The Secret Lives of Codebreakers

by Sinclair McKay

  Perhaps, like many aspects of British life, this might have more to do with class and background than anything else. It is not a great exaggeration to suggest that in the countryside, sex tended—and probably still does tend—to happen sooner than in the overcrowded cities, for the very simple reason that there is the freedom to take off and find privacy. It is also easy to suspect that reticence about sex was much more prevalent among the middle classes, women who knew just how precious one’s reputation was, and how easily it was lost. One might say that for upper classes and working classes alike, there was less to be lost in this way, and as such things were a little more relaxed; whereas for the young middle class, one’s good name was crucial when it came to maintaining one’s hard-won social standing. In some ways, the middle years of the twentieth century were more censorious than the famously repressed Victorian era.

  There were always rumors, including stories of unwanted pregnancies and illegitimate births; it was said that one Wren at RAF Chicksands gave birth but the baby died soon after. She attempted in her distress to hide the little body but the authorities found it. The girl was then taken away, and no one knew what became of her. Yet when it came to sex, one former Wren interviewed by Marion Hill responded with a curious blend of worldliness and innocence: “There were a lot of romances going on. Of course you couldn’t actually share a room with a man in a hotel. They asked to see your marriage certificate first. But where you will, you find a way. There was plenty of opportunity for walks in the countryside, bike rides. I can remember drinking champagne on hilltops with young men.”3

  They must have been very wealthy young men. Champagne in wartime north Buckinghamshire cannot have been very abundant. And the mention of hotel rooms illustrated perfectly what young suitors were up against; nevertheless, for many, the very idea of trying to get such a room in the first place wouldn’t have been countenanced.

  Another Park veteran recalled: “BP contained a network of long-standing relationships.… The Section would ensure that arrangements for shift-working took due account of them…for it was difficult to do much ‘carrying on’ with someone on a different shift.” Equally, if a romance was starting to wither, “it might have been advisable to reshuffle the shifts. On the whole, the system worked pretty well.”

  Young Mimi Gallilee too could see romance all over the Park, but she succinctly expresses the innocence that was very much a keyword at the time: “There were lots of marriages. Other liaisons,” she adds, “you didn’t know about.”

  20 1943: A Very Special Relationship

  The idea that a close partnership between Britain and the United States was forged during the Second World War has become one of the abiding assumptions of our political landscape. They gave us the tools, and we finished the job. What we lacked in material resources, we more than made up for with bulldog pluck—a pluck that earned the admiration of Uncle Sam and created a bond between the two mighty nations that has remained strong until today. It is a stubbornly enduring image. The war, it is believed, shifted the relationship between the two countries irrevocably from one of mutual suspicion to one of mutual respect.

  Yet it is obviously not that simple, and indeed seemed very far from being the case throughout the war itself, according to several historians who have written recent studies on the subject. Walter Reed believes that while the rapport between Churchill and Roosevelt was very strong, the opposite was the case for the military advisers and ministers beneath them; as Reed sees it, Congress and the US Treasury viewed Britain with immense suspicion during the war.

  According to historian Michael Howard:

  Roosevelt’s personal bonhomie was based on a shrewd appreciation that Britain must not be allowed to lose the war, and then—once the Americans had been precipitated out of a neutrality they would far rather have preserved—that she must be humored until the United States was strong enough to take over the direction of the war and wage it as she thought fit. He needed Churchill’s help to overcome the visceral dislike of the British that penetrated deep into his military and political elites. Ironically, Churchill was to do this so successfully that today he is far more of an iconic figure in the United States than Roosevelt.1

  Some of these tensions were reflected in miniature by the workings of Bletchley Park, both before December 1941, when the United States entered the war, and after. Suspicion in some corners persists to this day that Bletchley Park learned from decrypts in early December 1941 about the forthcoming Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and that Churchill suppressed the passing of intelligence in order to ensure that the bombing would go ahead, thus ensuring that the Americans would join the war. But even in 1940, more than a year before America entered the war, both countries were, at best, tentative with regard to the sharing of information and intelligence. Although it was clearly understood that Britain and America should cooperate in terms of ciphers, the extent of this cooperation soon became a cause of ill will. According to the Bletchley official history: “In the British archives there is no intelligence of any importance that was not available to the Americans.” Nevertheless, the mere fact that such a suspicion could arise is telling. And from the start, the relationship between Bletchley and American Intelligence was far from easy.

  In December 1940, a full year before America entered the war, an agreement was signed in Washington between Britain and the United States that would mean both countries having a full exchange of technical information concerning German, Italian, and Japanese codes. A month later, a small party of four American cryptographers—two army and two navy—sailed over to England to see the Bletchley operation for themselves.

  Having been greeted at the docks by the then Deputy Director Edward Travis and Colonel John Tiltman, they were driven to Bletchley, where they met Alistair Denniston at midnight. Denniston’s personal assistant, Barbara Abernethy, recalled:

  I’d never seen Americans before, except in the films. I just plied them with sherry. I hadn’t the faintest idea what they were doing there; I wasn’t told. But it was very exciting and hushed voices. I couldn’t hear anything of what was said but I was told not to tell anybody about it. I guess it wasn’t general knowledge that the Americans had got any liaison with Bletchley. It was before Pearl Harbor, you see, and presumably Roosevelt was not telling everybody there was going to be any liaison at that stage.2

  Throughout the several weeks the American party spent in England, they were put up in the nearby manor house of Shenley Park, and as well as Bletchley Park, were shown U-boat tracking stations and radar stations. One of the key elements of their visit was their mutual interest in cracking the Japanese codes. The elegant Scotsman Hugh Foss, together with Oliver Strachey, had penetrated the Japanese diplomatic code machine in 1934. Moreover, Colonel Tiltman had cracked Japanese military codes as far back as 1933, and the new army ciphers in 1938. Such expertise was naturally going to be of interest to the Americans, who had been monitoring the Japanese closely.

  Meanwhile, the Americans had succeeded by 1940 in getting their own decryption machine, devoted to Japanese codes, working. The machine was called “Purple.” The American cryptographers brought one such machine over with them to England, where they presented it to Bletchley Park. By all accounts, British and US codebreakers got on tremendously well in an atmosphere of mutual respect and excitement.

  Only in the weeks after the visit did this cordial relationship start to grow bumpy and sour. For there were some on the American side who considered that the British had not reciprocated the invaluable gift of the Purple machine. No matter that Bletchley Park had sent the Americans detailed documents about Enigma and the cracking thereof, and even parts of Alan Turing’s notes on the same, what the Americans wanted was a bombe machine. And British Intelligence, as well as Alistair Denniston, was determined that the United States should not have one.

  On the face of it, this seems a puzzling denial: why shouldn’t an ally have full access to any technology that could help in the wider conflict
? Was it simply—as American cryptographers suspected—a jealous possessiveness on the part of Bletchley Park? Was it a symptom of Bletchley Park’s neurotic insistence on maintaining control?

  Or could there have been fear on the British side? Some have suggested that Bletchley Park was deeply reluctant to let the Americans anywhere near the bombes because thus far, American security had been relatively lax. If the Americans latched on to the British technology, the reasoning went, there was always the grim possibility that an enemy agent in the United States would find it very easy to fathom what they were doing, and pass the information back to Germany.

  There was also the fact that in 1940, there were just six bombes in operation, and these were working at full stretch. Bletchley Park could not afford to lose even one of these machines. MI6 told Bletchley that they should not cite this reason, however, in case the Americans suggested that the bombe blueprint should be sent instead so that they could build their own.

  The American reaction was—perhaps not unreasonably—an angry one. Crucially, though, this diplomatic frostiness did not affect the personal relationships between the senior cryptographers themselves. Alistair Denniston struck up a warm and enduringly useful friendship with senior American cryptographer William Friedman; in turn, it has been written, Friedman greatly admired and respected Denniston.

  Though Bletchley refused to give up its bombes, it tried to help the Americans in various other ways. In November 1942, for instance, it sent the United States Alan Turing in person. He crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth at a time when all such shipping was intensely vulnerable to the all-pervasive menace of the U-boats. Turing had been in America before, in the 1930s, and had friends there; this visit was with the purpose of creating new ones. In essence, Bletchley was lending out his intellectual expertise to their formidably wealthy ally, in the hope that his genius combined with their technological know-how and unlimited resources would create further breakthroughs.

  Having arrived at Communications Supplementary Activities (Washington), known as CSAW, Turing moved from department to department of the American cryptography operation, with an understanding that he was there by permission not of the army or navy, but of the White House itself. He was allowed complete access to all the new systems that the US cryptographers were working on, and his skills began to pay dividends. The positions of the Atlantic U-boats were at last trackable once more.

  He next set to work in Bell Laboratories in New York, where a top secret new idea was being developed. It was concerned with speech encipherment and call scrambling, using devices such as the Vocoder, which was being developed in Dollis Hill back in London. Known within this community as England’s top cryptographer, he based himself in Greenwich Village for work on this and other military security systems that involved twelve-hour days.

  Still there was an ungovernable streak, though. His biographer, Andrew Hodges, writes that colleagues there:

  complained of Alan giving no sign of recognition or greeting when he passed them in the halls; instead, he seemed to look straight through them. [Colleague] Alex Fowler, who was an older man of just over forty, was able to take Alan to task.

  He was abject, but made an explanation hinting at why he found so many aspects of life difficult. “You know at Cambridge,” he said, “you come out in the morning and it’s redundant to keep saying hallo, hallo, hallo.” He was too conscious of what he was doing, to slip into conventions without thinking. But he promised to do better.3

  Turing even claimed aloud to have been approached sexually by another man in a hotel—the sort of boast that was assuredly not a conventional topic around the watercooler in the United States in 1943.

  Later in 1942, Commander Travis went out to Washington himself but received what Gordon Welchman described as “a frosty reception.” On the US side, there was still intense resentment at Bletchley’s refusal to share the bombe machines.

  Despite this difficulty, an agreement between Britain and the United States was signed concerning the pooling of cryptographical know ledge. Part of this agreement involved, finally, Bletchley relinquishing its knowledge in return for information and precious resources. The United States would develop bombe machines based upon Turing’s designs.

  Construction got under way in Dayton, Ohio. The first two of the machines, the design of which was inspected by Turing, were called Adam and Eve. From that point in 1942, Bletchley continued to take the lead on German naval decrypts, but would also send raw decrypts over to Washington. This was an extraordinary arrangement—the first time ever that two sides, regardless of their ally status, had so readily and widely pooled their codebreaking intelligence expertise.

  And while the Americans got Turing and new bombes, Bletchley Park got some Americans—soldiers who also happened to be expert cryptographers. Codebreaker Oliver Lawn recalls their arrival: “The American army sent over a batch of cryptographers to work with us in Hut 6. They were led by a chap called William Bundy, who was then a captain in the American army. Latterly after the war he became very prominent in American politics.

  “We got on very well with him. He brought half a dozen people with him and they mucked in with us on our shifts. Did the normal work with us and just became part of our team.”

  According to his account of Bletchley Park, Peter Calvocoressi was equally impressed at the ease with which the Americans slid into day-to-day operations. He wrote:

  One day in April 1943, a Colonel Telford Taylor was introduced into Hut 3, the first of our American colleagues. He already knew a great deal about Ultra and it seemed to take him no more than a week to master what we were up to. Others of similar caliber followed. They too were temporarily mobilized civilians and their backgrounds were roughly comparable with our own except that there were rather more lawyers among them than among us.

  They were slotted into our various sections and in next to no time they were regular members of those sections.

  When American army and air headquarters were set up in England and later moved to the continent, they had their own American Ultra intelligence officers and their own special communications with Bletchley Park, but at Bletchley Park itself British and Americans were integrated.

  In 3A for example, some of the Air Advisers were American, but all the Advisers served all American and British commands without discrimination. The addition of the American contingent was so smooth that we hardly noticed it. Presumably this was in part due to the sense of common purpose but it must also have owed more than we realized at the time to the personalities and skills of the first Americans to arrive…4

  This warmth was very much returned by Colonel Telford Taylor, who later wrote:

  I cannot adequately portray the warmth and patience of the Hut 3 denizens (and to a lesser degree those of Hut 6 and other huts as well) in steering me around and explaining the many aspects of the work. At first I had no office, but Jim Rose and Peter Calvocoressi gave me a seat in their office… “C,” Travis and de Grey were entirely civil, and Travis really friendly.…

  I take pride at the ease, goodwill, and success with which the merging was accomplished by Britons and Americans alike.5

  Colonel Taylor was also at the center of something of a scandal; he embarked upon an affair with English cryptographer Christine Brooke-Rose. She later confessed to Michael Smith that her husband reacted in a way that seems inordinately of a piece with the times: “He was very, very British and he and Telford talked together. Telford was terribly amused afterwards, because he thought my husband was so British, shaking hands and saying everything was all right—which of course it wasn’t, because our marriage broke up.6

  Elsewhere, Mimi Gallilee also has a particular memory of these socially adept American newcomers: “I had a friend, in the Wrens, and I don’t even know which Hut she was working in, but at the end of the war, whiling away time before she was posted to the Admiralty to finish out her service, before she could be released…she was going out with an American army
man there, Bob Carroll. I believe they got engaged before he went back to America. It took well over a year for her to be able to join him and marry out there.”

  The notion of American soldiers coming to Britain and making free with the available women is one of those comical tropes as deeply embedded as the idea of the special relationship itself. It even featured in a recent episode of The Simpsons, where Grandpa feels impelled to revisit his English love. As we have seen, Bletchley Park lent itself to romances of all sorts.

  Contemporary caricatures—good-natured ones, all the same—abounded in popular culture. One of the characters in the wildly popular BBC Radio comedy It’s That Man Again was an American sergeant called Sam Scram; elsewhere, in Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944) one of the three leads was a young American sergeant who finds his “pilgrimage” to Canterbury diverted temporarily by a quirky foray into Kentish village life. Powell and Pressburger were to return to this theme of Anglo-American melding in Stairway to Heaven (1946); here, airman David Niven falls for American wireless operator Kim Hunter.

  One Bletchley Park veteran, Harry Fensom, recalled with great good humor the “remark of an amazed American lieutenant” who had been visiting codebreaking sites. This American observed that “the buildings contained marvelous machines and many attractive ladies. The machines were made by the British Tabulating Company and the ladies by God.”7