There were two main groups of people at Bletchley Park. There were the code breakers such as Alan Turin and Dilly Knox. Then there was the administrative staff that was mainly girls aged eighteen to twenty-two. However when the bombes and colossuses were installed women, known as wrens, were recruited from the navy to operate the new machines. The way Bletchley Park got encrypted messages were from ‘Y centres’ which were set up all-over England, who intercepted the German messages and sent it to Bletchley Park. In Bletchley Park the messages would be sent to Hut 3 where they would be decrypted. Once that had been done the messages would be sent by a small passage way, pushed by a broom, to hut 6 where they would be changed from German (or later Japanese, Italian, as they were on Germany’s side) to English. It would then go into the index of messages in hut 6. The huts were manned twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. The people worked eight-hour shifts. Hut three, had someone who handed out new messages as soon as the new shifts walked into he room. Bletchley Park was so secretive that the people working there were made to sign a declaration of secrecy. People in one hut did not know what was happening in the other huts.
- How was Bletchley Park able to break the German Enigma Codes?
It could be said that the reason/reasons as to how the Enigma was decoded was solely because of the laborious work by the people involved or maybe the revolutionary ideas of individuals or even a stroke of luck as the mistakes made by the German operators were picked up. The actual fact is the reasons above combined together enabled the Enigma to be deciphered; also it was bound to be solved as the British had a replica of the machine and were working on it for seven years. It was handed to them by the Poles who had a spy in the German army and was able to compile enough information for a prototype to be built. This helped the British in a number of ways because it allowed the people at Bletchley Park to figure out how the rota settings worked and the settings for the machine to be cracked for the day.
Reading the messages required specialist attention and tremendous amount of effort as no message could be left unread; every message was given priority as it could be the one with which the code could be cracked. All this was one heck of a job for the code breakers they needed a system whereby the codes could be decoded much quicker. One man, a mathematician, John Herivel, found the solution. Since he was a mathematician he looked at words in exactly the same way as he looked at number patterns and used the ‘crossword puzzle’ method to find a way of working out what the wheel settings were likely to be each day. For Herivel’s idea to work he needed the first messages of the day from as many operators as possible. If they were similar they would give away the settings for the day. However this idea was not effective until after the German invasion of Denmark and Norway.
As the war got intensive every effort was made to find a way of cracking Enigma more effectively, which resulted in the construction of the ‘first bombes’, which were another of Alan Turing’s ideas. The ‘bombes’ were nicknamed ‘Victory’ that was installed on 1 march 1940 and ‘Agnes’ began work on 8 August. They were electric machines that each contained thirty cylinders and tried to speed up the decoding of messages. For the machine to be of any use the code breaker needed to input a clue into the ‘bombe’ which would then look for a related message. After that had been done the message would be transmitted into a replica Enigma to see if it resulted in a German message.
All of the above are the reasons as to how the Enigma was cracked but there was still the task of cracking ‘Fish’ which was Hitler’s personal code and without surprise was more difficult to crack than Enigma. A new machine nicknamed Robinson was invented which was based on an idea Alan Turing had at the beginning of the war. It used two paper tapes, which were run through the machine at high speed. On one tape was the German message and on the other was a key, which looked for evidence of the wheel settings. The machine worked, but the tapes tended to tear so an alternative to Robinson was Colossus, which was the first programmable computer. It did exactly the same job as Robinson, looking for patterns in a vast number of random data, but it did it much quicker and it did not use paper tapes. The first colossus was installed in December 1943 and with ‘Fish’ cracked the Germans were defeated, Hitler committed suicide and the war was won.
- In what ways did the work of Bletchley Park influence the out come of the Second World War?
As with all things in life there are up’s and down’s and Bletchley Park was no exception. At first Bletchley park played no significant role in WW2 as it had just started working on cracking the codes for Enigma, fortunately this was the period of the phoney war when nothing happened. As the war progressed so did Bletchley park, it was cracking more codes in a much shorter time so the German’s intentions were open to the British which allowed the British to be ready in advance. Even though the British suffered defeat, at Crete, it was a victory for Bletchley Park as it showed the world and its own armed forces what it was capable of and how reliable their information was.
It was in early 1941 that Bletchley Park made a breakthrough it confirmed reports that the Italians were going to invade Yugoslavia and later the Germans would be sent to back up the Italians. With this information in hand, Bletchley park tipped off the admiral Cunningham, the commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, and he was able to sink three heavy cruisers and two destroyers with no British loss which became known as ‘The Battle of Matapan.’ This was of tremendous value to the British as it was the first time they encountered no lost in combat. After this battle the Germans were going downhill and their chances of winning the war seemed slim. In may 1941 the German battle ship Bismarck left the Baltic to attack British ships in the North Atlantic and came into combat with the HMS Hood, resulting in the Hood being sunken and the Bismarck disappearing but it was found that the Bismarck was damaged and was heading for France. It was because of Bletchley Park that “Force H” from Gibraltar was able to intercept and sink the pride of the German navy.
Continuing its string of luck Bletchley Park made its next breakthrough in cracking the German naval code “Dolphin” and winning “The Battle of the Atlantic” which was the battle for Britain’s own status as an independent state. If Germany were successful in preventing merchant ships carrying food/ammunition/raw materials from North America to England, then the ending of WW2 would have been dramatic. England would have been starved into submission and taken over by Hitler, which would have resulted in the continuous persecution of Jews. Fortunately that was not the case and thanks to Bletchley Park “Dolphin” was cracked and by November 1941, the number of ships being sunk dropped from 282,00 tonnes to 62,000. However, in 1942 Germany was back in control with the introduction of “Shark” but it was not to last. In December 1942 Bletchley Park cracked ‘Shark’ and the outcome of this was that within the first five months of 1943 the allies had sunk more than 100 U-boats.
In short, it could be said that Bletchley Park provided the groundwork for all the events that took place in the war, without this intelligence the war would have been lost in early 1940’s. The whole of England and the allies were relying on Bletchley Park to find a gap within the enemies codes and like in maths, once you find a way into working out a calculation there is no going back, there is always a chance of progressing further as Bletchley Park did. Bletchley Park was the reason behind the defeat of the Axis in Europe, and Africa in “The battle of El Alamein”.