Bletchley Park Coursework

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Matthew Smithies 10M

Bletchley Park Question One: DRAFT 2

Describe the organization and work of the people at Bletchley Park

Bletchley Park, or Station X, was set up 50 miles north of London, near Milton Keynes. The site was far enough away for safety, but close enough for communication. It was a large estate that was able to become a self-contained community. The aims of Bletchley Park were to crack simple codes but more importantly, the Enigma code, which seemed impossible to crack. The Enigma needed to be cracked so any major German attacks or strategies became known to the Allies and were able to be prevented.

The Enigma code was a brand new code that no one had ever seen the like so before so the people at Bletchley Park needed to experiment with the types to people they needed to crack this code. At Bletchley Park, there were mathematicians working alongside chess players and even crossword competition winners, all working to crack simpler and more complex codes as well as the German Enigma by looking at the codes in their different ways. There were many different jobs in Bletchley Park, all requiring the different types of people to carry them out. The jobs ranged from code breakers working on simple codes and the crucial Enigma code, to translators and analysts working to extract intelligence from the decoded messages. Harry Golombek, a chess player and Cambridge Graduate was an Enigma code breaker at Bletchley Park, especially during the first years of the war.  He worked onsite at Bletchley Park alongside other mathematical and classical professors. Morse coders and Teleprinter operators, like Carol West, a previous sergeant in the WAAF, were also employed to send messages to the appropriate receivers. Secrecy was needed to prevent important intelligence leaking out and getting into the hands of German spies.

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 The early organization at Bletchley Park was a codebreaking school for academics and graduates but in the early stages of the war it was taken over by the government and turned into a station where enemy codes would be cracked. There was a small team led by Dilly Knox also with Alan Turing. There was a need for the hut system at Bletchley Park to departmentalize and create more workspace due to the increase in the number and types of codes that were coming in due to the Germans increasing the number of code possibilities by adding new rotors ...

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