Behind the scenes at Bletchley Park during WW2
Brian Oakley (Bletchley Park historian and tour guide)
7th September 2011
Brian Wynne Oakley CBE, was a British civil servant and industrialist who took a leading role in the area of information technology, especially the 1980s Alvey Programme.
Brian studied science at University of Oxford. Later he became a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and the British Computer Society. He undertook research in telecommunications and civilian applications of military research. He then worked in Whitehall as a civil servant. Subsequently, he became the chief official of the Science and Engineering Research Council. (Wikipedia extract)
Bletchley Park is an estate located in the town of Bletchley, in Buckinghamshire which currently houses the National Museum of Computing. During World War II Bletchley Park was the site of the United Kingdom's main decryption establishment, the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS), where ciphers and codes of several Axis countries were decrypted, most importantly the ciphers generated by the German Enigma and Lorenz machines. It also housed Station X, a secret radio intercept station. (Wikipedia extract)
Against this background and remembering that many members had visited the park recently Brian enriched our knowledge with a series of vignettes of some of the more notable and colourful characters and events that inhabited the famous huts in this most secret of places.
We learnt that there is now a hall of fame for those code breakers considered to be the very best, and names go on by recommendation and popularity; but any nomination must be accompanied by a recommendation for a corresponding removal of an existing name. Quite a challenge!
We also learnt that a daily news sheet produced each morning by three enthusiasts; and which summarised the key discoveries from the day before; was seen as fairly irrelevant by the British establishment but was seized upon avidly by our United States Air force friends.
A significant success in code breaking was our ability to destroy the German daytime air force by knowing where the aircraft were stationed and hitting them on the ground, this meant that we controlled the skies for the Normandy landings. As an aside we were told that aircraft casualties up to 10% were acceptable. Not any more.
The use of radio accelerated the interest in code breaking and in the early days code books were used and had to be kept with the radio. Early success in British code breaking came in WW1 with the breaking of Russian naval codes. This lead indirectly to the formation of the Government Code and Cipher School in 1919.
Dillie Knox, a leading light at Bletchley Park broke the Italian version of the Enigma in 1935 and shortly after the Spanish code was broken.
The German Enigma was proving more intractable due to fancy wiring changes but in 1939 the Poles revealed that they had been reading German Enigmas since 1932. This good news saw them brought to England via Budapest and the South of France.
Alan Turing, known now as the father of computing and a pioneer in artificial intelligence (see the Turing Test) was a key player during the major breakthroughs. His greatest achievement at Bletchley was the invention of the Bombe. The bombe was an electromechanical device whose function was to discover some of the daily settings of the Enigma machines on the various German military networks. The functional design was produced by Alan Turing with an important contribution from Gordon Welchman, and the engineering was by Harold 'Doc' Keen of the British Tabulating Machine Company at Letchworth. Each machine was about 7 feet (2.1m) wide, 6 feet 6 inches (1.98m) tall, 2 feet (0.61m) deep and weighed about a ton. (Wikipedia extract)
At its peak, GC&CS were reading some 4,000 messages per day. Because of the danger of bombes at Bletchley Park being lost if there were to be an aerial bombing raid, five bombe outstations] were established at Adstock, Gayhurst, Wavendon and Stanmore.
Brian also mentioned the first director of Bletchley Park, Commander Alistair Denniston, and that JR Tolkien had trained as a code breaker but never served there.
Finally Brian grasped the nettle and named the person he thought had been the greatest code breaker – John Tiltman
From Wikipedia, Brigadier John Hessell Tiltman MC (25 May 1894–10 August 1982) was a British Army officer who worked in intelligence, often at or with the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS) starting in the 1920s. His intelligence work was largely connected with cryptography, and he showed considerable skill at cryptanalysis. His work in association with Bill Tutte on the German teleprinter ciphers, called at Bletchley Park the FISH ciphers, led to sometimes successful attack methods. It was to exploit those methods that Colossus, the first digital programmable electronic computer, was designed and built.
From 1921–1929, he was a cryptanalyst with the Indian Army at Army Headquarters, Simla. They were reading Russian diplomatic cipher traffic from Moscow to Kabul, Afghanistan and Tashkent, Turkestan. After a decade as a War Office civilian at GC&CS, the interwar cryptographic organization, John was recalled to active service. His experience enabled him to assist in many areas of endeavour at GC&CS. He was considered one of Bletchley Park’s finest cryptanalysts on non-machine systems.
John Tiltman made the transition from the manual ciphers of the early 20th century to the sophisticated machine systems of the latter half of the century; he was one of a very few who were able to do so..
On 1 September 2004, Tiltman was inducted into the NSA's "hall of honor", the first non-US citizen to be recognised in that way. The NSA commented, "His efforts at training and his attention to all the many facets that make up cryptology inspired the best in all who encountered him."
During the questions and answers John noted that the Germans cracked many of our codes but never managed our Enigma equivalent machines, we were not as careless as they were.
Ken Taylor
Following an extensive question and answer session Pat Hunt our Vice President thanked Dr Oakley for an extremely interesting and informative talk about Bletchley and the very clever people who worked there during the war many of whom we know very little about, due no doubt to the restrictions placed on them by the Official Secrets Act, and to whom we owe a large debt of gratitude. Members joined Pat in a well deserved round of applause.
See also the Probus Visit to Bletchley here
Bletchley Park
In 1938, with war looking more imminent, the British Government Code and Cypher School in London, under Alastair Denniston, were hoping to expand and looking for a safe site in the country. At this time the Bletchley Estate became available, a site roughly mid-way between Oxford and Cambridge, where mathematicians could be recruited. The owner, Sir Herbert Samuel Leon, a wealthy financier had already died and upon the death of his wife, Lady Fanny, in 1937 the property came on the market. A developer Captain Hubert Faulkner was about to have the place demolished and sell the land for housing, but Dennison, under the guise as part of “Captain Ridley`s Shooting Party” looked over the place and the house and several acres were bought. It was to become known as Station X. (In a prior auction for Lot 1 of the Lodge, the House, with 26 bedrooms and 43 acres, the sale was withdrawn at £7,500 –for failing to reach its reserve price.) The code name for the whole deciphering project was “Ultra”.
