The huts operated in pairs. Hut 6 worked to decipher Army and Air Force coded messages and was supported by the team in Hut 3 who turned the dycphered messages into intelligence reports. Hut 8 did the same thing as Hut 6 but decoded messages from the German Navy with Hut 4 its associated intelligence hut. Gordon Welchman was the head of Hut 6 and was also run by his fellow mathematician John Jeffreys. By 1943 more than 450 people were working in Hut 6.
In Hut 8, Alan Turing one of the greatest mathematicians and code breakers of Bletchley worked with Hugh Alexander another brilliant code breaker to decypher the Naval Enigma. Turing also went on to create the Bombe. Based on a Polish similar design the Bombe was an electromechanically device which enabled to reverse the enigma codes into uncoded text. However it was not that simple as the Enigma codes changed every day. Hut 11 which was in charge of the Bombe received daily, letters and lines from Huts 6 and 8 telling them which wires needed to be plugged into the Bombe to decypher the codes.
Although Bletchley’s Park main objective was to break the Enigma codes, the teams of Hut 7 worked on breaking the Japanese Naval codes.
Dilly Knox, who had worked in the world war one room 40, was a very important person at Station X. He worked until his death in 1943 on breaking the Enigma codes and it was him who in practice led the operation as well as being the head of Hut 6. Dilly Knox was brilliant but never truly got on with Gordon Welchman.
Bletchley Parks staff only included the most intelligent and upper-class people. Mathematicians, chess players and people who were good at logic games and quizzes were the qualities looked for in people wanting to work at Bletchley Park. They were all sworn to secrecy and were not to reveal to anyone the work done at Bletchley Park. They were also commonly referred to as Geese. It was a sort of code name for the working staff of Station X. The staff rose from about 120 in 1939 to about 7,000 at the beginning of 1944.
Of course that staff was not entirely crypt analytical, it consisted also of an immense amount of staff used, for example, for signaling the products to commands in the rest of England or abroad.
After the war many of the 10,000 people who worked and had participated at Station X remained silent and it was only in the 1970’s that the activities of Bletchley Park were revealed to the general public.
