Sixty years after World War II, many of Britain's top-secret operations have been de-classified. Bletchley Park is on the top of the list.
Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, a Victorian mansion standing on 56 acres, is where a small team of scholars-turned-code-breakers cracked the Nazi Enigma cipher, the backbone of German military and intelligence communications. The success of this effort was one of the greatest intellectual achievements of the 20th century, helping to shorten World War II by at least two years and cementing the close relationship between the United States and Britain.
On the eve of World War II, a closely knit group of intelligence officers began searching the English countryside for a secure, out-of-town base for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS). Their search ended at Bletchley Park. Located 47 miles northwest of London, at a junction of major road and rail connections to all parts of the country, Bletchley Park was to become the most important communications center in the history of modern warfare.
By 1944, more than 12,000 people were employed there by GC&CS, including some of the most prominent mathematicians and intellectuals of the era.
Having selected Bletchley Park as its new operational base, GC&CS set about the task of transforming the park into a secure military establishment - much to the surprise of the locals. Iron railings and barbed wire were erected around the perimeter, and military police patrols were mounted on an intermittent basis to prevent unsolicited entry. After a few "trial-runs," Bletchley Park became fully operational as Britain's principal interception and decoding center.
In parallel with the German devel-opments, a group of Polish crypto-analysts had obtained early commercial copies of the Enigma and had been carefully monitoring the modifications being mad being made to the original machine. In July 1939, at a secret meeting in the Pyry Forest, the Poles, aware that an invasion of their own country was imminent, passed on their knowledge of Enigma to representatives of both GC&CS and the French intelligence services.
But the challenges facing GC&CS continued long into World War II. The Germans changed and modified the code daily to make it more secure. To speed up the code-breaking proc-ess, the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing developed an idea originally proposed by Polish cryptoanalysts. The result was the Bombe: an electro-mechanical machine that greatly reduced the odds and thereby the time required to break the daily-changing Enigma keys.
It was out of this frantic equivalent of blindfold three-dimensional chess, which also included extensive British and American cooperation over the interception and decoding of Japanese intelligence traffic, that the influence of Bletchley Park attained worldwide significance. After several other brilliant breakthroughs, the code was finally broken.
The mass exodus of staff from Bletchley Park soon after World War II is not where the story ends. From 1946 onwards, the intelligence services continued to use a quiet corner of Bletchley Park as a key interception and training center. It would remain so for 50 years until finally decommissioned in 1987.
Despite the vital role Bletchley Park once played in helping to strive for world peace, most of the buildings that remain standing are facing an ignominious end in the name of progress. This caused the Bletchley Park Trust to be formed to preserve the buildings and their historical significance for the future.
All this and more on this fascinating subject will be revealed Nov. 9 when Mr. Peter John Wescombe will be in Seattle to talk to our local English Speaking Union Branch reception.
Mr. Wescombe, a retired Royal Navy officer, spent time in Her Majesty's Diplomatic Service and was a charter and founding member of the preservation committee orga-nized in January 1991; he also is a Trustee of the Bletchley Park Trust. His visit generated great interest among ESU members, computer buffs and World War II historians.
If you would like more information, please give me a call. TTFN.
Linda Greenwald, a.k.a. Linda of London, is a Queen Anne resident and consultant on all things British. She can be reached at qanews@nwlink.com
