3

 

Britain Takes Over the Cryptologic War

 

 

Britain's cryptanalysts were busily making up for their years of halfhearted attempts to crack the machine. The Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS)—a deliberately understated title—was moved out of crowded and bomb-vulnerable London. For its new home, the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, eccentric millionaire Hugh Sinclair, had purchased the Bletchley Park estate in the town of Bletchley, a homely manufacturing and railway hub fifty miles to the northwest in Buckinghamshire. In August 1939, Alastair Denniston, picked by Sinclair to head up GC&CS, had investigated the accommodations at Bletchley Park. Even though the mansion was an architectural monstrosity, Denniston saw that the Park had other virtues. Chief among them was that it was located on a main rail line out of London and another line that connected Bletchley to both Oxford and Cambridge. Convinced, he made BP the GC&CS headquarters just before England was plunged into war against Germany.

British progress in cryptology owes much to Denniston. During the Great War, he was a bright young man in Britain's Room 40. He could have pursued a much more lucrative career elsewhere, but he stayed with the agency. With World War II approaching, he led the way in making changes that proved critical to BP's success. He realized, as the Poles had a decade earlier, that the new cryptology demanded different mind-sets, individuals with advanced mathematical skills, puzzle solvers, chess players, bridge addicts. He began tracking down such individuals, mainly in Cambridge and Oxford, and recruiting them. He launched a cryptography course to begin their training. Most important, he was a persuasive advocate for having most of Britain's cryptologic program centered in Bletchley. He knew that the kind of brains that excel in cryptanalysis are not common, and to have them joined in collaboration at one place was a distinct advantage. The Germans had bright analysts, but there were so many chiefs contending for Hitler's favor, with each zealously guarding his own turf, that the available brainpower was too fragmented ever to mount a coherent and consistent codebreaking program.

Denniston was not particular about his recruits' backgrounds. He combed the military; he used his old-boy contacts among the universities; he brought in civilians; he tapped the Wrens (Women's Royal Navy Service) and Waafs (Women's Auxiliary Air Force) for legions of young women. BP became a melting pot of cryptologic expertise. When the war began, three of Britain's master chess players were attending an international Chess Olympiad in Buenos Aires. They promptly caught the blacked-out, unconvoyed Alcantara for home and joined Denniston's team at Bletchley.

GC&CS denizens formed a society ruled by meritocracy. Military rank didn't count. No saluting or other military hocus-pocus was tolerated. Everybody went by first names or nicknames. The only way to gain respect was by doing a superlative piece of work.

Most brilliant, and most eccentric, of the lot was Alan Turing. He had a strange and wonderful combination of talents: he was a mathematical and theoretical genius, yet he could descend from his visionary cloud to become the most practical mechanic. To look back at those times is to marvel at how fortuitous it was that this man became the pivotal figure in the conquest of the Enigma.

Turing's powerful and independent mind made him, as a schoolboy, intolerant of conventional classroom teaching. Frequently he neglected regular studies because his real attention was given to probing advanced mathematical theorems on his own. Adding to his drive to excel was his memory of an ardent friendship with a fellow student, Christopher Morcom. When Morcom died of tuberculosis while still in school, Turing resolved to achieve what he believed his friend would have achieved if he had lived.

Morcom had won a scholarship to Cambridge. Turing followed suit by attending Cambridge and being elected to a fellowship at the university's King's College when he was twenty-two. He was also sure Morcom would have sought stimulus by searching out the university's outstanding academic scions. Turing was strongly influenced, first, by David Hilbert, who raised the question, did there exist a definitive method which could, in principle, be applied to any mathematical assertion and produce a correct decision as to whether it was provable? Hilbert believed there was no such thing as an unsolvable mathematical problem.

The second Cambridge lecturer who most influenced Turing's thinking was Maxwell H. A. "Max" Newman, who asked if there wasn't a mechanical process that could put mathematical theorems to the test.

From this point on, Turing—in the words of his biographer Andrew Hodges—"dreamed of machines." In the early summer of 1935, when he was just twenty-three years old, he saw his answer. He created a theoretical "universal machine"—afterward known as the Turing machine—that could, by using the binary system that later became the basis for digital computers, replicate logical human thought. The Turing machine could also write a verdict as to whether a specific assertion was or was not provable. This, together with his work on determining computable versus non-computable numbers, proved Hilbert wrong: there could be unsolvable problems.

The world of advanced mathematics was then centered in Princeton, New Jersey. There men such as Albert Einstein, Alonzo Church and Kurt Godel provided leadership in probing into mathematical unknowns. In 1936, Turing went to Princeton University and benefited from exchanging ideas with the older masters. While there he indulged both his theoretical and his mechanical bents in, as though by predestination, cryptology. He worked on a cryptographic system for which he needed an electrical multiplier. To build it he had to construct his own electrical relays.

Princeton Ph.D. in hand, and his multiplier in his luggage, Turing returned to Britain in July 1938 and soon afterward wound up at Bletchley Park. There, in the summer of 1939, spirits were animated by the knowledge that the Poles had broken the Enigma. Turing led BP's attack.

To him the German machine was a practical application of his theoretical machines. The Poles were right: to defeat the Enigma required counter-Enigmas. Yet the Poles were also wrong: their machines attacked the German machine through the message key indicators, and in his estimation, that was not the right way to go as indicators could be changed overnight, sending the codebreakers back to square one.

With astonishing speed Turing created an English bombe that took little from the Poles except the machine's name. Turing's bombe passed over the indicators; it sought to extract the key from the message itself.

 

 

Turing and Welchman Team Up

 

Brilliant as he was, to make his bombe effective, Turing had to have help from a colleague, Gordon Welchman. A lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge, Welchman had a frustrating time when he first came to Bletchley Park. Denniston assigned him to join Dilly Knox's small group at work in the BP building known as the Cottage. But Knox seemed to take a dislike to him and banished him to another building. There Welchman was told to study some German army messages and draw whatever information and patterns he could through an external examination. Welchman soon went beyond those parameters. On his own he realized the vulnerability of the double enciphering of the message key and independently evolved an equivalent of the Zygalski Sheets. When he reported his work to Knox, Welchman was dismayed to find that he had simply been duplicating the efforts of another BP associate and Cambridge alumnus, John Jeffreys, who had produced Bletchley's version of the Polish sheets.

Welchman's fortunes changed when he teamed up with Turing. Turing's approach to cracking the Enigma was to work with "cribs," or what Welchman called the "probable words" in a message. Since military parlance was highly standardized and repetitious, one could presume that certain words or phrases would appear in the text. The Poles had made rudimentary use of the technique by searching for messages that began with ANX. Turing meant to use his bombes to carry the method much further by finding longer passages embedded in the message itself.

The British were aided, as the Poles had been, by German overconfidence in the security of their machine. The Germans could have made the use of cribs far more difficult if not impossible. All they needed to do was to add random bits of nonsense into their message beginnings and/or endings, or to insert Xs into long words, or to translate officers' titles into coded references—any such steps would have prevented accurate cribs from being applied. But they remained punctilious about spelling out honorifics and titles, and they continued to use repetitive phrases without any masking.

Turing's bombe, possessing the power of at least twelve Polish bombes, was designed to run an automatic test to determine whether a specific crib was contained in the message. He, however, had a limited view of what could be obtained even when his bombe succeeded. Essentially, he meant to look for the same sorts of closed letter loops that had been at the center of the Poles' technology. Turing's loops, however, had the great advantage of being drawn from cribs within the message rather than from its indicator. His bombe used the loops to detect incorrect positions and, by rejecting them, to arrive at the correct settings.

When it was built, though, this first bombe did not work well. To seek out merely small strings of letters did not produce enough rejections. There were many "Stops" that were found to be false only by hand testing. It was a slow and uncertain process.

Then Turing showed his plans to Welchman. In a flash of inspiration, Welchman saw that they didn't have to settle for closed loops. "By interconnecting the scramblers in a completely new way," he wrote in his memoir, The Hut Six Story, "one could increase the effectiveness of the automatic test by a very large number."

His new method involved adding to Turing's bombe the circuitry of what Welchman called a "diagonal board"—a matrix of terminals in a square in which the twenty-six letters of the alphabet were arranged horizontally, with another twenty-six vertically. His scheme capitalized on the reciprocal nature of the Enigma's plugboard connections. That is, if A is connected with Z and becomes Z in the encipherment, then the reverse is also true: Zbecomes A. His change ruled out false stops that the plugboards could make in Turing's bombe. The insertion of the diagonal board, as Welchman described it, "greatly reduced the number of runs that would be needed to insure success in breaking an Enigma key by means of a crib."

Turing, Welchman wrote, was incredulous at first, "but when he had studied my diagram he agreed that the idea would work, and became as excited about it as I was."

Turing's earlier design had guided the British Tabulating Machine Company in producing the first BP bombe. Now an improved design incorporating Welchman's diagonal board was put into production. The conversion benefited from Turing's mechanical bent. To do their required switching jobs, the bombes needed fast-working electrical relays. Turing drew from his electric multiplier to suggest designs for the bombes.

Patricia Bing, a teletypist who worked for Turing, later recalled how fellow workers at BP quickly adjusted to the unconventional ways of the man they began referring to as "the Prof." They understood that Turing thought little of his appearance or the impression he made. His clothes were a mess; his chewed-up fingernails most often had crescents of dirt beneath them; he could show up at BP entirely unaware that he was wearing two odd shoes. To control his allergies in pollen season he donned a gas mask when riding his bike. The bike had a bad habit of periodically throwing its chain; instead of taking the time to fix it he would count off the number of revolutions and stop just in time to make an adjustment. Bing remembered seeing Turing arrive on his bike and then "scuttle past us giggling girls, eyes downcast, as though in fear he might have to speak to one of us before he disappeared into his office." The papers he wrote and the designs he produced were made almost unintelligible by scratch-outs and inkblots. When invasion threatened, he melted down a collection of silver coins into ingots, buried them and then, when the crisis had passed and it was time to dig them up, could not remember where they were buried.

In the hunt to unlock the Enigma, though, the Germans never dreamed they would be up against a man of Turing's genius. In those few months between the outbreak of the war and early 1940, he had analyzed the machine, discerned the chinks in its supposedly impenetrable armor and, with Welchman's help, devised the countermeasures that would defeat it.

Months must pass, however, before the redesigned bombes, with all their thousands of soldered connections, would be available. How were the codebreakers to achieve at least partial success in the meantime?

British patience and meticulous attention to detail came to the rescue. GC&CS analysts had been studying the habits of German Enigma operators and had found two subtle mistakes that could be exploited.

The first became known as "Herivel's tip," after John Herivel, a young mathematician recruited by Welchman. Much like Rejewski, Herivel tried to put himself into the shoes of a German code clerk and imagine what the operator might do incorrectly because of laziness or work pressure. Herivel had an insight. At the beginning of each new encoding day, the German operator had a boring series of steps he had to go through. Following instructions, he must choose the correct set of three rotors out of the five available, slide the rotors in proper sequence onto the axle, turn their alphabet rings to the required positions and link up the proper arrangement of the plugboard cables. Then he was supposed to select three random letters for his message key. It was all a big bother. Suppose, Herivel asked himself, the lazy or hurried operator didn't take that final step? Suppose he sent his first message of the day using the same three letters as his rotor ring settings? Herivel suggested collecting the new day's first messages. If there was more than one shortcutting operator, there would be repeats—and the rotor settings could be surmised.

The second sloppy practice consisted of what BP labeled "cillis." The name may have been derived from the initials of one German clerk's girlfriend, which he used often instead of randomizing his three-letter selections. That was one type of cilli—the repeated use of familiar sequences, such as HIT and LER. Another form was supplied by German operators who, instead of plucking their three letters out of the air, simply lifted them from their keyboards. A sequence down from the Q key read QAY. One down from PFread WSX. Although these practices were expressly for bidden in the Enigma operators' manuals, lazy or rushed code clerks did resort to them, and from these cillis BP's clever analysts could determine the wheel order for the day as well as the setting for these particular messages. "Unbelievable?" Welchman wrote. "Yet it actually happened, and it went on happening until the bombes came, many months later."

Using these and similar ingenious methods, the BP crew early in 1940 began deciphering the Luftwaffe messages known as Red because that was the color of the pencil Welchman used to demark it from other systems.

By then it had been decided that Welchman and Turing would divide the main Enigma decrypting responsibilities between them. Welchman had moved into Hut 6, one of the wooden structures hastily erected on the park's grounds, and took over its operation when the young John Jeffreys became terminally ill. Welchman's team concerned itself with breaking German air force and army traffic, then passed the decrypts on to Hut 3. There, another team translated them, judged their importance and urgency and determined where they should be disseminated. Turing was responsible for Hut 8, heading up work on the naval Enigma signals, with Hut 4 as his analysis center.

When the bombes arrived in August 1940, allowing cribs to be put to use, the Hut 6 team simply accelerated the breaking of the Red cipher. It was of particular value because it was used in army/air force coordination and disclosed information about both services.

German Enigma operators continued their inadvertent cooperation. Each month, for example, the operators had to create new sheets covering the next month's ring settings, rotor orders and plugboard connections. One German operator decided he could save himself much work by simply rearranging blocks of settings from previous months' key sheets. Having broken those of the previous months, BP could quickly break the new settings.

In North Africa's Qattara Depression, a bored German officer reported every day the same message, "Nichts zu melden"—"Nothing new to report"—giving Welchman and his team a ready-made crib for solving the new Enigma setup.

The Britons' attention to detail steadily paid dividends. In her self-published book, England Needs You, about her life at Britain's Beaumanor intercept station, Joan Nicholls has told of two Germans, either friends or relatives, who served as code clerks at different stations in a panzer division network. They would end each of their messages to each other with the smallest of flourishes. One would sign off with "—••—", or X; the other would answer with "— —", M. It was, Nicholls wrote, "such a small transgression on their part, but we were able to log these two and, of course, the whereabouts of their unit, from North Africa through Sicily, Italy, France and finally into Germany."

The bombes quickly proved their worth. The Wren operators of a bombe would receive a "menu" of settings phoned to them from BP and set the rotors accordingly. The bombe would whir through its rounds, testing a Luftwaffe message. When it came to a Stop, this indicated that all the links on a menu were confirmed. From a successful Stop, the GC&CS team could determine the order in which the three rotors had been placed as well as the three letters which were the settings for the alphabet rings on the rotors. One of the Wrens would check out the settings on her replica Enigma. If German text appeared, and a member of the overseeing watch approved, the exultant cry would ring out: "Red's up!" The operators would then await their next menu.

Mechanically, the bombes were a bit tetchy. The stiff wire brushes on each rotor that connected the two sets of contacts could, in use, widen and cause the machine to short out. Before each run the Wrens applied tweezers to reposition each wire correctly. RAF mechanics also appeared, either regularly or on emergency call, to repair the bombes. With these measures of correction, the machines operated around the clock, week after week, month after month. With the Tabulating Machine Company mass-producing new units, several bombes could be set to work on the same menu, greatly reducing the time required for achieving a productive Stop.

It was well that Hut 6 was breaking Red because over in Hut 8 Turing was having a far harder time. He was facing a much more formidable opponent. While Welchman was dealing with Hermann Göring, who was as lax with his Enigma systems as he was with his personal fitness, Turing had to match wits with Admiral Karl Dönitz, the much more rigorous leader of the U-boat command. The German navy drilled its Enigma operators in following strict security procedures, kept introducing improvements into its systems and made regular changes in key methods. As an example of Turing's difficulties, the navy Enigma gave operators a choice of three out of eight rotors, while other German clerks selected three out of only five—a difference that put much greater barriers in the way of the cryptanalyst.

Before Turing eventually triumphed over the naval Enigma, a story told in a later chapter, he and his team experienced a harrowing time. Every day of continuing failure conjured up new visions of men trapped in their sinking vessels or escaping only to freeze to death in the North Atlantic's frigid waters; of desperately needed food, gasoline and other supplies plunging uselessly to the ocean floor; of Britain's ability to survive hanging in the balance.

Welchman made another significant contribution to the early development of Bletchley Park. He looked ahead and realized how inadequately Dilly Knox was preparing for the intelligence war that was to come. The small staff Knox had gathered would be inundated, Welchman foresaw, once the Enigma was conquered and masses of German intercepts began pouring in. Welchman developed an organization plan calling for a major expansion of the forces at BP. With his plan quickly approved, he became needed as much for his leadership and administrative skills as for his codebreaking abilities.

 

 

BP'S Triumph over "Fish"

 

In the autumn of 1940, BP's analysts were faced with a cryptologic challenge decidedly different from that presented by the Enigma. This new traffic was based not on Morse code but on the international code—the Baudot-Murray code—developed for teleprinter machines. Instead of dots and dashes, Baudot-Murray employed electrical impulses triggered by holes and spaces in paper tapes. Unlike the Morse system, whose characters varied in length from one dot (letter E) to five dashes (numeral 0), each symbol in the Baudot code was represented by a group of five equal-length hole (x) or space (o) elements. Thus, in the nonsecret international system, A was xxooo, B was xooxx, and so forth. It was, in short, another forerunner of digital computers' binary system.

The Germans, it became clear, were adding a second machine to the standard Teletype machine to encipher its output. Messages transmitted by radio were most often sent automatically at high speed and were direction beamed so that interception was more difficult. In addition, each of the three German armed services was using a different cipher machine. Because the Germans called one of their systems Sägefisch, or "Sawfish," BP chose "Fish" as shorthand for this whole separate type of transmission.

How was BP to cope with the immense new problems presented by Fish? The question took on greater urgency as it became evident that after intermittent use at the beginning, the Germans were relying on Fish ever more heavily. BP also determined that the system was being used for higher-level communications, such as those between army commands, or from headquarters to commanders in the field. Further, the messages tended to be much longer, running to thousands of characters, compared to the few hundred typical of Enigma traffic. And there was the threat that the Teletype code machine might in time completely replace the Enigma. Harry Hinsley has written that Fish represented "intellectual, technological and organisational problems of a still higher order than those presented by the Enigma."

But BP had triumphed over Enigma. They were confident they could do the same with Fish.

Britain's top intelligence authorities came to a decision. To tackle three different types of Fish encoding machines would require too great a commitment of resources. Intelligence directed that the effort be concentrated on the cipher machine used by the army, subsequently known to be produced by the Lorenz firm. A greater flow of information about the Wehrmacht was, at that point, the prime need of Allied war planners. Carrying on the piscatorial analogy, BP called the Lorenz machine Tunny.

Hinsley was right: Tunny made a formidable opponent. In addition to two drive wheels, it used ten rotors, and none of them sat idle; they all worked together in linked sequences. The rotors were different from those of the Enigma. Instead of being wired internally, each enciphering rotor had around its rim a number of spring-powered pins that could be either retracted or extended to form either a hole or a space. To encode a message, the machine applied an additive system invented in 1918 by an American, Gilbert Vernam. The sender's machine automatically added to each plaintext letter a random letter, resulting in still a third letter which was sent over the air. The receiver's machine automatically canceled the additive, leaving the original character to be printed out.

BP's John Tiltman, a man who had entered Oxford at the age of thirteen, set his mind to unraveling Tunny messages by hand methods. He was making only slow progress until, once again, a German operator error opened the door. The operator had a long message of nearly four thousand characters to be sent from his high command post to another. The operator set up his Lorenz machine correctly and sent an indicator so the receiver could set up his machine. Yet trouble developed. After the sender had patiently typed out the long text and transmitted it, the receiver radioed back that he hadn't got it, so please send it again. The two of them took the absolutely forbidden tack of turning their machines back to the same initial settings of the rotors. The sender then committed a second mistake. Probably bored by having to repeat the message, he began to take shortcuts. The first word was Spruchnummer—"message number." He abbreviated it to Spruchnr. With similar cuts, the second message came out about five hundred characters shorter than the first. If the two messages had been identical, they would have been no help to Tiltman. But by crossruffing the streams of dissimilar ciphertexts against each other, he was able to recover both messages completely. What was more, he found the elements that had been added by the Lorenz.

Studying this information, another young Cambridge graduate, William T. Tutte, realized that certain patterns tended to repeat after forty-one bits. From this he deduced that the first rotor had forty-one pins. In four months of intense concentration, Tutte worked out the machine's complete internal structure. His discoveries resulted in the building of a simulated Tunny. Later, when the capture of a German unit permitted comparison, the BP team exulted, "We got it right."

Throughout 1942, work on the Lorenz intercepts had to be done by hand methods. The decrypts yielded some useful information, even though many of them were weeks old before the cryptanalysts could deliver them.

Max Newman, who had stirred the mathematical imagination of young Alan Turing at Cambridge, also entered the picture. Seeing that decryption of Fish traffic would remain of limited value until the process was mechanized, he proposed a device that would go beyond the strictly electromechanical functioning of Turing's bombes; it would make use of the emerging technology of electronics by including vacuum tubes, which worked much more swiftly than electrical switches.

Newman's machine resembled an eight-foot-high cupboard. The women working on it dubbed it "Heath Robinson," the name of the cartoonist who, in Britain, created the same sort of absurdly overcomplicated devices that Rube Goldberg did in America.

Comical or not, Heath Robinson could scan one thousand telegraphic symbols a second. It was designed to keep two paper teleprinter tapes in synchronization at thirty miles per hour. One tape carried the enciphered text of a message; the other contained the wheel patterns worked out by the codebreakers. The machine's comparison of the two tapes determined the settings of the five most active rotors and greatly speeded up the process of decryption.

It was a promising start, but Heath Robinson soon showed severe weaknesses. It caused the sprocket holes in the tapes to stretch, ruining the synchronization, or it completely broke the tapes. It sometimes became so hot that it began to smoke.

Turing, at that point in early 1943 a member of the Fish team, suggested that Newman call on the services of Tom Flowers, who had worked at Britain's Post Office Research Station, and who had developed postal equipment that used vacuum tubes. After the years of secrecy had ended, Flowers recalled about the Heath Robinson machine, "I was brought in to make it work, but I very soon came to the conclusion that it would never work. It was dependent on paper tape being driven at high speeds by means of spiked wheels, and the paper couldn't stand up to it."

He saw that combating the Lorenz required a fully electronic machine, one that would use as many as fifteen hundred vacuum tubes. The machine he envisioned would do a job much faster because it would not require the synchronization of two tapes. Its one tape would carry the enciphered message and would be read photoelectrically. To forestall the tape's tearing itself apart, it would run on smooth-surfaced wheels. Instead of running on a second tape, the wheel patterns would be generated electronically. He was confident his machine could process five thousand characters a second and could thus spin through all the possible combinations of keys for the Lorenz in about an hour.

The authorities at BP, having to husband their funds, thought Flowers's plans were too big and impractical. The vacuum tubes were unreliable; they burned out too quickly. Besides, since this was already the spring of 1943, the war would be over before he could possibly produce a machine.

Flowers and his Post Office colleagues were not to be dissuaded. They would build the machine without BP support. Flowers found that if vacuum tubes weren't turned on and off, if they were just allowed to run on and on, they were quite reliable. As for the completion date, he and his team, working on their own, produced Colossus I in ten months.

The results were dramatic. Colossus reduced the time required to decrypt Fish messages from weeks to hours. The timing was also dramatic. The machine came into use soon enough to provide invaluable information for Eisenhower's D-Day planning. Its decrypts helped prove that the Germans were swallowing the Allies' deception programs for the invasion. During the remainder of the war, it kept Allied leaders informed of the decisions of the German high command.

In volume, Fish decrypts numbered far less than the monthly averages of ninety thousand decrypts from Enigma traffic in the war's final phases. But the Fish messages were longer, some of them running to ten thousand characters, and they provided an ear to the most intimate planning of Hitler and his top generals, their discussions, orders and reports on the disposition and strengths of their commands.

As suppliers of intelligence, Enigma and Fish complemented each other. While Enigma decrypts most often revealed information of operational and tactical value, Fish supplied knowledge of strategic importance.

As the war progressed, the Germans relied more and more heavily on their Fish communications. These networks proliferated, rising from six links in July 1943 to twenty-six in early 1944. The Germans also kept changing and improving their systems. But Flowers and his men stayed with them, building ever more powerful Colossi. With BP approval, they had twelve machines working by the end of the war. Their Colossus II used twenty-five hundred vacuum tubes. George Vergine, an American who worked with the Colossi at BP, later recalled having one of the suppliers at the vacuum tube manufacturing plant ask him, "What the hell are you doing with these things—shooting them at the Jerries?"

Hinsley called the availability of Fish decrypts "the outstanding signals intelligence achievement in this last phase of the war."

Unknowingly, the engineers who produced Colossi were reaching another milestone. Their machines were forebears of the modern digital computer, a success that should have been attributed to British science but that had to be suppressed by the long postwar secrecy imposed on all things cryptographic. On orders from Churchill after the war, the Colossi were destroyed and Tom Flowers burned the blueprints.

At Bletchley Park in the 1990s, however, the Colossus was reborn. Tony Sale, a determined engineer of the postwar generation, secured the aid of Flowers and others who had worked on the original development to help him build a working model. This Colossus is now seen on summer weekends by thousands of visitors during tours of the Park.