Bletchley Park's contribution to victory in the Second WWII:
The intelligence produced by Bletchley Park built a broad picture from which a wide range of conclusions could be drawn, from enemy activity to high-level strategy. The contribution of its code breakers to the outcome of the Second World War is now globally renowned, particularly important being:
- Its important role towards the defeat of the U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic:
- Its contribution towards air defence and the air offensive against Germany and targets in occupied Europe;
- Its contribution towards the Mediterranean and North African campaigns, the latter including Alamein;
- The launch and success of Operation Overlord, including the disposition of German defences and the role played by the breaking of the German secret service Enigma in the Double Cross operation that misled the Germans as to the intended target for the invasion of northern France;
- The identification of new weapons including Germany's atomic research, their V weapons, jet aircraft and the development of new U-boats;
- Analysis of the war on the German economy, such as the effectiveness of aftacks from late 1944 on German oil supplies;
- The breaking of Japanese codes, of particular importance in revealing through diplomatic traffic the disposition of German defences prior to Overlord;
- Through link with the US SIGINT authorities, the final defeat of the Atlantic U-boat packs and outcome of the war in the Pacific.
The site has the potential for a great future which builds on the past. Recent initiatives around the Government’s plans for growth in the Milton Keynes area have stimulated a climate of change. Bletchley Park sits at the midpoint of the Oxford-Cambridge Technology Arc, and is now home to the Milton Keynes Enterprise Hub, sponsored by SEEDA the regional development agency. Together with the Bletchley Park Trust and other local stakeholders, they see the potential to build on the rich past of the site to inspire current and future generations to innovate and bring forward new technologies and innovations.
Role of Computers
The world's first computer, Colossus 1, was one of the technologies developed at Bletchley Park to speed up the process of analysis. Colossus was built by post office engineers for the code-breakers at Bletchley Park. The computer was as big as a room and was made mainly from parts used for post office telephone and telegraph systems. It was a development from the mechanical Bombes. The Bombes were enormous, noisy electro-mechanical machines, which could check through combinations of letters far quicker than a human being could. Sometimes messages began with the same words, such as a weather report. This gave clues (called Crib) about how the rest of the message had been encoded.
When the code-breakers eventually worked out what the Crib letters might be, they tested them on the Bombe. When the Bombe stopped, this meant that the code-breakers' guesses were right. All that days U-boat messages could then be decoded. Colossus worked by reading, through a photoelectric system, a teleprinter tape containing the letters of the coded message. It read 5,000 letters a second. All possible combinations of the coded message were checked with the cypher key generated by Colossus. A teleprinter typed out the results of Colossus's search, revealing the settings that had been used by the Germans to send their messages.
At the end of the war, much of the equipment used and its blueprints were destroyed by order, it is said, of Churchill. Though thousands of people were involved in the decoding efforts, the participants remained silent for decades about what they had done during the war, and it was only in the 1970s that the work at Bletchley Park was revealed to the general public
How I tackled this assignment …
Firstly I had researched what this topic meant to me, and I had then under each of the headings which I had to answer found relevant information which was of use specifically answering the question I had made notes and then proceeded to typing the up in the form of a research presentation. I had made specific time interval where between 0-3 hours of research and then 2 hours on extracting the relevant information which was required. Finally I had allocated 2 hours to write this up in the form of a report.
Resources and Reference:
This modern site had all information with regards to the wartime History and contains information on the Enigma cipher.
- http://www.iwm.org.uk/online/enigma/enigma7.
This web site had useful information form the Imperial War Museum upon the breaking of the Enigma code and how this was carried out.
The following website was detailed in the aspect that this had given information on the ways used to tackle and break the code through the Colossus machine which was built.
This encyclopaedia had given much information on the background of Bletchley Park and the importance of the discovery of breaking the code. This was very helpful, and useful as there are many different headings with much information of relevance.
- H. Flowers, The Design of Colossus (Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 5 (No. 3), 1983, pp. 239-252)
This book contained some useful pictures of the colossus machine along with a description of how it was designed for the purpose of cracking the code.
