- Station Y
- Station X (in hut 14)
- The Army/ Air force OR the ‘U’ Boat
- Hut 6 OR Hut 8
- Hut 3 OR Hut 4
- Passed on to M16 in London (if important enough) – dealt with foreign intelligence
Y Stations around the world intercepted German messages; the messages were decoded and sent on to Hut 14 where Station X was situated. At Station X it was decided whether the messages related to the German Air Force/ Army or the “U” Boat and surface boats. If the message was related to the Air Force/ Army they were sent to Hut 6 where people attempted to decode them. Decoded messages were sent to Hut 3 where they were translated, analyzed and their priority decided.
Huts 3,6 and 8 were the main decoding huts. To speed up the time in which the messages were decoded they had to be passed on so that many different people could look at them. To enhance this a chute was developed between huts 3 and 6; it was also rumored that this feature was developed to prevent the workers getting wet in the ‘English weather’.
If messages were related to the “U” Boat and surface boats then they went through a similar process. Firstly they were sent to Hut 8 where people attempted to decode them. Decoded messages were then sent to Hut 4 where they were translated, analyzed and their priority decides. All messages were sorted into four piles. Urgent – where messages were teleprinted to M16 in London, teleprinted later in the day, sent daily in a van or not passed on. They were recorded on cards for later cross-referencing.
Bletchley Park was organized and divided up into different sections to prevent the spreading of information in case there was a spy at Bletchley Park. Therefore there were different teams working on different parts of the messages received to minimize leaks.
Winston Churchill was the founder of Bletchley Park. He was born on the 30th November 1874. He published a book on his political philosophy in 1909 after becoming a conservative member of parliament (MP). Churchill was Prime Minister from 1941 to 1945 and 1951 to 1955. The first thing he did when he became Prime Minister in 1941 was order the evacuation of women and children to the countryside. He made many famous and stirring speeches, which inspired the British people e.g. “… We shall fight on the fields, and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender”. He is remembered as a statesman who led Britain to victory during World War 2.
The main decoding machine was called the Enigma. This machine was acquired by the Polish and given to the English. Even though Bletchley Park had Germany’s decoding machine they still didn’t know how to use it. This was the biggest challenge that the mathematicians had to overcome. It took them about a year to work out how to use the Enigma. Many men contributed to this including Alan Turing and Harry Hinsley. Other machines they used included the BOMBE (invented by Truing). The BOMBE was a noisy electro – mechanical machine that could check through combinations of letters much quicker than the human mind. When the BOMBE stopped, this meant that they had the right combination. Sometimes a code could be cracked in less than an hour. But when the U-boats started to use 4-rotor Enigma machines in February 1942 it took TEN MONTHS to break the code.
In 1941 England managed to destroy the Italian Navy in the Mediterranean, which was thought to be a threat to Britain. This was Bletchley Park’s first victory. The odds against their success were a staggering 150,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. But they did succeed - a triumph that was one of the greatest intellectual achievements of the twentieth century. Their great prioritizing strategies helped to shorten WWII by at least two years.
During the war there were more than 10,000 people working at Bletchley Park. There were women and men of all ages. Most of the workers were a mix of Mathematicians, linguists and academics from the “top” universities: Oxford and Cambridge. The original code breakers were middle-aged men from top universities and worked for the Government Code and Cyper School (GCCS) in the 1920’s. The second group of code breakers were younger mathematicians. Women, aged 18 to 23, were also part of the work at Bletchley Park and were mainly given jobs with administrative purposes.
By 1939 Bletchley Park was equipped with roads, telephone lines and water mains. Before this carrier pigeons were used frequently to relay messages. There were also certain blocks for the analyzing of traffic and deceptive operations. The huts involved with transportation included, G Block, Hut 11 and the Garages. G Block analyzed traffic; Hut 11 developed model railways and held the ‘Bombe’ machine.
All of these things helped to speed up the relay of messages and finally beating the odds (150,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1) win the war by using the top MINDS in England.
Written By: Amber Woodhams, 10 More
