discovery of Banburies in the roof of Hut 6 at Bletchley Park adds a new twist to the story. There is much high drama in the story of breaking and reading Enigma:… • the secret meeting of British and French cryptanalysts with their Polish counterparts outside Warsaw in late July 1939 (see Chapter 11) • Colonel Stewart Menzies (later to be ‘C’, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service) waiting at London’s Victoria Station in mid-August 1939, in evening dress and with the Légion d’honneur rosette in his buttonhole, to receive a Polish-made replica Enigma machine from the French Intelligence’s Gustave Bertrand • the Royal Navy’s Anthony Fasson and Colin Grazier of HMS Petard kick-restarting the reading of U-boat Enigma in October 1942 when Hut 8 had been shut out of it for ten months, their gallantry commemorated by posthumous George Crosses for securing Enigma materials from the sinking U-559 at the cost of their lives • some two hundred purpose-built bombes clicking away endlessly at Bletchley Park and its outstations (see Chapter 12)…. At first sight, the quaintly named ‘Banburismus’ component of breaking Enigma offered no high drama. Both the mathematics it was based on and the technology of its application dated back some two hundred years to the eighteenth century. Yet the handful of cryptanalysts and supporting ‘girls’ who employed Banburismus—building on Alan Turing’s genius and carried forward by Hugh Alexander’s leadership and ingenuity in method—multiplied in manifold ways the quantity of naval intelligence that those bombes could produce.