The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (37 page)

Nevertheless, by January 1945, those in Hut 6 were cracking more German army signals than ever before, under the keys ‘Puffin' and ‘Falcon'. And even though the tide was flowing so strongly, the work did not let up. Against the backdrop of the Yalta conference of February 1945 – at which Stalin assured Churchill that there would be free elections in Poland after the war – there was another massive codebreaking setback when the Luftwaffe started to implement a new system of changing call-sign encryptions on a daily basis, and the frequencies every third day. Thankfully, some of the more experienced codebreakers and traffic analysts were still able to detect the individual traits of some individual enemy operators, which gave a way in to each code.

On the night of 29 April, those on duty at Bletchley Park found themselves witness to Hitler's increasing desperation. The Führer
telegraphed Field Marshal Keitel from his bunker with three questions. ‘Where are Wenck's spearheads? When will they advance? Where is Ninth Army?' Keitel's response was that all such forces were either stuck fast or completely encircled.

One might imagine a build-up of tremendous excitement in the huts at this time. But in fact, the events leading up to VE Day brought with them, surprisingly, an increase in security precautions. In late April, just days before German capitulation, the staff of Hut 3 were being told in memos that any decrypts involving mass German surrenders were to be extremely restricted in terms of circulation. On top of this, Director Edward Travis sent out a memo forbidding celebratory telegrams being sent out – unless they were in extremely special circumstances, in which case they first had to be presented for his approval.

Why the anxiety? First, the war with Japan was still going on. And also, even in the euphoria of victory, Travis and other senior staff at Bletchley Park would have been aware of the need to maintain security in the face of a new, chilly, geopolitical reality.

The collective image we now seem to carry of VE Day is of jubilant crowds in the streets of London, men and women with arms linked, people hanging on to lamp-posts, the night-time streets bathed in lights after the years of blackouts; people getting ‘lit-up' themselves, as the singer Hutch put it, getting uproariously drunk, dancing and kissing that perfect night away.

And, despite the restrictions, nothing could stop the celebrations in Bletchley either. When the day came, one veteran recalls: ‘We assembled on the grass outside the Mansion to hear that war with Germany was over. There was a huge cheer and great excitement – though our delight was muted as we still had the Japanese to finish before we could go home. So back to our decoding machines.'

There was another reason for going back to the machines. Even since the beginning of the war, it had not just been German traffic
that was the target for the codebreakers; it was Russian traffic too. And in Bletchley – as well as in the wider Intelligence and military hierarchy – all thoughts were now starting to focus on ‘the next war'; that was, the possibility of having to face a dominant Russia with plans of its own for European territorial gains.

Recall that as far back as the early 1920s, the British had been doing their best to monitor all Soviet secret traffic. Come 1939, there was no less reason to do so, especially in the face of the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact that foreswore any acts of aggression between Russia and Germany. So at the time of the Russian invasion of Finland in 1940, with the enormous amount of encrypted messages that were generated therewith, Bletchley managed to get a hook into the Russian codes. When the Germans invaded France, the Polish codebreakers who had been living in exile in Paris were forced to flee once more, to Britain. And from the outstation at Stanmore in Middlesex, these Poles were able to intercept and read Russian traffic emanating from the Ukraine.

When in 1941 Germany invaded Russia, the mighty bear appeared suddenly to be an ally of the British. It was officially put about that she was treated as such, and that Churchill especially ordered that any intelligence operations against Russia should desist. This was not entirely the case.

In September 1944, Sir Stewart Menzies, head of MI6, held discussions involving Sir Edward Travis, Gordon Welchman and Colonel Tiltman. These talks were about the urgent need to keep pace with (and, if possible, ahead of) Soviet encryption technology. Some personnel in Hut 3, including an American officer, were instructed to focus on the Red Army's most advanced equipment. And come VE Day, it was clear that even after the Japanese had been vanquished, a core of codebreakers would remain with the institution of Bletchley Park, even if they did not stay within the grounds of the Park itself.

Of course, like every other aspect of the war effort, the fact of VE Day in May 1945 didn't instantly mean that everyone could be
released from their duties. As Jean Valentine recalls: ‘When the war in Europe in stopped, my mother wrote to me in Ceylon and said, “Isn't it wonderful that war's over, when are you coming home?” My mother didn't see any reason why I couldn't come back immediately. I said, “Mum, excuse me, it's still going on here.”'

But it was not just the fact that the war in the east was still rumbling on. Even in Europe, demobilisation was a complex business. Troops were not returned home instantly. And for the majority of the denizens of Bletchley Park, release from the work was slow. In the period between May and September of 1945, there were fresh tasks to address. Rather than decrypts, there was now the business of sweeping up after the destruction.

‘Technical books came in in their dozens from Germany,' says Sheila Lawn of that time. ‘And they had me and a few other girls just sitting and making details of the books so that they could be traced. The author and the way it was published and what the subject was.'

Her husband-to-be Oliver was engaged in similar mopping up. ‘I was writing reports detailing what we had done. And we both left in September.'

‘It was a sort of dribble down,' says Sheila. ‘The numbers got less. Ten thousand, then eight thousand, however many it was, we didn't all leave at once.'

There is a curious poignancy about the annual report of the Bletchley Park Recreation Club at the end of 1945. In the previous year, the club had proudly boasted of ‘play-readings', ‘operatic performances', even a musical concert given by the Bletchley Park choir on the BBC, as well as ‘fencing, chess, badminton and squash'. Now, though, the activities were fading as the young people began to move away. The floor of the hall no longer vibrated to the thump of couples ballroom dancing; there were fewer to take part in the specially organised cycling and hiking clubs. Even the ‘swing music enthusiasts', as the Park's annual report referred to these daring souls, were dwindling in number. Bravely the club went on,
meaning to carry on with all these impeccably middle-class activities until the very end.

In June 1945, there was a curious echo of Gordon Welchman's initial observation about codebreakers' aptitude for music. The BBC was already aware of the rich gathering of talented musicians at the Park, and had featured some of them in a previous broadcast. Now, startlingly, it was decided that there should be a broadcast from the Park itself. In one sense, it looked like surprisingly lax security – but then, of course, Bletchley's talented actors had been touring the local county, with their audiences aware of where they worked if not of what they did. So why not the BBC? Among the pieces performed were works by Ralph Vaughan Williams – a composer who, in his harking back to Tallis and to English folk melodies, reinforced a certain national sense of age-old coherence. The audience for the programme was not told what else the musicians had been achieving in recent years.

By that time, with Europe now silent, coming to terms with the devastation, grim news was still reaching Bletchley Park from across the world. In August 1945 intelligence was received that atom bombs had been dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rosemary Calder told Michael Smith of what it was like when the messages started coming in. ‘I was on a day-watch by myself,' she said. ‘I didn't know the bomb had been dropped but you could tell from the disruption of all the messages that something terrible had happened. You could just feel the people standing there, screaming their heads off.'
³

But it was finally over. A copy of a rather stiff memo on the subject of ‘Re-Distribution of Surplus Staff' survives. Intended as a generic letter to all staff members, it begins:

This transition was by no means instant, and nor was it painless. With personnel leaving, those left behind were juggling new and awkward shift systems to keep up with the remaining work. The Bletchley Park directorate made some proposals concerning week-end leave, which one might imagine would have been welcomed after all those years of seven-day shifts. Curiously, these met with fierce resistance: what worked in peacetime for ‘family and friends', as one Park staffer put it, was not right for this organisation. At Bletchley, the shifts worked best when the staff could ‘choose' which days off they wanted. And what, this staffer added, would be the benefit of having every Sunday off?

‘Shopping is impossible on Sundays anywhere,' said the staffer in a memo of protest. ‘So no shopping would be possible one week in three (according to the BP shift system). In London, shopping is only possible in the forenoon of Saturdays. Those making appointments – hairdressing, dentistry, interviews for jobs – would be severely handicapped.'

Perhaps even more persuasively, added the staffer, ‘Entertainment facilities are rare on Sundays and overcrowded on Saturdays. Difficulties would be greatly increased if all BP personnel were free at weekends.' And possibly the clincher? ‘Billeted personnel are in many cases obliged to be “out” for the midday meal. They are doubly unwelcome on Sundays, when the billetor is himself at home, and on Sunday, it is more difficult than on weekdays to get a meal elsewhere.'
⁵

John Herivel took a slightly more emollient line in the debate over compulsory weekends off, though he felt that in his own
department, he and his colleague Macintosh should carry on as before. ‘If we were to confine our leave to Saturdays and Sundays,' he wrote in another memo still held in the archives, ‘there would be some days when neither of us were on. This could be very inconvenient.'
⁶

Nevertheless, the slow, careful dismantling of the operation was under way. And the image of Bletchley Park in the later months of 1945 seems to be one of once-teeming blocks now lying empty; of sparse huts, and of many of the rooms in the house itself now starting to echo. ‘It was so strange,' said one veteran. ‘It was already nearly empty – a ghost town with just a few removal men shifting furniture. Thousands of people just walked out of the gate never to return.'

Actually the clear-up was a shade more complex than that; given the intense secrecy and security, every square inch of the house, and all the huts, and all the blocks, had to be combed and sifted for any hint of coding material or even machine components to ensure that solutely nothing had been left behind.

The operation was largely packed up: some (though by no means all) bombes were dismantled. Some Wrens were gleeful about these acts of destruction, for they had come almost to hate the machines. Now, instead of having to treat them with the utmost care, they let parts drop and fall and roll on the floor, and they shouted with enthusiasm.

Meanwhile, bonfires of paperwork were made in the grounds of Bletchley Park. The huts, the house, all areas had to be combed for any bits of paper that might have got away. Some decrypts were found jammed into the gap of a window frame; the huts had been so draughty in winter that they were used to muffle the cold.

The Colossus and Heath Robinson machines were also taken to pieces. Anything that remained was kept either at Stanmore or Eastcote in Middlesex. The bombe machines that remained at Eastcote, however, did not stop, for they now had other sorts of traffic and signals intelligence to decode.

For most of those who had worked at the Park though, the conflict was over; and many of those young people now had a shattered country to rebuild. One is tempted to look back across the years and see idealism in that enthusiasm; but it might be more accurate to say that this was a time for unflinching realism, and even a certain sense of apprehension.

All the thousands of young cryptographers and linguists and Wrens were at last able to turn their thoughts to the futures that they had planned for themselves, futures that had been held in limbo for the last six years. Yet there was also a destabilising sense of abstraction, like walking out into a white fog. According to a few of the veterans, there was, surprisingly, no intensive debriefing session. Apart from the instruction that silence was to be maintained at all costs, these young people went out into the world to begin their careers.

‘There was nothing,’ says Oliver Lawn of his final days at Bletchley Park. ‘Nothing at all. You signed the Official Secrets Act.’ His wife Sheila says: ‘I don’t remember any final lecture. We had just escaped from this dreadful war, and therefore anything that was secret then was secret now.’