Although the German army lost 100,000 men this is nothing compared to the on million men lost by the Red Army while defending Stalingrad. If the Russians had lost, they would have not only lost many many more men but the Soviet war machine’s morale would have been crippled and the Germans would have a lot of oil due to the nearby Caucasus’ rich oil deposits. The Stalingrad Victory was a turning point of the ware for the USSR.
In 1941 the Japanese bombed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor but it did not deliver the killing blow that they had expected and this finalized the decision for the Americans to join the war. The Americans joining the war wasn’t only a great morale boost for the allies but also increased the size of the Allied forces tremendously. The Americans were not just bought into the war in Europe but get their revenge against their new enemies for the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor.
The first major victory for the Americans was the Battle of Midway in June 1942. The Japanese had planned to invade the Midway Islands and the Aleutian Islands so that the Americans forces would be split to counter the threat. The Americans knew about the plan because the Japanese Naval codes had been deciphered. This helped the Americans mount a surprise attack on the Japanese.
The Japanese lost their four largest Aircraft carriers and over 300 ships, during the battle, marking a decisive turning point in the war in the pacific that was kept from the Japanese public.
In the first half of 1945 Bletchley Park did not influence the above or the capture of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The capture of the two islands represented the tightening of the noose around Japan.
Iwo Jima was defended by 20,000 Japanese trench by trench as had dug in with the intent to fight to the death defending the island. Before the island was cleared of Japanese in March 1945 the battle had cost the lives of 25,000 US Marines. It was then used as an airbase for short bombing runs on Japan.
The operation to capture Okinawa started on the 1st of April 1945 and went on for nearly three months. When it was finally captured, Americans were able to use Okinawa as a safe anchorage from which to blockade Japan. As with Saipan, the island of Okinawa was bitterly defended by the Japanese who had prepared their positions on the island and employed kamikaze attacks on the enemy ships. The island was cleared but at the cost of over 100,000 Japanese soldiers and a huge amount of Military equipment. Together, both islands cost more lives than the D-Day invasion of Normandy.
The code breakers of Bletchley Park had nothing to do with the American Decision to drop atomic bombs on the city of Hiroshima on August 6th 1945. The plane was blessed by a priest before it took of with its unforgivable load. On the impact of the bomb over 70,000 civilians were killed with many more thousands dying later from burns, various forms of cancer and radiation poisoning. Another bomb was later dropped on Nagasaki with equally horrifying results.
There were a lot of events in the second world war that were not affected by the work of the people at Bletchley Park, There were still lots of aspects that were affected by their work for example they had a large influence on the war in Northern Africa and on the D-Day invasion of Normandy.
In the Atlantic German U-Boats were attacking Allied Merchant ship convoys effectively depriving the British of Vital supplies that were needed for the war effort. On May 9th 1941, U110 had been about to attack an Allied convoy when it was forced to surface by British ships protecting the convoy. The German Crew surrendered. A party from the HMS Bulldog climbed into the conning tower and begun to search the deserted U-Boat. The search party found the bookshelves still contained every description of navigation, manuals, seamanship manuals code books and signal book. The Bulldogs Telegraphist spotted an interesting piece of equipment that resembled a typewriter. All the books from the shelves and enigma machine had to be transferred to the bulldog with the utmost care as the books were printed in a special ink that disappeared if it came in contact with sea water.
A member of Bletchley Park met the HMS Bulldog on its arrival back in Britain photographing every page from every book. The interesting type writer later turned out to be to be an enigma machine, and the books contained the Enigma codes used by the German Navy.
All the sailors that had taken part in the operation were sworn to secrecy as the British did not want the Germans to find out about U-110 and that the codebooks had been captured because if the Germans had found out than they would have definitely changed the codes. If the codes had been changed this would have made the job at Bletchley park a million times harder, but in 1943 the code breakers had the help of the Colossus, the worlds first programmable digital computer.
Colossus was built for the code breakers at Bletchley Park by post office engineers in 1943. The computer was as big as a room, 5 meters long, 3 meters wide and 2.5 meters high, and was made mainly out of parts used for post office telephone and telegraph systems. It was developed from the mechanical Bombes.
Ten Colossus Mark 2s were eventually built. They helped crack the enigma codes and even more complicated ones devised by the Germans on their 12 rotor cipher machines. On display at Bletchley Park is a fully rebuilt and working Mark 2 Colossus machine.
The information revealed at Bletchley Park by the code breakers was codenamed ULTRA. ULTRA was so secret the only people that needed to know about it like Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, were told of its existence.
The first sign of help from Bletchley Park code breakers and the Colossus super computer was in North Africa between the Allied General Montgomery and the Axis’ General Rommel also known as “Desert Fox”. The most famous skirmish of the North African Campaign was the Battle of El Alamein on 23rd October 1942 when after returning from sick leave Rommel was overwhelmed by the Allied Armies Reinforcements which for the first time outnumbered his own. He discovered that even if he wanted he would not have been able to respond to Hitler’s orders not to Retreat.
After Montgomery had regrouped he came forward again in “Operation Supercharge” comprising of New Zealand and British forces going into the battle under cover of artillery fire. Rommel had been ordered not to retreat and fought back in the same way. But the British had a good amount of supplies of arms and men; As Rommel was far from his base the advance of the allied troops forces him to retreat.
Most of the activity at Bletchley Park was based on German U-Boats in the North Atlantic because until then there had been effective measures in defending the convoys; ULTRA was used to divert the convoys away from the U-Boats. This had great effect on the supplies and morale of the British who felt the war was changing to their favor. Eventually the convoys were better protected by escorts of Boats and Aircraft so the use of ULTRA was no longer needed to divert the ships away from U-Boats.
The first major move for the Americans in Europe, who had been bought into the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, was the decision to send troops to aid the invasion of Northern France, particularly the Normandy beaches. They were helped by the earlier attempts of code breaking at Bletchley Park to cross the Atlantic almost completely unopposed. ULTRA was a huge help in these landings because it told the Allies where the best places to land their forces would be. It was also the job of Bletchley park to locate the least defended parts of the French coast so the Allied Forces would have minimal losses during the invasion.
The allies did not want the Germans to know that they had cracked the code and the allies were listening to their plans. The possession of German Military plans was vital and many soldiers died in campaigns which to anyone without any knowledge of military affair or strategy were doomed to fail but these campaigns were to lull the Germans into a thinking that their plans had not been discovered. In the final years of the wars as the Germans enjoyed the success in the regions of Belgium, the allies did not change their plan of sending thousands of troops to their death to keep the secrecy that would ultimately lead to the vital victory.
To conclude Bletchley Park helped in many ways to shorten the war by helping with individual battles i.e. the Normandy Beach Landings and the War in the North Atlantic. There were also a lot of aspects through the war Bletchley park had very little or no influence over such as the ongoing fighting between the Germans and Russians and the entrance of the Americans into the war.
