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Bletchley Park - The Home of WWII Allied Codebreaking
Bletchley Park, located near Milton Keynes in England, was the leading codebreaking centre in WWII. At a recent presentation the former Director of National Intelligence, V. Adm. Mike McConnell commented in Washington that it was the US that broke the Nazi codes. In reality it was three years after the war begun before the United States burst onto the scene and an embattled Prime Minister Winston Churchill handed over the codebreaking secrets to the United States, who had the manufacturing and raw materials to produce code breaking equipment in large numbers. Many think of Bletchley Park as a quaint mansion, a mismatch of Victorian architecture, which housed everything. In reality the code breaking center is a sprawling complex of huts and buildings which employed over 10,000 people at it's height. Today much of the site is in decay, with empty wartime buildings and conflicting proposals for the eventual use of the property. Many led by Tony Sale want to keep the place as a monument to the great achievements accomplished within it's grounds, including the first electronic computer.
And looking at the work in rebuilding that early electronic computing device is more than an amazing feat of engineering for this working replica was created by volunteers, without drawings or blueprints, without circuit diagrams from scrap materials, or hand built from scratch. The original devices were destroyed at the end of the war under a cloud of complete secrecy. In fact it was not until 1979 that the existence of Bletchley Park, and the work undertaken there were made public for the first time. The original machine code named "Colossus" was not used in breaking the Enigma code but for the high level ciphers used by the German High Command to send orders to the military foundations in the field, and of course Hitler's Headquarters. The centralized command and control of the German military was to be it's undoing when it came to breaking the security of its codes and ciphers. Some leaders like Herman Goering were so verbose, sending the rambling statements to every unit, and in every cipher made operators tired, lazy and allowed the Allied codebreakers to pounce on their mistakes and get through the encrypted security walls to the plain text.
Life in the codebreaking huts was far from comfortable and the operators were not allowed to speak, even go to the toilets till their official breaks. Life was highly regimented, the result of so much riding on the valuable information being received from cracking the codes. Had the Germans got wind of the 10,000 operators working day and night to read their most sensitive military secrets they would have changed the codes, and the initiative would be lost. Each time the Germans altered the Enigma machine with upgrades it caused the codebreaking to fail until the new changes could be broken. During this blind period thousands of lives, and ships were lost. This could be a simple move like adding an extra rotor to the machine, as the German Navy did.
The first to recognize the looming threat of the Nazi war machine, and the intense mathematical work needed to recreate a working Enigma, and begin research on cracking the mechanical cipher was in fact the Poles, and it was Polish researchers who saved the day. They were not given the accolade of recognition for their achievements till quite recently. The true story of Bletchley Park, and the history of WWII codebreaking is fascinating to say the least. More shortly. |
Even as late as 2003 the operators of the code breaking equipment were hesitant about speaking to the media. I attended the reunion of the few still alive, and they wanted to tell their story, but kept asking if it was alright to talk about it. So intense was the blanket of secrecy imposed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the threats that if they whispered a word about Bletchley they would be shot.
The Germans never believed that the mechanical coding machine could ever broken, and refused to consider that their technology was flawed, a lesson for today's military leaders.