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Since the outbreak of war GC and CS had continued to give work on the G[erman]A[ir]F[orce] variant of the Enigma priority over its attack on the naval traffic.
自从战争爆发，政密学校一直在研究德国空军的谜机，在海军通信上进展甚少。
It had done so for two good reasons.
这么做有两个原因。
The GAF traffic was more voluminous. Over and above that, those who worked on the naval Enigma had been held up first by the fact that the German Navy used the machine more carefully than the GAF,
一是空军通信量更大，二是，也是更重要的，海军在使用谜机时，比空军更为小心。
so that by the beginning of 1940 GC and CS had been able to break the settings for only 5 days of 1938,
因此，在1940年初期，政密学校只解出了1938年的5天信息，
and then by the discovery that, sometime about the outbreak of war, the naval machine had undergone more radical modification than had the GAF's.
并且发现海军的机器相比于空军进行了根本性的改进。
During 1940 small amounts of captured naval cypher material had confirmed that, while both still used only three wheels at a time, the naval Enigma's wheels were selected from … 8 instead of from 5.
1940年截获的少量海军信号确认了，虽然一次只使用3个转盘，但海军一共有8种转盘，他们不是5选3，而是8选3……
To make any headway, Alan would need something more to go on.
为了找到一个切入点，艾伦现在需要更多的东西。
'From December 1939 GC and CS had left the Admiralty in no doubt about the urgency of this … requirement, but the Admiralty had had little opportunity to meet it.'
从1939年12月以来，政密学校已经让海军知道，这种需要是非常紧急的，但是海军却基本上无动于衷。
But there was (at least at sea) a war on, which meant that the German authorities had to work on the assumption that the Enigma machine itself would be captured.
但是战争发生了（至少在海上），这说明德国专家的工作，必然基于一个假设，那就是谜机本身有可能被缴获，落入敌方手中。
