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[Rogi Ocnorb]

# 1 is U43
# 2 is U106
# 3 is U264
# 4 is U518

Yay!

[Perko]

Yup, I just got there myself on my own. I installed the free Iokio viewer and loaded the 1100 data point U-boat database from http://www.uboat.net/maps/iokio.html, which makes it super-easy. You can enter the latitude and it quickly shows you the boat that sank there. Took less than 5 minutes to find the other 4 boats

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Heh. I just keyed them into Google like "34.57N, 35.11W"

[Perko]

SPEC on Enigma part A:

"Long way" immediately suggests to me the song "It's a long way to Tipperary", so that's my guess for "the place where he has lived" - Tipperary county, province of Munster, Ireland. The whole theme is pretty British so far, so this seems appropriate.

"Tom" likely translates to Thomas, which could be a last name, not a first name. Haven't found anything interesting with this so far, but it should presumably be somebody related to WW2 naval combat / Enigma machine / code-breaking.

EDIT: Just found at Wikipedia out that the song was sung "by the crew of U-96 in Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot (that particular arrangement was performed by the Red Army Chorus)" Since we just came from tracking U-boats, I'd say that's just too much of a coincidence NOT to be right.

[ALISDAIRPARK]

Weelll I'm finding many Toms from Tipperary, although nothing has clicked yet. The best fit I've found was Tom Clancy, who was a singer, and served in the RAF, but no joy.

BTW: Given we only have Tipperary (and if that's right) and "Tom" we could be on this one for a while. Remember there isn't always a link between enigmas...

[memyselfandi]

he added something

"alone"

[Perko]

Been beating on this for quite a while now, not making much headway. Misc musings:

Tipperary isn't getting me anything, although it still feels right. It could refer to Ireland in general.

The added "alone" to "lived alone" is leading me to hermits and hermitages, but to no avail. I found a random blogger who calls himself "Irish Hermit" and whose real life name is Tom, but I don't see how he could possibly fit in.

Tom Clancy is a great Tom, especially given the obvious submarine connections. But I can't take it anywhere.

The only other good Tom I've found is Tommy Flowers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers), a British engineer who built the Collosus computer for decrypting WW2 German intelligence. He was a colleague of Alan Turing. Great fit, but I don't see any way that this links with the text on the page...

[enaxor]

[GoodChild]

I missed something, how did the Uboat thing get solved? what's the answer?

[enaxor]

[Perko]

[Perko]

FWIW, I've been researching another possible angle on this. One somewhat famous Tom is Tom Bombadil, a character in The Lord of the Rings books. This is possibly interesting because the term "Bomba" or "Bombe" is Enigma-related: see "Bomba (cryptography)" or "Bombe" on Wikipedia. I still don't see anything in the "long way" text that's in any way relevant. I'm beginning to wonder if that text itself is some sort of cipher, and that we should not be reading it so literally, and instead trying to "crack" it.

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Not finding much for this one, either. So far, in this trail, our gut instincts have served us pretty well, so it seems the Tipperary route is the most likely.
While it would be a hard thing to make work from a design perspective, there are enough u-boat numbers available that the creator could have engineered our last solve from coordinates.
As presented, splitting the number in two, puts the location in the middle of a large, pretty barren, plain in China. Making the longitude a western hemisphere locale, puts it just east of a town called Ava in Illinois. So there is a slight connection there with Oak Park being in Illinois, as well (though on opposite ends of the state).
For completeness, the southeastern location is in the middle the Indian Ocean
And the southwestern location is 1,500 miles off the coast of Chile in the Pacific.

ETA: From a purely "riddlistic" view of the clue(s), I keep running into Thomas Merton when using search terms like "Tom", "Hermitage" and "Journey".
But can't find anyone who made any journeys to his hermitage.

[tipsila]

I'm not finding much of anything, but I thought this might be of interest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Atkins

[JohnnyTooBad]

I'm new to this whole thing.

Anyway, what about Thomas Edison? He started out as a telegraph operator, which primarily uses Morse Code. The USS Edison was also the name of an American destroyer in WWII. Not sure if there's much relevance to Enigma A, but I feel it's pointing in the right direction.

Unfortunately, it bears no connection to Ireland, save that Thomas Edison was put on an Irish stamp in 2000.