How a wireless operator's one second pause in transmission cost his submarine and her crew their lives.
In the early hours of February 11th 1943, a British Wren, Marjorie Elphinstone, who was listening for Nazi radio signals, noticed that a German transmission she was monitoring paused pause for a second, as though the Wireless operator she was listening to had been interrupted or given some different information. Marjorie Elphinstone recorded the message and the pause, and flagged it to her superiors. This is the story of how that act of sharp attention resulted in the destruction of an enemy submarine, even though at this stage of the war the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park had temporarily lost the ability to decode Kriegsmarine (German navy) Enigma transmissions.