The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (36 page)

And so this monster, this Colossus, was delivered to Bletchley in January 1944; and with it, many argue, came the dawn of the computer age. For this was more than just a huge, elaborate counting machine; it worked to a program, via electronic valve pulses and delicate, complex circuits, at a rate hitherto unimagined, opening up the Lorenz messages at a terrific rate.

Tommy Flowers was vindicated; the work he did proved utterly invaluable. His nimble engineer's mind had overcome extraordinary problems. And of course, he would not be allowed to tell a single living soul.

Adjusting to peace after years of war was extremely difficult for a great many people. It seemed almost cruelly so to Tommy Flowers. It wasn't just that his boss Gordon Radley was knighted, whereas he simply received that discreet MBE and Award to Inventors. In those days, of course, £1,000 was a very substantial sum, almost enough to cover half the price of a house. But in a way, it was beside the point; for what would the money mean if Dr Flowers was not permitted to share his extraordinary and innovative electronic knowledge with peers and colleagues?

Worse than this, according to Paul Gannon, was that while a few of Bletchley Park's decoders could, after the war, decamp to the States and join up with computing projects there, Flowers was stuck in a department where no such transfers would be possible. The Post Office Research Office was extremely respectable and offered the now unimaginable security of a job for life. But it was also excruciatingly limited for a man of Flowers's talent. And his frustrations grew as the British government's post-war insistence of keeping every single one of Bletchley's operations secret further blocked off any advances that he might have made; advances in a budding computer
industry to which he had claim to have a greater stake than most.

Not all accept the charge that secrecy held British technological advances back. Harry Fensom concluded a talk given to an Enigma symposium with this thought:

However, Captain Jerry Roberts articulates what he believes that Britain lost, thanks to that insistence on absolute post-war security. He is still furious on behalf of Tommy Flowers today: ‘Dan Brown [author of
The Da Vinci Code
] wrote a book called
Digital Fortress
. And he says in that that the computer was invented at Harvard in 1944. That's the damage that has been done.

‘Part of the trouble,' Captain Roberts continues, ‘was that the Colossus machines were all destroyed, except two which got away. There were ten machines – eight were dismantled and destroyed, and two were kept at Cheltenham at the new GCHQ.

‘It was at the orders of Churchill. He didn't want to reveal anything to the Russians. But this meant – crucially – that Britain couldn't develop this new computer industry. And I'm sure they could have found some form of cover for the technology – helping building supersonic aircraft or whatever you like to invent.'

When interviewed some years ago, Dr Flowers himself recalled with some sadness the moment in 1960 when the orders came through to destroy the last two remaining Colossus machines, which
had been shipped to GCHQ. ‘That was a terrible mistake,' said Flowers. ‘I was instructed to destroy all the records, which I did. I took all the drawings and the plans and all the information about Colossus on paper and put it in the boiler fire. And saw it burn.'

As a postscript to his work, however, there is now, at the Bletchley Park museum, a fully working recreation of a Colossus machine. It stands, vast and unbelievably complicated, as an enduring testament to an outstandingly brilliant engineer.

The use of Enigma decryption was not confined to intercepted enemy messages; it also played an active role throughout the war in operations designed to deceive. And the most crucial of these was the Pas de Calais gambit of 1944, part of the preparations for D-Day. Indeed, it was reckoned by Bletchley Park veteran and renowned historian Harry Hinsley that, without Bletchley, the D-Day landings might well have been a catastrophic failure and the forces could have been ‘thrown back into the sea'.

Here is how they did it. Over the space of several months, German intelligence operatives found themselves monitoring a gigantic new military formation which was apparently termed the First United States Army Group (FUSAG). German Intelligence was also receiving word of the Twelfth British Army, whose many divisions looked poised to move into Norway, into Sweden, into Turkey, Crete and Romania. The Allies, it seemed, were massing. German Intelligence gradually gained an impression that the Allies were planning a substantial cross-channel assault. And no area was more threatened than the Pas de Calais, the point at which the Americans – apparently – planned to enter and then swarm into France.

It was all, of course, a vast and elaborately planned deception, which had the effect of taking German attention off the real target of the Normandy beaches. And on top of this, noted Ralph Bennett, ‘bombing and sabotage cut enough land-lines in northern France in the weeks before D-Day to force a proportion of useful intelligence on to the air'. Land-lines were a problem for Bletchley because communications made by telephone could not be intercepted. Now, thanks to the work of Bletchley, the Allied commanders were able to see that the lies had worked, receiving confirmation via broken messages from various corners of the German military machine.

With the coming of D-Day, the work of Bletchley was reaching its climax. As one veteran recalled, the approach of Operation Overlord changed the atmosphere of the Park quite dramatically, not least because there was a sudden travel ban: ‘This was a miserable restriction, as most of us had nowhere to go for our weekend off. We were also forbidden to eat at the cafeteria and had to eat in a Nissen hut by ourselves and the food was much worse. Our work intensified under pressure.'
¹

One Wren kept staccato diary notes of this pressure, recording such memories as: ‘Monday 12th June – Started the nightmare', ‘Tuesday 13th – Gosh, what a day!' and ‘Weds 14th – Hectic day!' Another recalled the unexpected results of being briefed:

These quibbles aside, Bletchley played its part on 6 June 1944, even as the Allied armada was setting sail across the Channel. Various messages from the Germans, involving U-boats and reports of parachute landings, were decoded, translated and sent to the relevant authorities all within the space of half an hour. Although the precise details of the landings were secret, it was clear that something very significant was about to happen. Mavis Batey recalls of the build-up: ‘I remember that we knew when D-Day was coming because I can see myself going up to London on a train from Bletchley and thinking “I suppose I am the only one on this train who knows D-Day is tomorrow.”'

For codebreaker Harry Hinsley, D-Day involved him sitting firm behind his desk for over twenty-four hours. The climax was marked by an important telephone call from Downing Street. First a woman asked him to confirm that he was Mr Hinsley, then he heard Churchill's voice asking: ‘Has the enemy heard that we are coming yet?' Hinsley assured the Prime Minister that the first Bletchley decrypts of German messages were coming on the teleprinter.

A couple of hours later, Churchill called Hinsley again: ‘How's it going? Is anything adverse happening yet?' After forwarding more decrypts, Hinsley finally allowed himself to leave his desk, return to his billet and go to bed.

But in general terms, 1944 was by no means the end. Following D-Day, there was a lethal German technological weapons breakthrough, targeted on London. Indeed, later in the year, one of the last V-1 rockets to land came down very close to the Stanmore bombe outstation, although damage was kept to a minimum because of the blast wall that had been built to protect the machines.

Sarah Baring was by working at the Admiralty. Under the forty feet of reinforced concrete, known as The Citadel, that sat atop this maze of passages and offices, the prospect of lonely night-watches, although not entirely welcome, did offer one consolation. As she
recalled: ‘It was horrible sitting in my flat alone with these bloody rockets crashing down. And the short walk to the safety of the Citadel … was too tempting to resist … it may have looked like Lenin's tomb to some people. But I got to love the old dump and was amused to notice on bad nights the portly figure of the First Lord of the Treasury prowling the corridors in his bright red silk dragon-patterned dressing gown.'

Mavis Batey vividly recalls the V-1 rockets and the means by which the codebreakers at Bletchley Park sought to thwart them. ‘We were working on double agents all the time, giving misinformation to their controllers. And because we could read the Enigma, we could see how they were receiving this misinformation. One of the things when the V-1s started was that the double agent was asked to give a report to the Germans on where the rockets were falling. Because of course they were wanting them to fall on central London.

‘At that point, the bombs
were
falling in central London so intelligence here wanted them to cut out at a different point. So this double agent was instructed to tell his masters that they were falling north of London. The result of this was that the Germans cut the range back a little and as a result, the rockets started falling in south London. Just where my parents lived.'

In this case, it seemed that to Mrs Batey at least, ignorance was preferable to any other state; for security reasons, she knew nothing of this double-cross operation, or the messages that confirmed its success. ‘I had no idea and it is just as well that I didn't. So when I saw the devastation at Norbury, I did not know that it had anything to do with anything I was doing. It really would have been a terrible shock to know that.'

The decisive turning of the war brought Bletchley into a new phase. Plans were being made for the allocation of encryption work after the conflict. Nevertheless, as the Allies took France and it appeared, finally, that the Germans were in retreat, the workrate intensified
dramatically at the Park, for the very fact of turning fortunes meant that the volume of German encoded traffic had risen dramatically. On top of this, German intelligence had further tightened security around the encryptions. In fact this was one of the most tiring phases at the Park. By September 1944, Hut 8 was recording naval decrypts at a peak rate of about 2,200 a day.

Happily, as the weeks of the Allied assault wore on, the effect on German communications staff was deleterious; as a result, attention to security became more slapdash. By this time, the Colossus technology was firmly bedded in. A further six of the revolutionary machines were delivered to the ‘Newmanry' and a new block, Block H, was built to house them. More were to follow as the year went on.

Indeed, for this final stage of the conflict, personnel numbers at Bletchley had almost doubled from what they had been just two years previously. As well as the codebreakers and the Wrens, there were large support teams (including 152 house staff – cleaners, handymen, etc.) and a transport section comprising 169 drivers, some fifty of whom were women. Transport didn't just deal with despatches – there was also, according to one who worked in the department, ‘a Wolseley and a Hillman … we would wait in the lounge for the phone calls. Whoever was there answered and you could find yourself going down Watling Street to St Albans with despatches or to the Admiralty.'

There was no let-up in pace, or indeed in focus and concentration. In December 1944, Hugh Alexander set up Naval Section IIJ specifically to make further inroads into the main Japanese naval code. And there were still outbreaks of tension between the military and Bletchley Park. That same month the Park found itself being blamed for failing to give warning of a surprise attack in the Ardennes, when the British and Americans found themselves facing fourteen infantry and seven Panzer divisions along a 75-mile front. The assault was termed by some as ‘the most notorious intelligence disaster of the war'. Those who worked in Hut 3 defended themselves
with the explanation that they had picked up word of an imminent assault – and indeed a date – but there was nothing in the transmissions that could have indicated a location.

Part of the problem, it seemed, was that the Germans had used skilful deception – misdirection in the matter of troop deployments – as well as a tactic of radio silence. Moreover, the amount of decrypt material that Bletchley could harvest had decreased; rather than relying on radio transmissions, the Germans, back in their own territory, were using land-lines once more.

This ever-increasing intensity of work took its toll at the Park; by December 1944, it was estimated that the sick rate was running at four per cent, rather higher than normal. In the earlier years of the war, such intensity would have been tempered with the enthusiasm of youth. One can see all too easily, though, how the strict rota system, combined with the unremitting focus of the often repetitive and dull work, would have a corrosive effect. It is often said that for ordinary soldiers, any conflict is composed of moments of sheer terror and exhilaration, and the rest of the time of solid boredom. In the case of Bletchley, there was little in the way of exhilaration or terror.