Bletchley Park visitors
marvel at Enigma codebreakers
SCI Thames and Kennet
Regional Group Members visit the historic mansion where groundbreaking
military intelligence cracked the German Enigma code during
the Second World War
Bletchley Park, 21 May 2004
In the 60th anniversary year of the Normandy landings, the
Thames and Kennet Regional Group met at the historic grounds of Bletchley
Park near Milton Keynes, the location of the Second World
War secret codebreakers.
Hugh Davies, our guide, took us on a tour around the magnificent
mansion house for a glimpse of the famous huts where small
groups worked on breaking German Enigma codes. One of these
was Hut 8 where Alan Turing collaborated with Gordon Welchman
to devise the Bombe and Diagonal Board, key devices in solving
Enigma codes.
In another of these huts, the group gathered around a full-scale
Bombe mock-up used in the recent film Enigma, learning
how these machines exploited flaws in the Enigma’s encryption
process. The Bombe’s prominence around Bletchley shows
why its inventor, Turing, is so highly revered; but while
much of the success in breaking Enigma is often attributed
to his brilliance, the tour of Bletchley highlighted that
there were many others who made just as significant contributions
as that of the Cambridge professor.
Special tributes were paid to the Polish mathematicians Marian
Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Rozycki; men who broke
German intercepts as early as 1932 before handing their findings
over to French and British intelligence in 1939. And by the
converted stables we assembled outside the cottage where Head
of Enigma Operations Dilly Knox and ‘his girls’
made early breakthroughs in solving Italy’s Naval Enigma,
assisting in the Royal Navy’s victory at the battle of
Matapan.
The US also contributed enormously to the intelligence effort
by manufacturing the large number of four-rotor Bombes required
to reduce the time it took to solve daily messages from a
possible 28 days to just 14 minutes.
To put into context the difficulty in solving Enigma, the
probability of correctly identifying the starting positions
of a three-rotor Enigma using 10 pairs of steckers (wires
that swap connections between letters as signals enter and
exit the machine), is one in 159 million, million, million.
This compares to that of around a one in 14 million chance
of picking the winning numbers of the UK National Lottery.
But the trip was not just about numbers. We were treated
to numerous accounts of the brave and heroic deeds, such as
the story of Lt Tony Fasson and Able Seaman Colin Grazier,
who were both posthumously awarded the George Cross after
sacrificing their lives retrieving codebooks from a sinking
submarine. This one act made great inroads to what had been
an impregnable new way of communication by German U-boats
using the new four-rotor Enigma system, codenamed Shark. It
is estimated it would have been another eight months before
Shark would have been broken otherwise.
In another twist in Bletchley Park’s past, we were shown
the rare Abwehr G312 Enigma machine, stolen and famously sent
to the BBC Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman, minus
three of its rotors. These were later recovered after a note
to a middleman was published in the Sunday Times personal
columns. It was all very covert and completely consistent
with the history surrounding the machine. A man was later
arrested in connection with the theft and convicted for handling
stolen goods.
The closing stages of our tour took us to see project recreations
of the chief code-breaking devices, the Bombe and the Colossus
Rebuild. Colossus, employed to speed the deciphering of the
German High Command’s communication system, the Lorenz
Cipher, was crucial in planning the D-Day landings and is
now recognised as the first electronic programmable computer.
But because of the destruction of the ten Colossi immediately
after the war, in addition to the cloak of secrecy enforced
on Bletchley for 30 years, it wasn’t until the 1970s
before this record could be rightly attributed to Colossus.
After a fascinating day, made even more so by our guide,
we sombrely reflected on the circumstances behind the people
who worked at Bletchley, and the lives on the battlefield
they untiringly tried to protect. And though the short amount
of time we had was never going to be enough to fully appreciate
what had been achieved, it would have been equally impossible
to have left without understanding the importance of the work
that once went on at Bletchley Park.
Thanks to Ron Stephenson, organiser of the event, who took
up the mantle of the sadly missed Kit Finch.
By Jon Wong, SCI Web Team
• Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK3 6EB, T: +44
(0)1908 640404, F: +44 (0)1908 274381, W: www.bletchleypark.org.uk
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