Guest Post by Chris Oakley: Ill Wind

July 24th, 1588

The Spanish Empire's plans to conquer England were dealt a fatal blow when the armada carrying King Philip II's invasion force ran into a massive storm that lashed the armada's ships with torrential rains and hurricane force winds. Before the storm was over, more than three hundred vessels belonging to King Philip and his Italian ally Duke Alessandro of Parma would be sunk; fewer than a hundred would survive to limp home. When Philip was informed of the catastrophe, the shock proved almost too much for him to bear, and he would not be seen in public again for weeks as he went into seclusion to try and recover his nerves. The disaster would be an even worse shock for the Duke, whose physical health rapidly went downhill and who would die from a cerebral hemorrhage just two weeks after the storm.With the Spanish navy effectively neutralized and the Spanish government plunged into crisis after the catastrophe, a triumphant Queen Elizabeth I moved swiftly to capitalize on the strategic opportunity these developments had opened for her and assembled an armada of her own to occupy Spain's neighbor Portugal and subjugate Spain itself.

While the British couldn't quite take over all of Spain, they were able to seize control of most of the Spanish mainland's southern regions as well as the islands of Majorca and Minorca and maintain that control until the late 1690s. With Spain effectively kneecapped, Great Britain's only remaining challenger for supremacy among the European powers was her old neighbor and rival France; by the time King George III assumed the British throne in 1760, the Spanish had been shut out of most of the New World and were locked in a bitter three-way battle with the British and French for the rest of it. Not until after the end of the American Revolutionary War in 1782 would Spain be able to begin reasserting herself on the world stage. Seeking to avenge what many Spanish nationalists referred to as “the century of humiliation,” the Madrid government negotiated a military alliance with French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802 and assembled a massive invasion force with the goal of landing on the southern British coast and overthrowing the Hanover dynasty in London.

Right from the beginning, the invasion plans ran into trouble. Napoleon insisted on personally assuming command of the joint Franco-Spanish expeditionary force as well as having the last word on matters of strategy and tactics, something which didn't sit well with the Spanish army general staff or the admiralty of the Spanish navy. Complicating matters still further, all three nations had profitable and growing trade ties with the United States and there were concerns among the Spanish diplomatic corps that a “friendly fire” mishap might provoke the U.S. into joining forces with Britain. Last but not least, growing unrest among Spain's own few colonies in the Americas made it necessary for the Spanish army to shift many of its most experienced troops to the New World, leaving its contingent in the expeditionary force to Britain made up in the most part of ill-trained recruits. When the expeditionary force finally departed for southern England in June of 1803, it was confronted by a well-prepared Royal Navy coastal squadron who opened fire on the lead Spanish warship in the invasion force as soon as it was sighted; in an engagement lasting nearly three full days most of the expeditionary force was wiped out in the English Channel with its primary target. Folkestone, still over two hundred nautical miles away. In an eerie coincidence, the spot where the Royal Navy defense contingent confronted and ultimately turned back the would-be invaders was the precise location where the Duke of Parma’s own flagship had sunk back in 1588 at the height of what is now called “the Armada storm.”

By 1806, Napoleon’s empire was on the verge of collapse, and Spain was on the verge of the biggest internal revolt any European nation had experienced since the French Revolution of 1789. The Spanish Liberation War broke out in the spring of 1807 and would last nearly  fifteen years, ending in January of 1822 when the last Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, fled to Mexico as the rebel armies were advancing on Madrid. The Spanish Republic was established in 1823 by a constitutional convention in Seville; over the next century, under the Republican government, Spain’s old adversarial relationship with Britain would give way to a more cordial rapport. In the First World War Spanish naval power would play a crucial role in the success of the main Allied landing at the Turkish port of Gallipoli, and when right-wing extremists tried to launch a coup in 1920 to restore the Spanish monarchy, British marines aided the Spanish army in quashing the revolt. One of the Spanish regular army officers who worked with the British at the time, a  young captain named Francisco Franco Baramonde, would receive the Empire Medal for his heroism during the uprising and go on to serve as Madrid’s chief military liaison to the British army high command during the Second World War.

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In reality the Spanish Armada fell victim not to storms but to the English navy’s ingenious use of “fire ships”(vessels packed with combustible materials and set adrift to burn enemy vessels). The Spanish monarchy would survive until 1931, when King Alfonso XIII went into exile after an electoral landslide by republican political parties in municipal elections. Spain would be neutral in both World Wars, although the Falangist regime that took over the country in 1939 leaned to a significant degree in favor of the Axis.

Guest Post: "Nixon Proven Right"

First appeared on Today in Alternate History:

May 12, 1976 - Nixon Proven Right

Having already delivered a bomb-shell in the most controversial report of his nine-year long career, CBS Evening News anchor Arnold Zenker ended the show with a low-key catch-phrase from his predecessor Walter Cronkite, "And that's the way it is." 

The explosive truth had been accidentally revealed during that messiest of divorce hearings George W. Bush vs Ms Tricia Nixon. Of course before this unfortunate break-up, the Bush and Nixon dynasties had gone back a long way, as did Bush Senior's involvement in the Agency. It was the accidental disclosure of private information from the CIA Director that was the topic of "Uncle Arnold's" show that night.

Surprisingly, the incredible accounts of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had passed largely unchallenged. Although they probably would make a great movie, the details of the mysterious meeting in the garage, the identity of "Deep Throat" etc. were worthy of their own close examination. And now the balance of evidence suggested that Bob Woodward might himself be a CIA Agent.


Gene Roberts, the former executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and former managing editor of The New York Times, had called the work of Woodward and Bernstein "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time."

Zenker was the previously unknown Columbia Broadcasting System executive who shot to national fame when he replaced Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News for thirteen days during a television strike. When Cronkite returned, he opened the program by saying, "Good evening. This is Walter Cronkite, sitting in for Arnold Zenker. It's good to be back."

In 1967 at the age of 28, he was asked to sit in for anchor Walter Cronkite to deliver the nightly news. Zenker, working as a Manager of News Programming at CBS at the time, was chosen because a strike by the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists left the network without an immediate substitute. Once the strike ended, Zenker returned to his former post.

It was too late for former president Richard Nixon, however, who had resigned rather than drag the nation down in a fight against the conspiracy that ended his career.

Author's Notes: George W Bush did date Richard Nixon's daughter but of course married Laura Welch.

May 15, 1932 – Japanese Civil War Begins

Eleven young officers in the Japanese Navy approached the home of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi to replicate the assassinations by the League of Blood from two months before. Japan was at a turning point with the populace frustrated by a struggling economy, and extreme-nationalists determined that it was time to purify the nation of the weak liberal-leaning civil leaders that had been in power since the beginning of the Taisho Democracy, when the emperor was ailing and political parties moved the Diet into authority.

Since being opened to the West by American Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853, Japan had undergone radical change. The Meiji Period saw the restoration of the emperor as the central source of power, ending the local control of the shogun. Industrialization brought new technology, and the Japanese market was flooded with commercially produced goods. The flow of foreign ideals upset many, especially as communism trickled over the border from the Russian Revolution.

Even more resentful than the radical changes in the country and the inflow of alien culture was Japan’s treatment by other world powers. Despite its participation in World War I where the Japanese Navy seized German colonies in China and the Pacific, Japan was treated as an outsider in the agreements. The Five Power Naval Limitation Agreement in Washington, D.C., in 1922 promoted disarmament in Pacific, creating a ratio of 5 to 5 to 3 for the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan for major ships. In 1924, the United States closed off immigration with the Japanese Exclusion Act, even though it enforced open markets. The final straw for Japan came when its own colonial ambitions in China were frowned upon after the invasion of Manchuria after a Chinese attack on a Japanese railway in 1931, even though that proved to be a hoax.

Conservatives grew in power throughout the 1920s. The first base came as a reaction against the communists, leading to the Peace Preservation Law in 1925 that ensured private ownership and sentenced anyone trying to undermine Japanese cultural spirit with ten years’ imprisonment. The populace grew restless as the war-time boom in the 1910s turned into a general recession, only made worse by the collapse of exports in the Great Depression. Nationalism, which had been strong in the country for centuries, was especially strong in the military, which enjoyed successes against Russia and China. Some believed that the disciplined military, not elected officials, should be in command of the country under the authority of the emperor.

Secret societies grew up among the ambitious young officers of the military, which had become stunted by spending cuts. The Army had its Sakurakai (Cherry Blossom Society), which attempted coup d’etats in March and October of 1931, which ultimately led to the society disintegrating in exchange for light punishments. Instead of cooling the flames, the light punishments proved to encourage others to act. In February of 1932, the “League of Blood,” formed by mystic Buddhist Nissho Inoue, who had previously served as a Japanese informant in Manchuria and was given a vision that he was to be the reformer of the country. He instructed a team of twenty followers with the motto “one person, one kill,” planning a wave of assassinations of politicians and businessmen that would rock the Japanese status quo. Only two of the assassins actually acted, and Nissho turned himself in, becoming exalted as a patriot. Another group from the Navy readied to carry through their own coup d’etat in May, planning to strike right after actor Charlie Chaplin arrived from America.

The assassins were slow in assembling on a strangely rainy evening, which proved fortunate to their cause as Chaplin and Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi’s son attended a sumo wrestling match before the reception at Inukai’s home. They arrived shortly after Chaplin, charged inside, and gunned down Chaplin and Inukai Takeru, who threw himself in front of his father. The Prime Minister was wounded but survived, while the eleven went on a string of assaults later that night. In the end, they turned themselves in to the Kempeitai military police, expecting similar awe as Nissho had seen.

Instead, the Prime Minister ordered their trial for executions the next morning. The military balked, saying that the officers were under their authority and should be court-martialed. Inukai, who had been customarily diplomatic over his life, was hardened, saying that if the officers were acting under military authority, then the military was treasonous. He ordered civilian police to re-arrest the officers out of Kempeitai custody. The resulting firefight was considered the second battle of the civil war.

Desperate for support, the Diet appealed to the League of Nations. This turned the majority of Japanese against them, but the nations of Europe (particularly Germany) were eager to act. What might have been a short war in the military’s favor turned into a long and violent international occupation. Britain and France eventually dropped out of the effort, although Germany carried on to create a fascist client state by holding the emperor. Hitler’s attention was focused on the Pacific, which he seemed determined to reach through the USSR, strong-arming Japan’s Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto into striking Vladivostok with a sneak attack.

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In reality, the civil government of Japan did little to stem the rising tide of militarism. The officers assassinated Inukai Tsuyoshi, who yet tried to reach out to them with his last words, “If I could speak, you would understand.” They replied, “Dialogue is useless.” The sensational trial furthered national zeal, which prompted Japan to walk out of the League of Nations after censure over Manchuria. Charlie Chaplin and Inukai Takeru avoided assassination by attending the sumo match.

May 14, 1525 – Peasants Win the Battle of Frankenhausen

The end of the Feudal period brought widespread change through Europe, particularly Germany, which was ruled by hundreds of landholders of varying stature. The labor shortage through the Black Plague had ensured basic rights for peasants, but now princes were more interested in consolidating power through new civil law. Public lands became property of the prince, who outlawed poaching and charged fines for use. Taxes were increased for princely projects, such as wars on neighboring nobles. The growing middle class resisted such increases on themselves, hoisting the major burden onto the poor.

The lower class of peasants became increasingly resentful as they struggled through bad harvests with little to show for their work after taxes. Meanwhile, the princes seemed to live more and more luxurious lives. Although respite from religious coercion through indulgence payments had come in the Reformation guided by men like Martin Luther, the peasants were eager for economic change, especially the return of communal lands for the good of all.

The Peasants’ War began in the German south during the 1524 harvest season. Workers needing to focus on their fields were stopped and ordered to gather snail shells for the Countess of Lupfen, who wanted them to use as spools for her thread. The peasants refused, and soon more than one thousand angry serfs marched to show their complaints. Likeminded peasants joined the fight, and soon the entire region was in an uproar.

At Memmingen, elected leaders called for a Christian Association and published the Twelve Articles that outlined peasants’ demand for a new social order based in scripture. Communities would elect their own spiritual leaders, and tithes of harvests would be granted to the Church for its support, support of the poor, and for defense. Serfdom was to be eliminated, forests were to be open for all for game and wood, and commons would be returned to free use supported by the town. Inheritance taxes, enforced labor, and fines and fees had to be agreed upon by peasants as well as their lords.

The nobles of the League of Swabia saw that they did not hold much power in this new order and raised armies of mercenaries to put down the insurrection. Such rebellions had happened before, like the Poor Conrad revolt of 1514 when peasants seized the weights of the Duke of Wurttemberg and proved that he had been cheating them. The resulting revolution against the duke was broken up by soldiers, especially after only a fraction of the peasants stood to fight rather than slipping away as the battle approached.

Much the same was expected from this war. Peasants were able to make gains such as seizing Kempten, but the princely army overwhelmed the well-armed peasants at Leipheim. Another peasant army stormed Frankenhausen, attracting more from around the countryside to build a force some ten thousand strong. They nominated Thomas Muntzer as their leader.

Muntzer was a preacher and theologian whose radical ideals prompted him to flee one town to the next before the war. He bickered with Luther, whom he admired after the posting of the Ninety-five Theses but determined that he had not gone far enough. Luther, meanwhile, refused to make the Reformation a worldly revolution, keeping it strictly a spiritual matter. In 1524, Muntzer gave his Sermon to the Princes to the Duke of Saxony in Allstedt, citing the foretelling of the Old Testament prophet Daniel that the Kingdom of God would crush all human kingdoms. He led a revolt in Muhlhausen that eliminated the town council and established communal rule.

Philip of Hesse led an army of thousands of mercenaries against the peasants at Frankenhausen, who formed a wagon-fort, a mobile stronghold made of wagons chained together. Many in the crowd began calling for a ceasefire and negotiations, yet Muntzer recalled the words he wrote earlier to the citizens of Allstedt, “Let not kind words of these Esaus arouse you to mercy. Look not upon the sufferings of the godless! They will entreat you touchingly, begging you like children. Let not mercy seize your soul, as God commanded to Moses.... Forward, forward, while the iron is hot. Let your swords be ever warm with blood!”

Upon the first skirmishers to assault the wagon-fort, Muntzer led a huge charge, crying out a referencing the Magnificat of Mary, mother of Jesus, “Scatter the proud!” The numbers of the peasants overwhelmed the assaulting force. Other mercenaries began to desert Philip’s force when he ordered a full assault. Muntzer organized a continual charge, using the vast numbers of his haphazard soldiers against the remaining mercenaries like a torrent.

The action ignited the Peasants’ War’s appeal. It was shown that the Duke of Saxony was approaching with reinforcements the next day and negotiations were only a stalling tactic. Now the duke, too, retreated. Muntzer determined that massacres like that at Boblingen two days before, where three thousand peasants were cut down, happened primarily in retreat, and so he kept up the momentum of rebellion. Muntzer relieved encircled peasants at Konigshofen and joined with Hans Muller at Freiburg to defeat the imperial army under Gotz of the Iron Hand at Wurzburg.

Muntzer consolidated his power and encouraged dedication of his followers through spiritual rhetoric and enforcing new sets of order, saying, “Omnia Sunt Communia” (“all things in common”). His agents spread through Europe, encouraging rebellions against all nobles and the debased Church. Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Spain launched a campaign and Clement VII attempted to root out Muntzer’s agents with the Inquisition, but the heavy-handedness and taxation to support the expense of the army only caused more rebellion. Muntzer’s communist empire rolled over Europe, which he ruled through strict social control. Within two generations, however, corruption and apathy brought it into collapse and began a new era of feudalism between pseudo-socialist warlord nations, such as English True Leveller State under Digger Gerrard Winstanley.

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In reality, Frankenhausen was a violent defeat for the peasants, who wished to negotiate but were crushed by the combined Hessian and Saxon forces on May 15. Muntzer was captured and soon beheaded; the rest of the Peasants’ War ended within weeks. His collectivist ideals were praised 450 years later in communist East Germany.

May 13, 1958 – VP Nixon Killed

A tour of Latin America ended abruptly and tragically when American Vice-President Richard Nixon was killed in a riot. Venezuelan protestors had surrounded his limousine. In a show of foolhardy bravery, Nixon got out to calm the mob. Someone threw a lead pipe, which hit him in the head. A blood clot killed him later that evening at the Caracas hospital.

It was a heartrending end to a classic, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps American life story. Richard Nixon had been born the child of Quakers in California in 1913. The family ranch was lost in 1922, and his father struggled on with a grocery store. He awoke at four every morning to drive the vegetable truck for his store, excelled in school, and was voted student body president. Family illness kept him from accepting a scholarship to Harvard, so he worked the store and attended Whittier College, where he was turned down by the affluent Franklin Literary Society since he did not come from a prominent family. Nixon countered by forming his own society, the Orthogonians, graduated with a huge range of extracurricular activities, and went on to Duke University School of Law on scholarship.

Due to budget cuts, Nixon was turned down for his dream job at the FBI. Instead, he began practicing law in California and moved to Washington, DC, in 1942 to further his prospects. Deskwork was tedious to him, so Nixon joined the Navy where he worked in logistics. Home from the war, he was invited back to California to run against Democratic Congressman Jerry Voorhis, who had already been elected five times. Nixon won after fighting a brutal campaign that destroyed Voorhis’s character by suggestion communist connections.

Nixon became a national figure from his work on the House Un-American Activities Committee, contributing to the revelation that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy. He then worked his way up to the Senate, defeating fellow California Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas by handing out the “Pink Sheet” that showed her left-leaning voting record. Republican king-makers handpicked him for the vice-presidency in 1952. When Nixon’s “political fund” from backers was revealed in the press, he gave his passionate “Checkers Speech” that displayed his humility, accused “the crooks and the Communists and those that defend them” of undermining American government, and admitted he had received a gift of a Cocker Spaniel puppy that his daughter named “Checkers,” which he was going to keep (no explanation was given for the $18,000 in cash except that it was for “reimbursements”). Eisenhower and Nixon won the election handily, as they did again in 1956.

As vice-president, Nixon did a great deal of executive work while Eisenhower presided. He chaired meetings on domestic policy, including those for national security. When Eisenhower had a heart attack in 1955, Nixon stepped in to run the country for six weeks. Outside of Washington, Nixon was especially active in goodwill tours, going to East Asia in 1953 and Africa in 1957. His tour of Latin America in 1958 began with a surprise visit to take questions from college students about American foreign policy. In Lima, Peru, however, the tour took a bad turn when student demonstrators greeted him by throwing trash and chasing him back to his limousine. More demonstrators spat on him at the hotel later that day. Nixon left for Caracas, where the mob went even further.

The American reaction to the death of a popular, if wily, vice-president was angry mourning. The United States had instituted a blockade of Venezuela in 1902 alongside Britain, Germany, and Italy after the winners of the Venezuelan civil war refused to pay debts, an action that mirrored the European intervention in Mexico forty years before. Eventually the two countries had found common ground over oil exports, though many Venezuelans felt that the wealthy Americans were taking advantage of their rates. A new military intervention by the U.S. Navy to round up those responsible sparked anti-American protests all over Latin America, spurring further engagement with the Soviet Union, who readily accepted them as they did Cuba.

The Republican Party particularly missed Richard Nixon, whom they felt could certainly have defeated Democrat John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election. The Democrats controlled the White House until losing to Nelson Rockefeller in 1968 when Johnson did not run for another term and the Democrats split over the Civil Rights question. Rockefeller proved adequate overseeing the end of Vietnam and the introduction of Civil Rights, many laws modeled on ones he championed as governor of New York. He widely expanded the administration and increased spending to fight the growth of crime, specifically that which centered on drugs. For international affairs, Rockefeller focused his support through the UN and NATO. Rockefeller handily won reelection in 1972, but he was blamed for the struggling economy. Conservatives overtook the Republican Party, which put Ronald Reagan in office in 1976 in a narrow defeat of Georgia governor Jimmy Carter.

The United States continued to struggle economically through the final decades of the century. Increased government spending and encouraged consumerism kept jobs afloat, but collapsing unions and low minimum wages sparked deflation. Japanese and German international trade regularly undersold American goods, promoting isolationism, cutting off potential markets like communist China and Latin America, which faced constant revolution. Through it all, however, the American opinion is lasting that they can trust their president to do what is best for the country.

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In reality, Nixon survived the riot in Caracas. He stayed in the limousine, unlike his attempts to deal face-to-face with demonstrators in Peru. Nixon was defeated by JFK in 1960 and partly retired from politics, but he returned with gusto upon the post-Johnson shake-up of the Republican Party to win elections in 1968 and 1972. During his second term, he would be implicated in the Watergate Scandal and become the first American president to resign.

May 12, 1941 – Z3 Computer Applied to German Codes

In a stunning display of modern technology, Konrad Zuse presented his Z3 machine to the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt (German Laboratory for Aviation). An electromechanical computer, the Z3 was built to analyze wing flutter, calculating vast collections of data that would further improve plane designs. With some two thousand relays, the Z3 processed up to twenty-two bits data at five to ten Hertz. It even offered external tape memory, meaning a new program could be created without any mechanical remodeling to the machine.

A member of the Oberkommando der Luftwaffe, the air force high command,sat in on the presentation and raised a question, “Can we use it for our codes?”

As the war continued to escalate, encoding and code-breaking had become some of the most important matters to ensure victory. The Kriegsmarine B-Dienst had made notable success breaking British naval codes and even those of the neutral Americans, giving predatory U-boat attacks an effective edge as they knew where all British ships were at sea. For defense, German forces used the daunting enigma machine to create codes, which was considered the utmost in encryption technology. The rotors inside the machine created a tri-fold system of encryption that could be reproduced in seconds by another Engima machine while being virtually indecipherable to enemy code-breakers. The Battle of Britain had showed to some air officers, however, that the codes might not be as unbreakable as they were told.

In fact, the British program Ultra had long cracked the Enigma code. Polish cryptologists at the Biuro Szyfrow had been reading German codes since 1932, and the new implementation of an updated code ten times more complicated in 1939 prompted them to reach out to French and British offices. Just over a month before the war began, Poles delivered handmade duplicates of the Enigma machines and, most importantly, their methods for cracking to Bletchley Park.

With the Luftwaffe funding Zuse’s machines, he was able to build a staff and catch the attention of the Wehrmacht, who immediately began placing miniature Z-machines with the armies. Ultra found itself bewildered by the intensely complex codes, which translated to defeats on the front. In North Africa in September of 1942, the Battle of El Alamein was called Britain’s “Second Dunkirk” when Rommel’s armies, despite being nearly exhausted of fuel, drove the Eighth Army into the Mediterranean Sea. The resulting loss of Egypt and devastating Battle of the Suez Canal are touted as two of the biggest disasters of World War II.

Code-computing became a shadow arms-race in the midst of the war. Technologists hurried to outpace one another in faster processing speeds and adaptability of memory. Germans continued to apply the technology to weapons such as guidance on their V-2 rockets and the bomber-hunting V-3 that knocked enemy planes from the air. Americans brought computers to their Los Alamos laboratories for better calculations of atomic blasts, while the British improved integrated sonar detection.

The War in Europe came to an end in 1947 with the Soviet seizure of Berlin. With British and American armies long bogged down in Africa and the first invasion of Sicily aborted, the western Allies contributed primarily air support while struggling to gain a foothold in what Churchill described as Europe’s “soft underbelly.” The Soviets, meanwhile, forced their way through heavy German defense, including the Battle of the Bulge, which spanned nearly all of occupied Poland. German resources finally gave out, bringing an end to the war that many feared would be atomic, as was seen in Japan.

After the war, another burst of development came as the West attempted to catch up with the work of Soviet scientists and those captured from Germany. Miniaturization of technology brought integrated circuits, which in the West was spun off to consumer markets. Computers were applied to banking, weather-mapping, nutrition and medicine, communications, and more. Wired and cellular integration gave handheld devices the ability to converse on a myriad of levels by the mid-1980s, including in virtual reality through headset broadcasting devices. By the turn of the millennium, just about everyone on the planet carried their personal computers, creating a digital universe that seemed to envelop more thought than the prospect of ever sending a human to the moon.

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In reality, the Z3 was only applied to engineering matters. Improvements to the Z3 like fully electronic switches were denied as “not war important.” After the war, Zuse completed his Z4, which served as the first commercial computer in Europe, being sold to the Swiss. Zuse continued to develop leaps in computing, like the magnetic-storage memory for the Z22 in 1955. German forces instituted the Lorenz cipher in 1941, which was easily cracked by Ultra’s Colossus computers.