The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (18 page)

She and the even younger girls like Eileen Plowman felt their responsibility very heavily. They didn’t need to be told that lives were being lost; many of them had
boyfriends or brothers who were putting their own lives at risk. Eileen was in no doubt about how important it was that everyone in Hut 8 worked as hard as they possibly could.

‘We used to find it very nerve-racking. We used to get uptight about it all. The responsibility of it. I wasn’t very old. I think at that time I was very King and country. It was
something that was important.’

But despite the frustrations in the Admiralty and Hut 8, the solution was already in hand. At the end of October 1942 the crew of the
U-559
scuttled the submarine in the Mediterranean
after being attacked by the British destroyer HMS
Petard
. The
Petard
’s first officer, Lieutenant Anthony Fasson, and Able-Seaman Colin Grazier swam to the U-boat and passed
the codebooks out to sixteen-year-old Naafi boy Tommy Brown, but before the seamen could get out the
U-559
sank, taking them down with it. They were awarded the George Cross posthumously.
Brown received the George Medal. Their heroism was vital in helping to end the blackout.

The codebooks were for lower-grade German naval codes but the messages they were used to encode were also sent to other ships that only used the Shark code. If they could track identical
messages they should have a crib that would get them back into the U-boat codes.

Shaun Wylie took over the codebreaking shift in Hut 8 at midnight on 12 December 1942. They worked through the night trying to match the messages broken with the
codebooks
against Enigma messages without luck. Next morning, a frustrated Shaun Wylie was having breakfast in the new canteen that had replaced the restaurant in the mansion when someone from Hut 8 rushed
in and grabbed him excitedly:

‘We’re back into the U-boats.’

Shaun Wylie was elated and relieved. In a measure of how important it was not just to Bletchley and the Admiralty but also to the country itself, he was under orders to ring Commander Travis,
who had taken over from Commander Denniston as the head of Bletchley Park, immediately the code was broken, day or night. Commander Travis had exactly the same instructions from his own boss,
Stewart Menzies, the head of MI6, and Menzies had been left in no uncertain terms that he was to inform Mr Churchill immediately.

The girls in the Big Room were soon dealing with a flood of messages to decode as the codebreakers began cracking first the day’s code and then the settings for previous days. Huge numbers
of messages had piled up and it was important to track the latest position for each of the different U-boats. Eileen Plowman remembered the messages coming through thick and fast.

‘It got more intense once it was broken. They used to say they were breaking “the day”. We would set the machines up and then all the messages – there were lots and lots
of messages – came through and everybody went mad with all the decoding and it all came out in German. Where I came in useful was that I knew German, because it was all positions of the
U-boats and we had to get that right and
send up to Admiralty. The next thing you’d hear was that a U-boat had been sunk.’

Within hours, the Admiralty was once more routing the Atlantic convoys around the wolf packs and from then on Hut 8 had no problems breaking the U-boat codes.

Once the code had been broken and Pat and the other girls in the Big Room had typed out the strips of German and stuck them on the back of the original messages, they were passed through to
Phoebe in Hut 4 and handed on to the naval intelligence reporters. The Z Watch, which wrote the intelligence reports on all the German naval Enigma messages, was run by Walter Ettinghausen, a
German Jew who had fled the Nazis with his family and become an Oxford academic. He joined the British Army in September 1940, but since he was one of the leading German scholars in the country it
was not long before he was sent to Bletchley.

The reports would come into the Z Watch in batches in wire trays and the distribution of the messages was controlled by two Wrens. One of them, Diana Spence, was twenty-two when she arrived at
Bletchley. She was astonished to find that her billet was the ‘majestic’ Woburn Abbey and her ‘cabin’ was in a room that had once been the Duke of Bedford’s private
bedchamber; it was covered with beautifully ornate and obviously antique Chinese wallpaper. Diana and the other Wren sat at a small table in the Z Watch waiting for batches of messages decoded by
the girls in the Big Room to come in.

‘We gave them out to members of the Watch, who were all interpreters, on the big table. When they’d translated
the German we sent the handwritten messages back
down to the typing room. The important part of our work was to check the messages when they were sent back again typed in English against the handwritten translations, in case there were any
mistakes.’

The teleprinter operators typing out the reports were WAAFs rather than Wrens, but it was Diana and her fellow Wrens who controlled the messages and made sure that the often untidy handwriting
of the intelligence reporters was typed out properly by the WAAFs before it was sent to the Admiralty. Unlike the women in Hut 8, they were reading reports in English and could understand what was
going on. So the nine Wrens who worked in the Z Watch were in a very privileged and unusual position for women working at Bletchley in that they could see the war from very close up.

‘We were always reading messages sent by U-boat commanders saying they had sighted a convoy and were about to attack. The air force would be alerted and then very often we would read a
message from the same U-boat commander saying he couldn’t surface to attack as the RAF were overhead. If we did not spot a mistake by a typist – in perhaps a degree of longitude or
latitude – it could be vital.’

There was good communication between the reporters in the Z Watch and Hut 8 to ensure that Pat and the other girls in the Big Room didn’t waste time typing out messages that were
irrelevant or had no intelligence value.

‘We would say, “Shall we go on with this?” And they would say: “Yes, keep going,” or “No, don’t bother.”’

So many teenage girls had now been called up by the Foreign Office to go to Bletchley that a number of mothers were becoming concerned at what might be happening to their
daughters. Peter Loxley, the senior Foreign Office official dealing with MI6 and the rest of the secret world of intelligence, wrote to Alan Bradshaw, the head administrator at Bletchley,
explaining that one anxious mother had written to the head of the Foreign Office:

‘She said that she and a number of other mothers were worried about the lack of supervision exercised over the many young girls who are now working at Bletchley. There seemed to be nobody
who had general charge of their welfare, and she had heard several accounts of girls who were cracking under the strain.’

Commander Travis set up a Women’s Committee in the spring of 1942 to look after the well-being of all women working at Bletchley, but he made it clear that ‘it will not deal with
questions concerning work or pay’. The committee included representatives of all the main departments and the women’s services, as well as the MI6 section that encoded secret messages
to its agents abroad, which was still based at Bletchley. Their representative was the very glamorous Lady Cynthia Tothill, who was well known as the ‘face’ of Pond’s beauty
creams in all of its advertisements.

The committee – whose members included Evelyn Whatley, representing all the women in Hut 8 – dealt with a number of problems ranging from the deteriorating standard of coffee served
in the canteen to the theft of watches and the ‘ever-increasing amount of artistry’ in
the ladies’ cloakrooms and toilets; the problem that almost certainly
most concerned the anxious mothers was presumably left to the representatives of the various sections on the committee to deal with privately.

Christmas 1943 was notable for a major triumph within Hut 8, the tracking of the
Scharnhorst
. This was the German battlecruiser that had sunk the Royal Navy’s
aircraft carrier HMS
Glorious
with the loss of 1,500 men in 1940 after the Admiralty ignored Harry Hinsley’s warnings.

During the days leading up to Christmas, Hut 8 was on full alert with numerous indications in the messages encoded in the naval Enigma code that the
Scharnhorst
was about to attack a
Royal Navy Arctic convoy taking supplies to the Russians, and that she was backed up by a number of other German warships and a wolf pack of eight U-boats. Christmas Day brought confirmation from
the U-boats that they had found the convoy. What the Germans didn’t know was that they were heading into a British trap. Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, commander of the Home Fleet, who had himself
captained
Glorious
, was deliberately trying to draw out the
Scharnhorst
. But it might all go worryingly wrong, and things were tense in Hut 8 as they worked hard to produce the
latest intelligence for Admiral Fraser. Pat Wright had been working the day shift, typing out the messages from the U-boats reporting their sightings of the convoy.

‘I finished work at four o’clock and went back to my billet. Christmas dinner was over by now but Mrs Tomlin said, “Hello, duck, saved you a bit of Christmas pudding.
Here you are. This’ll make your shit black.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or what to do. So I said thank you very much and ate it.’

It was a touch of humour amid the worries over the convoy. Next day Pat was back in the office on the day shift as Admiral Fraser’s trap was sprung in the Barents Sea north of Norway. From
shortly after nine o’clock in the morning of Boxing Day 1943, the
Scharnhorst
was repeatedly attacked by Royal Navy ships and was finally sunk just before seven in the evening.

Admiral Fraser came to Bletchley to thank the codebreakers and to explain how vital their work had been. There was a ballot to hear him talk and a number of the girls in the Big Room won
tickets, sitting and listening to the results of their work with a mixture of awe and pride.

By now the Americans, with more financial and manufacturing resources, had built many more Bombes than Bletchley could afford and had taken over the bulk of the work protecting the Atlantic
convoys. But Hut 8 remained busy. The Allies were about to invade France. There was a great deal of concern over the damage that the U-boats could do to the Allied invasion force as it crossed the
Channel, and a special team of Wren intercept operators were brought to Bletchley to provide Hut 8 with the messages as quickly as possible.

It was clear from the restrictions on travel that D-Day was coming but Pat and the other girls didn’t know when until the evening of 4 June 1944 when they went into work and were told the
invasion would be launched overnight.

‘They told us they wanted every message decoded as fast
as possible. But then it was postponed because the weather was so bad and that meant we girls knew it was
going to take place, so we had to stay there until D-Day (for security reasons). We slept where we could, and worked when we could, and of course then they set off on 6 June, and that was
D-Day.

‘The next day I went back to my billet and Mrs Tomlin said, “Where the bleedin’ hell have you been? We’ve invaded France, don’t you know!” I said I’d
been working so I hadn’t heard the news.’

Dilly Knox was deeply unhappy when the Enigma codes were taken away from him at the start of 1940. The new boy Gordon Welchman had set up Hut 6 to break the German army and air
force Enigma codes and Alan Turing and Peter Twinn had gone off to work on the German naval Enigma, leaving Dilly with nothing to do. He’d been at the heart of British codebreaking successes
since the start of the Great War, when he’d pieced together and decoded the charred fragments of messages from a giant German Zeppelin airship destroyed by the Russians. Without codes to
break, Dilly was like a fish out of water.

When it came to piecing together fragments of secret codes, Dilly was a genius. He’d proved that when deciphering the British Museum’s Greek papyrus found in an Egyptian cave and
with his greatest First World War triumph, breaking the German diplomatic codes, unlocking the 1917 telegram from the German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmerman to the Mexicans that offered them
parts of the United States if they’d join the war on Germany’s side. Breaking that code
was one of the most important intelligence coups of the Great War,
bringing the Americans into the conflict and ensuring the Allied victory.

Dilly had broken the Italian and Spanish Enigma codes before the war and he was the only British codebreaker who’d truly believed the German Enigma codes could be broken. Finally, with a
bit of help from the Poles, he’d done it. He’d have preferred to have managed it on his own, of course, but his methods – and his confidence – had been proven correct.
They’d even made him chief assistant on the back of his success. In theory he was the head codebreaker, and yet he now found himself cast aside, his work on Enigma taken from him by the new
boys. The Cottage Enigma codebreaking section had been closed down, his staff hived off to Hut 6 or the Naval Section, and he was hidden away on his own in a tiny office in the Park’s old
plum shed.

Inevitably, a resignation letter followed, complaining at the way in which the Enigma codes had been ‘stolen’ away from him. Just as inevitably, Commander Denniston refused to accept
Dilly’s resignation, rightly telling him that he had unique qualities vital for the war effort. He should put his talents to work breaking new codes and leave Hut 6 to do the day-to-day
grind.

The son of a bishop, Dilly was in his mid-fifties and so wildly eccentric as to put his fellow codebreakers in the shade. He wore horn-rimmed glasses without which he could see nothing and
frequently stuffed them into his tobacco pouch rather than his spectacles case by mistake. Dilly was tall, thin and bald. His trousers and jackets were
too short, as if he
had bought them some years earlier and outgrown them by several inches, and his face always looked drawn, as if he hadn’t eaten in days.