11/8/2014
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| Mansion at Bletchley Park |
Baby was so excited this morning—actually, when hasn’t she
been super chirpy this trip? It’s all the places she wants to visit. We’d
watched Bletchley Circle on PBS and really loved all the girl power in
Bletchley. So, Bletchley Park was very high on Angel’s list of places to visit.
The park is operating on winter hours now, so 9:30am to 4pm.
Angel thought that should be plenty of time for us (“We haven’t been in a
single castle for more than 3 hours”). Ha. We ended up staying til they kicked
us out of Block B—well, not really kicked, but they were turning off the lights
as we finished each portion of the exhibit. This happened to us in the Roman
Baths too. We seem to be the last to come out of a lot of things.
Bletchley Park is a 1.5 hour train ride away from
Birmingham. I found out later today that Bletchley is actually closer to London
by ½ hour, so if we ever decide to come back (we totally want to!), we should
do it as a day trip from London.
The walk to BP was very short from the Bletchley train
station. Turn right, cross the street, and you’re there! We entered the main
gate and saw this:
*gasp* Benedict Cumberbatch! As Alan Turing! Angel was
super, super stoked…until we saw the exhibit dates. It doesn’t open until
Monday, November 10th. Argh. We missed it by 2 days! And then Angel
posed the question—what if we come back on Monday? That’s how much she wants to
see the exhibit. She didn’t even mind paying again for the train ride here and
the admission tickets. I had a buy 1, get 1 free voucher to BP from the Days
Out Guide, so I thought why not, we already saved a bit today, let’s come back
on Monday.
As it turns out, when you pay for Bletchley admission, you
get a season ticket that’s valid for a whole year.
So we can totally go again next year…and we’re going on Monday again, to see the Turing exhibit. Angel and Dad are Turing buffs, so I guess we’ll bring Dad along next year.
The head of Britain’s intelligence agency, Admiral Hugh
Sinclair, bought Bletchley Park with his own money during WWII. London was
under heavy bombing from the Germans and he didn’t want his code-breaking
operations jeopardized by bombing, which is why he chose to locate the operations
at Bletchley, a rural country mansion. Bletchley is perfectly located in the
middle of Oxford and Cambridge, the two universities they recruited a lot of
their codebreakers from.
It was crucial that the Germans never learn of Bletchley Park, so they explained away all the people congregating at BP as “Captain Ridley’s hunting party.”
Initially a motley crew of 200 people, BP grew to a force of almost 9000 strong by the end of the war. 2/3 of which were women.
There were linguists, mathematicians, engineers who all came
together to brainstorm, think outside of the box to break German codes.
They first began recruiting debutantes to work here, as they thought that debutantes would keep secrets better. The girls would enter through the gates and be herded up to the mansion, where they were to sign the Official Secrets Act. The commanding officer would instill in them the fear of God should they ever reveal any information to another person of what they were doing at BP. So they never talked about their work even to each other.
When the war was over, all the code-breaking machines were
ordered to be dismantled and all the papers burned. The men and women who
worked here left to return to ordinary citizen lives and they weren’t allowed
to speak of their time at Bletchley, even to their spouses. So many died taking
the secrets of Bletchley to their graves.
General Eisenhower had this to say about the workers at
Bletchley:
Churchill put it most apt, that Bletchley workers were the “geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled.” In the age of Facebook and Twitter, who would be able to do that? It’s crazy that this group of dedicated people kept mum for so long. So long, the general public never learned of Bletchley’s existence until 30 years later!
Perhaps one of Bletchley’s greatest achievements (besides
being the birthplace of the computer age) is that the code-breakers were able
to confirm that Hitler thought the Allies’ invasion would begin at Calais, thus
helping ensure the success of Normandy on 6/6. Double agents had been sent out
to drop clues to German agents that the Allies were planning to do a
preliminary invasion of Normandy as a feint, and that their biggest invasion
efforts would then be at Calais. It was essential to learn if Hitler swallowed
the false information, and at the 11th hour, code-breakers at
Bletchley found out that yes, Hitler believed the double agents’ information.
His decision to move most his forces to Calais to block the
Allies helped turn the tide of WWII. D-Day landings were a success and most
importantly, double agents had led Hitler to believe that an invasion at Calais
was imminent after Normandy…which Hitler believed for more than a month.
Alan Turing, with some of the most brilliant minds in
Britain, worked at Bletchley, trying to come up with ways to break German
codes. In a letter dated October 1941, some of the heads of Bletchley
(including Turing), wrote directly to Churchill, complaining of lack of resources
and funds.
Unlike most of his contemporaries, Churchill believed in the
work they were doing at Bletchley. He remained convinced that breaking the
codes was crucial to winning the war, so he wrote back to Turing and
colleagues:
“Make sure they have all they want extreme priority and
report to me that this has been done.”
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| Can you read Churchill's writing? I can't! |
Google has donated a lot of money to BP over the years to help restore Bletchley.
There were dispatch motorcycles on display. Most of the
riders were women, who drove all over the country, collecting intercepted radio
traffic from Y centers (Wireless Intercept = ‘WI’ = Y) and delivering it to
Bletchley to be code-broken. The dispatch riders were initially recruited from
amateur riding enthusiasts and they drove their own motorcycles. They’d drive
under any weather condition, be it hail or snow, to get this vital information
to Bletchley in a timely manner. They didn’t know what exactly was in the bags
they were delivering, just that this was part of the war effort and that they
were doing their part to help their country.
German Enigma and Lorenz encoding machines were on display,
as were the British counterpart, the Typex. The Typex was developed using
Enigma as a prototype by the British Air Ministry Signals department. They were
advised that they might be infringing on patents, but the government responded
in typical bureautic fashion that they would consider paying the patent holders
after the war was over. Effectively, this gave them free reign to do whatever
they wanted without paying—if the war was won, the company might not be in
existence any longer (as the company was German). If the war was lost, then
there would be no British government to pay the royalties. How devilishly
clever. In any case, the government later said that to pay the royalties would
mean admitting the Typex was in existence, and as it’s crucial to never let the
existence of Typex be known, then they shouldn’t pay the royalties.
The deciphering machine, the Bombe (well, a recreation
anyway, because the originals had been ordered destroyed so that no other
country would learn that Britain and America knew how to decode the Germans’
code. Even during WWII, Britain and America never let Russia know that they knew
how to decode German code. This would prove vital during the Cold War) was also
on display, built by a group of volunteers in the 2000s.
The Bombe machines were developed by Alan Turing and Gordon
Welchman and were used to test out possible Enigma settings much faster than
humans. This was critical because the Enigma settings were changed on a 24-hour
basis.
After having their code broken with humiliating ease during
WWI, Germany spent a good decade researching ways to create an invincible code.
The government bought encoding machines from the company Lorenz (the machines
were sold on open market so anyone could buy them), and changed them to make
them more secure.
The culture of Nazi Germany was that they were the
invincible race. This spread to their thinking that their code was unbreakable.
And for a time, it was. I was reading how they encoded using the Enigma machine
and my head was spinning from how crazy it was that BP codebreakers even
attempted to make sense of the gibberish the Enigma was spitting out.
Germans were so confident that the Allies wouldn’t be able
to break their code, they transmitted over the radio using Morse code. Of
course, radio’s easy to listen in. England had a lot of centers around the
country with Intercept Operators listening in to the Germans’ gibberish 24/7.
The machine encodes in a way so that there are 158 million,
million, million ways to decode.
That’s crazy! Tiltman made a go at it, and figured out a pattern after 10 days
of continuous work. These brilliant geniuses at BP would work round the clock
at the beginning of the war, and it’s said that they were distracted by the
humdrums of daily life. A women who worked at Bletchley described them as
“unclean,” and they often threw their cups into the lake instead of losing time
(and train of thought) taking the cups back to the canteen. Dilly Knox, another
of Bletchley’s geniuses, was said to do his best thinking during his hours in
the bathtub.
This is the building that housed a lot of the Enigma
codebreaking machines, where the workers worked tirelessly to decode Italian,
Japanese and German codes:
Since most of the buildings were hastily built during WWII,
a lot of the buildings were destroyed after the war.
When Hitler was gaining power in the 1930s and before WWII
broke out, a Polish post office clerk noticed a big package sitting in the post
office that was addressed to German officers. The rather astute postal clerk
and his colleagues opened the package and figured out that this was a new type
of encoding machine. They took meticulous pictures of the machine, then
dismantled it to see how it worked before putting everything back together
again and wrapping it up. The German officers came to pick up the package,
never the wiser that it’d been opened—and dismantled, no less!
The information was given to Polish cryptanalysts, who were
able to use the photographs to build a model of the German encoding machine.
They were able to listen in successfully on German plans for a good few years
before German officers added additional security features.
Then WWII broke out for good. France became occupied,
Britain under air bomb siege. The Polish cryptanalysts called a conference with
the Allies and handed off the blueprints of the German encoding machine. This
was a vital piece of missing information for the Allies. They were able to take
what the Poles had given them and run with it, ultimately producing the Bombe
machine, which could quickly compute and spit out what the day’s key might be.
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| The Bombe machine |
The Bombe machine was so called because the Polish
cryptanalysts had called their model, the precursor to the Bombe, the “Bomba.” They’d
been eating a particular type of ice cream called the “Bomba” at a café. The
word was corrupted into English, then turned into Bombe.
The Bombes were operated mostly by WRNS (Women’s Royal Navy,
or WRENS).
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| Enigma machine once owned by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini |
A Japanese flag thought to be worn by a Kamikaze pilot:
He would have worn the flag around his head, like a scarf. The flag is adorned with well-wisher’s good lucks, like “At least I shall kill one enemy for the Emperor.”
They had an exhibit about double agents. Juan Pujol was
codenamed Garbo because he was considered such a good actor, in the league of
Greta Garbo. He was awarded medals by both sides, the British Empire and the
German Iron Cross. 3 hours after the D-Day landings had started, he informed
German intelligence of the fact, and it was the first reporting that German
intelligence got of the D-Day landings that day. This enhanced his reputation
for accuracy. He then convinced German intelligence that the Normandy invasion
was a deception, and the main invasion area would be Calais. Hitler believed
him and 12 German armored divisions remained at Calais for 120 days. Even after
the blows at D-Day, Hitler didn’t move these divisions.
Another agent convinced German intelligence to open up a spy
outpost because he claimed he could successfully recruit spies abroad. He was
given funding for this, and he set up fake spies to claim their paychecks. The
money was funneled into MI5, some 85,000 pounds.
As Alan Turing worked here as one of the first codebreakers
at Bletchley, they had a lot of information detailing his life. Sadly, not many
of his personal effects remain. A cherished watch was on display, as was his
teddy bear, Porgy. He bought Porgy when he was an adult:
At Cambridge, he would practice his lectures in front of
Porgy. Ha. It’s like I always tell Angel…talk to the wall! Well, I tell her to
talk to Pooh too, but she’d rather flap his arms around at me.
Turing was a rower on the Cambridge rowing team as well as a
cross country runner. Very accomplished man! After his death, his mother lived
to research his works and achievements, but his time at Bletchley was still
state secret. It was only some years after his death that she received a letter
that detailed a wee bit of her son’s accomplishments at Bletchley. She made the
connection to his letters during those years as “His enforced silence
concerning his work quite ruined him as a correspondent; his letters from then
on became infrequent and scrappy.”
One of Turing’s most important papers (posing the question
“Can machines think?”) was on display.
There’s a guided tour every ½ hour starting at noon, with
the last one at 2:30pm. You have to go up to the mansion to get a ticket to the
tour (included in price of admission). All the tickets to the 1:30pm were
taken, so we had to wait for the 2pm tour. It was pouring rain by that time and
freezing cold. The tour starts at the Chauffeur’s Hut, then takes you along the
grounds to point out key aspects. Like the stables, where there’s a pigeon loft
above the stables. Technology was advancing rapidly in WWII, but they still
relied on messenger pigeons to relay messages. The pigeons were considered a
reliable way to get information into the necessary hands.
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| Stable with pigeon loft above |
This is the gate the recruited girls would travel through
when they first arrived at Bletchley:
Also the cottages where the senior code-breakers assembled,
like Dilly Knox of the long baths and Alan Turing:
Angel: After an entire day at Bletchley with countless
interactive exhibits explaining the workings of the Enigma and Lorenz machines,
Jen wanted to have a section about the “things that turn” on the blog. =)
The Enigma was used by the rest of the German army and each unit
had their own “menu” that reset at midnight every day. The navy had a different
Enigma machine from the army which had 4 rotators instead of only 3, making the
naval encryptions harder to crack.
To prevent the enemy from finding out that the Enigma code
had been cracked, reports from Bletchley were often reworded to make it appear
that the information had come from spies working abroad.
There was a different cipher machine known as the Lorenz
which was reserved for Hitler and his highest generals to use; it was in theory
more cryptographically secure and was codenamed “Fish” by the people at
Bletchley Park. However, in the end its code was still broken in part due to a
German operator’s error of sending a long message (around 4000 characters)
twice using the same wheel-combination. This gave the code-breakers at
Bletchley the needed depth to crack the code.
The Lorenz was only declassified in 2003, so a lot of people
who worked on decoding it had already died.
When we arrived back in Birmingham, it was to find this:
A full-on Christmas parade was in progress and it cut off
the main road! We had no way of getting across to get to our hotel, except to
walk all the way down the street to where the parade had already ended, cross
there, and come back around again. I wanted to watch the parade, as there were
a lot of people on both sides watching with excitement. Angel said, “You think
they’ve never seen a Disney parade before, and Disney parades are better.” :P
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