The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (14 page)

But before the extraordinary and exceedingly fortunate retreat at Dunkirk, Bletchley made another vitally important breakthrough.
In a further triumph for the Herivel Tip, it broke the ‘Red’ Enigma key. To have a way into the German air force messages was a glittering prize. ‘The Red became of vital importance immediately,’ commented one veteran of Hut 6, ‘and remained so all the way through the war and in all the main theatres of war except Africa … The Red was the great standby that kept Hut 6 going. I cannot remember any period when we were held up [in decoding] for more than a few days at a time.’

From that point onwards, the Park was able to read, on a daily basis, every single Luftwaffe message – something in the region of one thousand a day. The messages also gave vital clues as to the movements of land troops. The latest setback was that the messages were also filled with technical jargon: abbreviations, equipment terms, out-of-date map references. In the short term, the intelligence yielded was of no use whatsoever to the thousands of British troops gathered on the French beaches at Dunkirk, awaiting the deliverance of the little ships. But in principle it was a fantastic breakthrough; and the difficulties would be overcome with time and experience.

There was an important psychological point too, one that would have been relayed to Churchill; in the midst of all these decrypts, it was obvious that the main German concern at that moment was the successful conquest of France. There was no mention at that stage in May 1940 of plans to invade Britain. Not one of the thousands of decrypts had suggested that there was going to be an incursion from across the Channel.

By June 1940, however, the decrypts were throwing up intelligence concerning the refit of the Luftwaffe, which strongly suggested that a bombing campaign against Britain was imminent. ‘Enigma gave general warning of the approach of the Battle of Britain,’ wrote codebreaker Sir Harry Hinsley. ‘The fact that Enigma had now been producing intelligence for some months on the German Air Force’s organisation, order of battle and equipment was also of great strategic value.’
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Indeed, thanks to Bletchley Park – the information was described as ‘heaven-sent’ and ‘apparently sure’ – Air Intelligence and the RAF gained a much more realistic idea of German bomber strength, and was given a vital boost of confidence; the enemy forces were not quite as multitudinous as had been first thought. On top of this, the cumulative effect of listening in to so many messages had the effect of bolstering Churchill’s determination. Thanks to the decrypts, he knew that he and the British had just a little extra time.

In fact, on 16 July 1940, with the German subjugation of France consolidated, Hitler issued Directive no. 16, involving preparations for ‘a landing operation against England’. The plan was called ‘Operation Sea Lion’ – a phrase that, ominously, was picked up with increasing frequency thereafter by the decrypters – and an initial air offensive was to begin on 5 August.

This then was the background to the Battle of Britain – that extraordinary moment when, as Bletchley veteran Captain Jerry Roberts now puts it, ‘one tiny blob to the north of the map of Europe’ stood its ground while all others around it fell. Even though Bletchley could not be of practical assistance to British planes as the battle was fought, the help it had provided beforehand was immeasurably valuable.

And in the midst of the national anxiety, there was one other small, but vital fillip for the Chiefs of Staff: they had learned that the Germans could be outwitted. Their sheer physical force may have seemed unbeatable but to have advance notice of plans and manoeuvres made their threat, at last, surmountable in theory.

Initially, the bombe machines were operated and serviced by specially picked RAF technicians, headed by a Sergeant Jones. After weeks of frustration during which Victory produced endless false stops, as Sergeant Jones wrote later, ‘it was realised that some radical change was still required … So the theorists, the cryptographers, the engineers, professors, doctors, got together and decided what
was needed.’

It was the first sign of serious friction at Bletchley Park. While it could hardly be said that the three services – army, navy, air force – were in competition, the fact was that some codes were being broken with reasonable success whereas others – the German naval codes – were still proving resistant. As a result, it was felt that the British navy was not getting the vital intelligence it needed.

Although during the Battle of Britain in mid-August, the emphasis was very much on air force intelligence, Frank Birch, head of the German Team of the Naval Section at Bletchley Park, wrote a memo to Edward Travis, Deputy Director of the Park:

There might have been something in Birch’s complaints – Jack Copeland later stated that Turing was extremely bad at making himself understood – but in a wider sense, the complaints were unfair, as would become clear as the months progressed. Thanks to the stringency with which naval Enigma was employed, including the use of bigram tables, it was far harder to break than the military and Luftwaffe Enigma codes worked upon in Hut 6. The only reasonable chance Turing and his Hut 8 team had of cracking naval Enigma would be if one of these books of tables were to be captured.

In the meantime, there was yet another breakthrough. Turing and Welchman saw that their ‘diagonal board’ feature could allow for simultaneous scanning of all the possible twenty-six plug-board
settings for an individual wheel setting. ‘Agnes’ – an abbreviation of its real name, Agnus Dei, the sister machine to Victory – made her debut in August 1940 in Hut 11. Once both machines had been fitted with the diagonal boards, they were truly operational. One veteran recalled: ‘The bombes were bronze-coloured cabinets about eight feet tall and seven feet wide. The front housed rows of coloured circular drums – the naval colours were dark blue, black and silver.’

‘After the first two, a large number of machines were made to a fairly standard form,’ says Oliver Lawn. ‘It proved its use. Altogether about two hundred were made. The first ones were located at Bletchley itself, in what is now called the Bombe Room, which still exists. But when the numbers grew bigger, they had to use other places, and as the war went on, most of them were put at two locations in north London – Eastcote and Stanmore. They had roughly a hundred machines each, run by a large company of Wrens in both cases.’ The reason for the multiple locations was simple: the threat of bombing. To have such precious and irreplaceable machines working in a single location would have been unthinkably risky.

The very first Wrens, eight of them, made their appearance at Bletchley Park in 1941. They were there to see if it was possible for young women to work the bombe machines. Some senior men held the view that ‘it was doubted if girls could do the work’. They were not merely being sexist; it was perfectly reasonable to wonder if such young people would indeed be up to the remorseless, ineluctable pressure of the job. However, clearly the Wrens were up for it. And as throughout the war the number of bombe machines crept up to a total of 211, so too did the numbers of Wrens. One estimate suggests that by 1945 there were 1,676 bombe operators. The effect of the work on those early Wrens, though – and indeed, among the many who were to follow – was often deleterious.

The work was very hard for the young women who were drafted in to carry it out. To operate a bombe properly took all one’s concentration
and focus. Accuracy was of the highest importance. One young Wren recalled: ‘The back of the machine defies description – a mass of dangling plugs … and a multitude of wires, every one of which had to be meticulously adjusted with tweezers to make sure the electrical circuits did not short.’

According to Ruth Bourne, herself a Wren, the effect of this on individual women could sometimes be distressing. There were instances of the strain getting too much, of girls collapsing and having to go for periods of extended rest. Medical attention was sometimes needed. Bourne also recalls that bombe operating was unforgivingly harsh in less obvious, more psychological ways.

‘It was very pressurised because of the working hours. It was very intensive. You did an eight-hour shift – you only had thirty minutes off in the middle of the shift to rush across from the place where you were working to the place where you were eating, queue up for the food, eat it and go back. Then the person who was working with you, called your oppo, went and had her thirty minutes. And the reason you worked together was because you alternated.

‘One night you were standing up operating the bombe for seven and a half hours. On the next night you could sit down for most of the time operating a checking machine, which was not very hard to do. Stops didn’t need checking that often. Maybe you would get four or five stops a night, which wasn’t arduous. The only time you worked together was plugging in the back of the bombe because it was so complex. But there was the noise, and it was smelly. And many people got what they called burnout.

‘I had it for a short period of time. You’d go to the sick bay and say “I don’t feel well.” They’d say “What’s the matter?’ and you’d say “I don’t know,” and maybe you’d just cry or something.

‘And they’d put you to bed for about four and a half days – with a big jug of water. All you’d remember is wandering in and out of bed, drinking water and sleeping. After about four and a half days, you’d wake up, and that’s what happened with me.’

The other difficulty of the bombes was that they were so intricate
to set up. Ruth Bourne recalls: ‘You had to be accurate as a bombe operator. You didn’t have to be a crossword puzzler or a Greek scholar, but you did have to be incredibly accurate. Because with all these little wires on a wheel – one little group of wires must not touch another. And if you were putting in twenty-six pin plugs, you mustn’t bend the pins. Anything you did wrong caused a short circuit.

‘And every fifteen minutes,’ Mrs Bourne adds, ‘the machine stopped and some of the wheel orders had to be changed. So you’d have to check those wheels with a tweezer and put them back on the rack. You’d put on the new ones, check the old ones, and if there were a lot of wheels, you might have only just enough time to check them before the run was finished. At the end of fifteen minutes, you’d start again with another lot of wheels.’

Ruth Bourne recalls in particular looking at the women who were just coming off a week of night shifts. ‘All their faces were terribly pale. I remember when I first went there, I saw all these scarecrow pallid women coming off their shift. And I thought, “My God.”’

Tellingly, about a year into the bombe operation, one Dr Gavin Dunlop, of Newcastle Street, Worksop, Notts, sent a concerned letter to the Bletchley Park authorities concerning one of his Wren patients:

It was a perfect illustration of how, at every conceivable level, the work at Bletchley was kept absolutely secret. Just a couple of days later, Commander Bradshaw sent a reply:

Bradshaw went on to add, with pointed understatement:

It scarcely needs to be added that, even without the background of the war, this was not an era in which concerns about workplace health were given a sympathetic hearing or researched in any
depth. From shipbuilding yards, to deep coal mines, to deafening factories filled with potentially lethal machinery, the discomforts of manual occupations were simply part of the burden that working men and women were expected to accept in return for their wages. Indeed, in industrial terms, there is something about the image of the bombes, ticking and clicking and spraying oil in unison, that puts one in mind of Fritz Lang’s film
Metropolis
– the image of small people tending to vast, inexorably functioning, demanding machines.

Occasionally, the bombes could be downright dangerous. According to one account from a technician: ‘A Wren operator was prettying herself using a metal mirror which slid across two large electrical terminals. There was a bright flash, the mirror evaporated, and her lipstick shot across her throat. I was working nearby. The scream made me look up. I thought she had cut her throat!’
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