The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (25 page)

‘I realised that this is EXACTLY what I wanted to do,’ wrote veteran Hugh Denham. Invited for interview with Colonel Tiltman and others, he was asked: ‘Do you have any religious scruples about reading other people’s correspondence?’
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What followed was an exhausting and intensive six-month course in Japanese, taught at the Gas Company in Bedford, and defying the conventional assumption that it took at least two years to grasp a working knowledge of the language. There wasn’t the scope, wrote Michael Loewe with nice understatement, ‘for much attention to the niceties of Japanese history or culture.’
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A short introduction to codebreaking followed. But in the early days, there was, understandably, a lot of frustration; the intercepts
they were working on were old. Moreover, ‘none of the thousand or so characters that we had learned were there on the [message] page before us’, commented Maurice Wiles, another Classics scholar.
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Michael Loewe talked of the ‘long weary hours’ that would be spent simply indexing the code-groups that they had managed to identify.

And there were not many people in the section – either codebreakers or clerical staff – to help with what must have been unbelievably complex filing needs. ‘At Bletchley Park, we were overawed by the presence of those whom we saw as experienced professionals,’ wrote Michael Loewe. ‘The tall and lanky figure of Hugh Foss seemed to look down from a great height on the raw recruits assembled in his office.’
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None the less, ‘we got there in the end’, said Maurice Wiles. ‘Fortunately it was not the most difficult of codes, but it took time for us to figure out what was going on and how to tackle the problems it posed.’ In other words, a magnificently insouciant response to a problem that most of us would not begin to know how to solve.

Work on the Japanese codes also threw up an interesting rivalry with Bletchley’s Washington counterparts, who were thought to outnumber the British staff by ten to one. Those at Bletchley found that the prospect of stealing of a march on the Americans, who were studying the same messages, offered a powerful incentive for getting codes cracked as quickly as possible. If a transmission came through from the USA with the solution to one such problem, the mood within the Bletchley section deflated accordingly. This rivalry with Washington carries echoes of America’s anger and frustration with the British – at least at the political and diplomatic level – for not sharing the Enigma secret in the early years of the war.

Even more irksome were the occasions when they found that they had spent many of those ‘long weary hours’ simply duplicating work that the Americans had been studying simultaneously. Michael Loewe said of the Japanese section of Bletchley that it was ‘the Cinderella’ of BP, ‘where the main effort was understandably directed to German and Italian problems’, and in the midst of
which its own efforts were not accorded anything like the same sense of paramount urgency.

For some, like Hugh Denham and Wren Jean Valentine, the Japanese work would take them all the way out to Colombo, in what was then Ceylon, an extraordinarily exotic contrast to Bletchley, with its ‘woven palm-leaf cabins’, the ‘phosphorescent sea’ and the ‘snakes in the filing cabinet’, as Denham recalled. The work of this small, concentrated team would mostly track Japanese activity in the Indian Ocean.

‘One thing to record,’ Denham wrote, ‘is the priceless sense of community that formed. We were in our teens or twenties, thrown together, Wrens, civilians and officers, working to a common purpose, sharing unusual experiences.’
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Jean Valentine’s spell as a Wren based at Adstock and working at Bletchley came to a startling end in 1944. One day, as she says: ‘A notice went up on the wall saying, “The following are required to go overseas.”’ Her name was among the ‘following’. For a nineteen-year-old girl who had never before left Britain, the notion of travelling right the way across the world – U-boats or no U-boats – was extraordinarily daunting.

‘We went out into the Atlantic, down, and then through the Straits of Gibraltar, and eventually dashed across the Red Sea, and then across to Bombay,’ says Jean. ‘We were in Bombay for a week, then got a dirty old tramp steamer – which had been condemned before the war – and that took us from Bombay to Colombo.’

Upon arrival in her little concrete hut in Colombo, Jean found that the work was rather more congenial than simply tweezering the inner workings of a giant bombe. ‘We were breaking the Japanese meteorological code,’ she says. ‘So I didn’t need to speak Japanese. It was all figures.’ After the privations of Britain – the constant shortages, the rationing – this exotic new billet proved surprisingly pleasant. The ease with which this girl from Perthshire adapted to her new life tells us something about the last years of the British Empire, when even the remotest corners of the world had a sort of
instant familiarity and comfort – as long as one made the correct introductions and got to know the right sort of people.

‘I was there fifteen months,’ says Jean. ‘I left Britain in the middle of the blackout, with all that severe rationing. I got to Colombo and there was no blackout.’ And, by pleasing coincidence, a family connection enabled Jean to settle in a little further. Her cousin’s fiancée, who had visited Ceylon as a member of a ladies’ golfing team, had told her, ‘If you should find yourself anywhere near Ceylon, I’ve got a business card for this tea-planter, do use it …’

Jean contacted the man, ‘And subsequently he invited us up to his beautiful tea-planter’s house, four thousand feet up. It was a different life. Here was a man sitting in his beautiful bungalow with bluegrass that he’d imported from Kentucky before the war. A bell at the end of the table. When anybody laid down their knife, he quietly rang and servants would come.’

Back in Britain, despite the dreadful setback of the even more complex naval Enigma, the Battle of the Atlantic was by no means over. However intractable the new ‘Shark’ U-boat key, Hut 8 began after a while to make headway with ‘Dolphin’, the codes that related to German ships. This was illustrated vividly in March 1942, when the formidable German battleship
Tirpitz
was stalking an Arctic convoy bound for Russia. ‘
Tirpitz
was the big bad wolf of the war in home waters,’ wrote naval historian John Winton. ‘All by herself she constituted a “fleet in being” and, while she still floated, she remained a potential threat … the mere knowledge of her presence lying up in some northern fastness cast a long shadow over the convoys.’
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Thanks to the almost instantaneous decrypts that Bletchley provided – the translated messages instantly being transmitted to the Admiralty – the convoy was able to take evasive action from both the
Tirpitz
and the U-boat wolf packs.

However, an attack on the
Tirpitz
itself came to nothing. A few months later, and that ‘long shadow’ was hanging over convoy PQ17, which consisted of thirty ships, sailing through the wind and
the ice of the northern seas. The
Tirpitz
, and other enemy ships, started hunting them down; again, the codebreakers at Bletchley worked at terrific speed, and the decrypted messages were passed to Admiralty. This time however the messages were misunderstood.

The Admiralty gave the order for the convoy to be dispersed; back at the Park, Hut 4 liaison officer Harry Hinsley tried to persuade the Admiralty that the convoy should not disperse and should instead sail back towards the home fleet. The Admiralty would not listen.

Twenty-four Allied ships were sunk – some from the air and some by U-boats. This was no failure of Bletchley; rather, it was a failure of those who gave orders on the basis of the intelligence that they received.

Yet in spite of such catastrophes, and the anguish of the 1942 code blackout, Bletchley could still console itself in one small sense, according to cryptographer Edward Thomas. ‘The evasive routeing of convoys made possible by Hut 8’s [original] breaking of the Naval Enigma in the spring of 1941,’ he wrote, ‘had, according to some historians, spared some 300 merchant ships and so provided a cushion against the heavy losses to come.’
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Despite the blackout, he noted, this earlier work of Bletchley Park meant that Dönitz’s new offensive came to very little, and that losses were in decline.

And in the spring of 1942 Hut 3 made significant inroads into the Luftwaffe codes. As a result, better defensive measures could be taken as 1,000 bomber raids were carried out, meaning that the RAF could carry out more daring raids while keeping the loss of aircraft to a minimum. Although many of these raids were ineffective and inaccurate when it came to hitting serious industrial targets, they nevertheless had a powerful propaganda effect, especially among the British. The German raid on Coventry had hardened British public attitudes towards retaliation. After the destruction of the London Blitz – and horrific assaults such as that on Coventry – the RAF were at last seen to be giving it back.

Despite its disastrous start, 1942 eventually proved to be the year
that Churchill was able to describe as ‘the end of the beginning’. There was the key triumph of El-Alamein, possibly the most important British battle in the war: after months of morale-corroding setbacks in North Africa, General Montgomery’s armies at last pushed behind German lines, forcing Rommel’s Axis forces into a long retreat. ‘By the summer of 1942,’ recalled Y Service signals intelligence operative Aileen Clayton, who by that stage was based in Malta, ‘there can have been little Enigma traffic between the German forces in Africa and their masters back in Berlin and Italy that we did not intercept, and now that the cryptographers at Bletchley were so quickly decoding the messages, it was almost like being a member of Rommel’s staff.’
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The results were spectacular. Thanks to Bletchley, Montgomery had access to an unprecedented amount of information about his enemy’s army; about numbers, about armaments, about the supply situations. ‘Alamein was marvellous,’ recalled one veteran, ‘because you had these desperate messages from Rommel saying, “Panzer Army is exhausted, we’ve only enough petrol for 50 kilometres, ammunition is contemptible”, and so on.’

We do see here some of the ambiguity felt by the British military towards the intelligence that Bletchley Park was providing – there is a suggestion that General Montgomery did not wholly trust what he was being told. ‘We told Monty over and over again how few tanks Rommel had got,’ recalled Bletchley Park veteran and historian Ralph Bennett. ‘So Monty could have wiped Rommel off the face of the earth. Why he didn’t, I simply do not know.’
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Nevertheless, throughout General Montgomery’s attack on the Axis forces on 23 October 1942, and the subsequent twelve-day battle, he was given a stream of decrypt information concerning German troop and weapon positions. And as Montgomery launched his second attack, it was Enigma decrypts that gave him crucial insight into the crumbling state of the German and Italian forces.

Meanwhile, on the eastern front, the Russians were engaged in the extraordinarily bitter and prolonged struggle of which
Stalingrad became both the focus and the symbol. The turning point arrived after many gruelling months in which the Germans had been convinced that the Russians would simply collapse under the weight of the German attack. Stalin himself was receiving information from Churchill ‘based on intelligence sources’ concerning the state of the German forces and their possible next moves. As the Germans eventually began their retreat, Churchill provided more small gobbets of such information, while keeping the true source carefully concealed.

The codebreakers still had little idea of how their work was being utilised. As Oliver Lawn recalls: ‘I was concerned with the codebreaking and that was it. When the code had been broken, the decoded message was passed through to the Intelligence people who used the information – or decided whether to use it. The content of messages was of no concern to me at all. I knew enough German to get an idea of what it was all about. But I had no idea of the context. And it wasn’t my business. I could read the messages but they were so much in telegraphese, jargon, that they would mean nothing.’

Nevertheless, it was perfectly obvious that the work was important. And the success of Bletchley was also being reflected, late in 1942, to the extent that it appeared to be expanding physically. There had come a point when all those wooden huts, with their attendant discomforts, were no longer sufficient for the task. And so the Blocks – plain constructions of brick and steel, some two storeys high, and explosive-resistant – started to appear. In Block A, Josh Cooper’s Air Section got the first floor, while Frank Birch’s Naval Section was moved into the ground floor.

There were more Blocks to follow, up to D. Block A was equipped – in one of those nice little touches that always seemed to bring an element of the quotidian into the Bletchley effort – with a pneumatic tube system previously used in John Lewis stores and employed at Bletchley for zipping messages on paper between rooms. It was a step up from the hatchway/tray/pulley arrangement
that had previously been a feature of inter-hut communication. The pneumatic system was brought in by Hugh Alexander, who before the war had been Chief Scientist to the John Lewis chain.

Despite such innovation, working conditions were still far from luxurious. For example, the conveniences, or lack of them, were sometimes a talking point. In February 1943, an agitated Frank Birch wrote a letter to the works manager, Mr MacGregor: