Describe the organisation and work of the people of Bletchley Park?

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History coursework

1. Describe the organisation and work of the people of Bletchley Park?

Bletchley Park was a small estate 50 miles outside of London, near Milton Keynes. This location was chose as it was already owned by the secret service and was also far enough away from London that Germans would not consider it worth while target to attack. Bletchley Park was given the nickname “Station X”. The aim of Bletchley Park was to break the encoded German messages that were sent using the “Enigma”. In Britain there were “Y stations” where the messages were intercepted. Once a message had been intercepted it would appear as gibberish. This was because the enigma changed every letter. The German operators of the enigma had to change the rota settings every day. These rota settings were what the code breakers of Bletcley Park had to figure out. Once they had figured out the settings they could then read all the messages for that day. They had to find the new rota setting every day of the war. There were seventeen thousand five hundred and seventy six different combinations of rota settings and added to the switchboard there were one hundred and fifty nine million million million different combinations.

   At the beginning of the war there were around 1000 people working at Bletchley Park. By the end of the war around 7000 people were working there. The types of people at Bletchley Park were recruited from all walks of life, there were Oxford and Cambridge professors and mathematicians. They also recruited crossword competition winners. Most of the code breakers worked for the G.C.C.S in the 1920s and 1930s. One man, Alan Turin was a Cambridge professor at the age of twenty-three and was described as the smartest man of his generation.

  There were two main groups of people at Bletchley Park. There were the code breakers such as Alan Turin and Dilly Knox. Then there were the administrative staff who were mainly girls aged eighteen to twenty-two. However when the bombes and colossuses were installed women, known as Wrens, were recruited from the navy to operate the new machines.

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   A German message would be intercepted at one of the many Y stations that were located all over the country. Once a message had been intercepted it would be sent to Bletchley Park. At Bletchely Park the message would be sent to Hut 3 where it would be de-cyphered. Once it had been de-cyphered it would be sent by a small passage way, pushed by broom, to hut 6 where it would be changed from gibberish to German then to English. It would then go into the index of messages in hut 6.The fact that the people at Bletchley ...

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