After years of Aunty Penny
talking about her time at Bletchley Park during the Second World War we
finally decided that it was time to visit and see just what she had got up to!
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| Bletchley Park Mansion which was the Head office |
Bletchley Park is a mansion set in the Buckinghamshire countryside. It was here that members of MI6, the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), a secret team of individuals including a number of scholars, turned Codebreakers.
The GC&CS mission was to crack the Nazi codes and ciphers. The most famous of the cipher systems to be broken at Bletchley Park was the Enigma. The Poles had broken Enigma in 1932, when the encoding machine was undergoing trials with the German Army, but the cipher altered only once every few months. With the advent of war, it changed at least once a day, giving 159 million, million, million possible settings to choose from. The Poles decided to inform the British in July 1939 once they needed help to break Enigma and with invasion of Poland imminent.
Thousands of wireless operators, many of them civilians but also Wrens, WAAF personnel and members of the ATS, tracked the enemy radio nets up and down the dial, carefully logging every letter or figure. The messages were then sent back to Bletchley Park (Station X) to be deciphered, translated and fitted together like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle to produce as complete a picture as possible of what the enemy was doing.
The Codebreakers began working around the clock to send the intelligence they were producing to London. Special Liaison Units and their associated communications specialists, the Special Communication Units, were set up to feed the Bletchley Park intelligence to commanders in the field, first briefly in France in May 1940 and then in North Africa and elsewhere from March 1941 onwards.
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| These are the basic tools which his Great, Great Aunt used to crack Enigma |
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| Just getting to grips with the software before I crack the code |
The process of breaking Enigma was aided
considerably by a complex electro-mechanical device, designed by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman. The Bombe, as it was called, ran
through all the possible Enigma wheel configurations in order to reduce the
possible number of settings in use to a manageable number for further hand
testing. The Bombes were operated by Wrens, many of whom lived in requisitioned
country houses such as Woburn Abbey. The work they did in speeding up the code
breaking process was indispensable.
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| The Bombe |
The intelligence produced by deciphering the Naval Enigma was passed to the Admiralty via the Z Watch in the Naval Section. Throughout the First Battle of the Atlantic, they helped the Admiralty to track the U-Boat wolf packs, considerably reducing the German Navy's ability to sink the merchant navy ships bringing vital supplies to Britain from America.
In 1942, the Code breakers' many successes also
included the North Africa Campaign, when they enabled the Royal Navy to cut
Rommel's supply lines and kept Montgomery informed of the Desert Fox's every
move. Early 1942 brought serious difficulties with the German Navy’s
introduction of a more complex Enigma cipher. But by the end of 1942 they had
mastered it as well.
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| Outside Hut 8 where she worked |
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| In the old days |
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| Busy on the 'Old Telephone' |
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| Getting the hang of the whole thing now |
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| In Memory of a 'Great' Aunt |