These methods were out of date by 1939; it had been known for some time that the Germans had been using Enigma, a coding machine that did not use random symbols. The British government believed that the Enigma system was unbreakable, so no effort had been made to try and crack it. Now that war was inevitable something had to be done.
The recruits were joined by other newcomers, generally mathematicians, the mathematicians and the experienced code breakers did not get on well at first. Not only were they younger but they also worked in a completely different way, however the two groups were soon working together and it was the mathematicians who made the real breakthroughs on Enigma in the first years of the war. Enigma was a mathematical machine and breaking it mostly depended upon being able to predict the likelihood of random letters appearing sequence. There were no real traits that made you a good code breaker in 1939 but in time tests were made to see how a potential recruit would work in Station X. The reason for this was because to solve crossword puzzles you need to be able to put yourself in the perspective of an unknown person and expect the unexpected.
Station X worked with Y stations this was because they received messages from German operators that had been picked up by the Y Service. The messages were intercepted by the Y Service and then they were sent to Bletchley to be decoded and translated into English. At first there were only a few Y Service stations but when war broke out mobile units were sent to France and from 1941 more stations were set up around Britain. The success of Bletchley depended on the Y Service being able to pick up and record the messages in Morse code without this Station X would not be able to function properly. It was important to record the beginning of the message because this was often the clue to cracking it and as the war went on the Y Service operators became more and more skilled at finding the correct frequencies at the right time of day.
The work at Bletchley was centred on Hut 6 and Hut 3. Hut 6 received signals and messages and attempted to decode them, the people that worked there rarely paid much attention to what was in the messages; their role was to simply break through the enemies attempts at concealment. Hut 3’s job was to break the code as best they could and turn it into text, the intelligence offers attempted to make sense of the decoded messages which were often scraps of text in German, and later Italian and Japanese. Most of the staff in Hut 3 were linguists and they had to be able to identify possible words from just a few letters and fit them into an overall message in a foreign language. When the message was completed it was sent to MI6.
As the volume of messages grew, the Huts had to be manned twenty-four hours a day. There were three watches, each of eight hours in Hut 3 each watch was supervised by the head of the watch, whose job was to allocate messages to the staff as they arrived. This became a highly skilled and very important role. Not only did the head of the watch have to act very quickly but they also had to decided whether or not a particular message was important or not and then give it priority. The shifts changed three times at nine in the morning, four in the afternoon and midnight. This meant that some staff could work long hours. Much of the work was boring and involved a lot of routine jobs. Although the information might be routine, the message might contain important clues that would enable the codes to be cracked.
3) In what ways did the work of Bletchley Park influence the out come of the Second World War?
The work of Bletchley Park influenced the out come of the Second World War by giving the army and navy important secrets that they had heard from intercepting the German enigma codes. The impact that Bletchley made on the war can be seen when the information they provided was not used, this is because it shows us the consequences and usually the failure of the armed forces due to their ignorance.
The first major case of information being ignored from Station X was at the beginning of April 1940, there was a build up in the number of messages coming from the Baltic this suggested naval activity. The Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC) showed no interest in this and when one of the officers from Bletchley tried to contact them by telephone they got nowhere. A few days after this Norway was invaded and even though most of the soldiers in Norway were territorials (part time soldiers) they could have been better prepared than they were if the information had been taken seriously.
A second example of Station X being ignored came two months later. In late May there was another build up of messages in the Baltic which made it look like German warships were about to sail out into the Atlantic. Again the OIC were informed but did not pass the message on to the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow. The results of this blatant ignorance were disastrous. HMS Glorious, HMS Acasta and HMS Ardent were all sunk and all 1500 men were killed by German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.
When Bletchley Park was listened to and their evidence was acted on the British had the upper hand on the Germans, this is clearly shown by the consequences of The Battle of Matapan. It became clear that the Italians were going to invade Yugoslavia and later that German forces were being sent to back up the Italians when they were stopped. They tipped off Admiral Cunningham and he sunk three heavy cruisers and two destroyers from the German fleet and suffered no British losses. This stopped the Germans from supporting the Italians.
