The Secrets of Station X

by Michael Smith

  Churchill’s visit was timely given Denniston’s inability to get anyone in Whitehall to provide the new recruits and the equipment the codebreakers needed. He was doing what he could but since so few people were allowed to know the Ultra secret Denniston was unable to make clear the importance of the work being done at Bletchley Park. He was seen in Whitehall as the head of an obscure Foreign Office department that could not possibly be allowed to compete with the needs of the forces who were fighting the war and he did not wield the necessary power or weight of personality to force the issue. The requests for more resources were getting nowhere.

  It was clear to the leading members of Hut 6 and Hut 8 that Denniston’s old-fashioned approach, while perfectly well suited to keeping the varied, often difficult characters who inhabited the inter-war GC&CS happy, was not adequate to running the increasingly mechanised Bletchley Park codebreaking operation. The German military operations in North Africa, the Mediterranean, the Balkans and on the Eastern Front were now generating a massive amount of work for the codebreakers. There was far too much to do and too few people, and equipment, particularly Bombes and radio sets, to do it.

  Welchman, Milner-Barry, Turing and Alexander, ‘the wicked uncles’ as they were known among their junior staff, decided to go straight to the top. On 21 October, 1941, they wrote a letter to Churchill reminding him of his visit and his praise for their work.

  We think, however, that you should know that this work is being held up, and in some cases not being done at all, principally because we cannot get sufficient staff to deal with it. Our reason for writing to you direct is that for months we have done everything that we possibly can through the normal channels and that we despair of any early improvement without your intervention.

  They emphasised that they had written the letter entirely on their own initiative and were careful to stress that the problem lay with the Foreign Office and the service ministries who seemed not to understand ‘the importance of what is done here or the urgent necessity of dealing promptly with our requests. No doubt in the long run these particular requirements will be met, but meanwhile still more precious months will have been wasted. If we are to do our job as well as it could and should be done, it is absolutely vital that our wants, small as they are, should be promptly attended to.’

  Fearing that if the letter were sent through Denniston or Menzies it would never reach Churchill, they decided that Milner-Barry should go to Downing St himself to deliver it. He would later remember his own ‘incredulity at hearing my own voice say “10, Downing Street” to a taxi driver at Blackfriars and arriving unopposed – the first and no doubt the last time that I shall find myself inside those doors.’ While he was unopposed in his attempt to get to Number 10, it was a different matter once he was inside. Brigadier George Harvie-Watt, Churchill’s principal private secretary, insisted that no one saw the Prime Minister without an appointment and demanded more details of this matter of supposed great national importance. Milner-Barry, who had not thought to bring any official identification with him, was equally insistent that he could not discuss it with anyone who was not authorised to know about it. Eventually, Harvie-Watt agreed to pass the letter on to Churchill, whose immediate response was a minute to General ‘Pug’ Ismay, his chief military assistant. ‘Make sure they have all they want extreme priority and report to me that this has been done,’ Churchill wrote, scrawling across the minute the ominous warning: ‘Action this day.’

  From that point on, resources began to flow into Bletchley Park. A comprehensive building programme was put in place in anticipation of a staff of around 3,000 – at the time, with the number of staff still some way short of 1,000, a highly optimistic figure. The first priority was a canteen to replace the old dining hall in the mansion which was now far too small, leading to long queues at mealtimes. There were also to be a number of custom-built brick blocks to house the necessary expansion. The Ministry of Labour was ordered to hold a meeting with Denniston and Menzies at which the needs of the codebreakers were to be considered favourably. The service chiefs were instructed to provide more clever young men and to enlarge the Y services immediately to provide the coverage that Welchman, Milner-Barry, Turing and Alexander demanded. Expensive new orders for many more bigger Bombes – the Jumbos – were placed with the British Tabulating Machine Company and the Royal Navy agreed to supply additional Wrens to operate them.

  Tiltman set up a training school for cryptanalysts in order to give the new entrants a basic grounding in codebreaking. It was called the Inter-Service Special Intelligence School and was housed briefly in an RAF depot in Buckingham before moving into the gas company showrooms in Ardour House, Albany Rd, Bedford, where it swiftly became known to locals as ‘the Spy School’.

  The military resorted to unusual methods to bring in the right type of recruit to Bletchley Park. Stanley Sedgewick’s job as a managing clerk with a firm of city accountants was classified as a reserved occupation which meant that call-up was deferred for six months at a time. Every day, he travelled into London by train. ‘I became quite good at solving the crossword puzzles appearing in the Daily Telegraph,’ Sedgewick said.

  Towards the end of 1941, the appearance of a crossword marking a milestone in the history of the Telegraph inspired several letters from readers claiming they had never missed them, or never failed to solve them, or never took more than so many minutes to solve them.

  A Mr Gavin, Chairman of the Eccentrics Club, wrote saying he would donate £100 to the Minesweepers Fund if it could be demonstrated under controlled conditions that anyone could solve the Daily Telegraph puzzle in less than twelve minutes. This prompted the editor to invite readers wishing to take up this challenge to present themselves at the newspaper’s offices in Fleet St on a Saturday afternoon. I went along to find about thirty other would-be fast solvers. We sat at individual tables in front of a platform of invigilators including the editor, Mr Gavin, and a timekeeper. The editor then selected a sealed envelope out of a stack of seven, each containing the puzzles due to appear the following week.

  Four of those present completed the puzzle correctly in 7 minutes 57.5 seconds; 9 minutes 3.5 seconds; 9 minutes 52.5 seconds; and 10 minutes 38.5 seconds. I was one word short when the twelve-minute bell rang, which was disappointing as I had completed that day’s puzzle in the train to Waterloo in under twelve minutes. We were then given tea in the chairman’s dining-room and dispersed with the memory of a pleasant way of spending a Saturday afternoon. Imagine my surprise when several weeks later I received a letter marked ‘Confidential’ inviting me, as a consequence of taking part in ‘the Daily Telegraph Crossword Time Test’, to make an appointment to see Colonel Nicholls of the General Staff who ‘would very much like to see you on a matter of national importance’.

  Colonel Freddie Nicholls was in fact the head of MI8, the military intelligence department concerned with Bletchley Park and the Army’s radio interception or ‘Y’ Service. ‘I arranged to attend at Devonshire House in Piccadilly, the headquarters of MI8, and found myself among a few others who had been contacted in the same circumstances,’ Sedgewick said.

  I think I was told, though not so primitively, that chaps with twisted brains like mine might be suitable for a particular type of work as a contribution to the war effort. Thus it was that I reported to ‘the Spy School’ at 1, Albany Rd, Bedford. On completion of the course I received a letter offering me an appointment as a ‘Temporary Junior Assistant’ at the Government Communications Centre and started at BP.

  Sedgewick worked in Hut 10, Josh Cooper’s Air Section, on German weather codes. ‘The results were used – usually currently – to permit weather forecasts to be made for operational use by Bomber Command,’ Sedgewick said. He was unaware until long after the end of the war that they were also used as crucial cribs for the Naval Enigma.

  The Y service was to be gradually expanded by around 1,000 wireless sets and, since these were to be manned twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week
, more than 4,000 operators. As a result of Chatham’s vulnerability to German air raids, new Army stations had been built at Harpenden, in Hertfordshire, and at Beaumanor, near Loughborough in Leicestershire, where from October 1941 – when the Army operators from Chatham moved there – most of the Enigma traffic was taken. The RAF intercept site at Chicksands Priory was now expanding rapidly and a new General Post Office (GPO) site to augment the work of Sandridge was opened in a rambling eighteenth-century rectory at Whitchurch in Shropshire.

  There were also a number of Y Service interception stations abroad in Palestine, Egypt, Malta, Gibraltar, India and South Africa as well as the Far East Combined Bureau, based in Singapore until the Japanese invasion when it moved to Ceylon. There were now 155 radio sets concentrating solely on different types of Enigma traffic, 132 of them in the UK and the others at various points around the world with all the material pouring into Hut 6 Registry by teleprinter.

  By the end of the war the Y Service had grown to an astonishing size. ‘The Y Service was an amazing organisation,’ said Joan Nicholls.

  It began with a few people before the war and ended up with thousands of us. Wherever the Germans were we were listening. Berlin, Essen, anywhere in Germany, anywhere in Russia, all over the continent, Holland and so on. At Beaumanor there were 900 female ATS intercept operators and 300 civilian intercept operators, the men, so there were 1,200 of us manning four set-rooms twenty-four hours a day and that was only one station.

  Hundreds of Wrens were drafted into Bletchley, not just to look after the new Bombes, but also to work in a number of other codebreaking and intelligence roles. They were allocated their own trade, ‘Special Duties X’, and a new Bombe outstation was opened up at Gayhurst Manor, north of Bletchley. The increase in numbers of people arriving put strain on the administration, which had to find billets for them all. ‘Many more service people came in, many more Wrens,’ said Mavis Lever, one of the civilian codebreakers. ‘The more people came, the further you had to go out to villages, right over beyond Woburn and into Bedfordshire and around Buckinghamshire and a vast system of taking people in and out and so on, whereas before we were all very locally billeted.’

  When the shifts changed over at 9am, 4pm and midnight, swarms of people descended from a variety of vehicles, many of them driven by young female Motor Transport Corps (MTC) volunteers, young debutantes who had no need to be paid for their war work. ‘The MTC drivers were really very attractive girls,’ said Barbara Abernethy. ‘They were usually quite wealthy and they had to buy their own uniforms, which were beautifully cut, and they were all pretty. But they worked very, very hard.’ The staff coming on shift had been brought in from various billets all over the surrounding countryside and those going off shift were taken home in the same fashion.

  ‘We would do eight-hour shifts,’ said Morag Maclennan, a Wren working in the Hut 11 Bombe section.

  You would come out of your transport, buses or shooting brakes. They were the great things, shooting brakes dashing all over the villages of Buckinghamshire bringing people in. Huts were being built all the time and extra pieces of equipment being installed. Things were going on in the far reaches of the park that I didn’t know very much about.

  Some of the vehicles were extremely old and unreliable, said Julie Lydekker, a junior assistant in the Air Section.

  They laid on extraordinary old seaside char-a-bancs, with doors all down the side. One of the people who used to come on this char-a-banc was A. J. Alan. He used to be in the Hunt Hotel, Lindslade, and when the buses broke down he would take us in and give us ginger wine. He was always very amusing.

  In an attempt to relieve the pressure for new billets, the servicemen and women were moved into military camps, recalled Ann Lavell.

  We were hauled out of our billets, many of us wailing and screaming mightily, and by this time we were all dressed up as flight sergeants. A flight sergeant is really quite somebody in an ordinary RAF station but we were nobodies. We were put into these frightful huts that took about twenty-four people and had these dangerous cast-iron stoves in them that got red hot and sent out smoke everywhere. There was a terrible feeling between the camp authorities and the Bletchley Park people. They couldn’t bear it because they didn’t know what we did and because we could get in past the sentries. The guards actually said: ‘Halt, who goes there?’ If you arrived at night, they did the bit about ‘friend or foe’ and you said, ‘Friend’ and they said, ‘Advance friend and be recognised’. The camp people absolutely hated not knowing what was going on and some of the officers tried to bully out of the junior people what they were doing.

  By now most people, apart from the dons, wore uniform. ‘There was a period when the hierarchy, such as it was, was completely chaotic,’ said John Prestwich, one of the Hut 3 intelligence reporters.

  Some people were group-captains, some people were lieutenants and so on. So for a longish period we all wore civilian clothes and we were perfectly happy about it, uniforms were uncomfortable. Then some wretched admiral came down and said: ‘Where are my Wrens?’ and there were these girls in skirts and jumpers and he said: ‘It’s disgraceful. My Wrens should be jumping up, hands down seams of skirts.’ So we were all made to wear uniform.

  A branch of the Corps of Military Police known as the Vital Points Wardens (VPWs) mounted guard on the camp. The VPWs wore a distinctive blue cap cover rather than the standard Military Police red cap until somebody pointed out that this gave away the fact that Bletchley Park was a ‘vital point’ and the blue cap covers were removed.

  Despite the increase in military control, man management remained relaxed and in keeping with the attitude encouraged by Denniston from the start. Stuart Milner-Barry, then deputy head of Hut 6, recalled that formal orders were rarely given out.

  Orders were nearly always given in the form of requests and accompanied by explanations. The reasons are partly historical. When we began there was in any one room no hierarchy; the people doing the job were all on the same level. As things became more complicated, it was obviously impossible to maintain this agreeable anarchy; somebody had to be responsible if administration was to be carried on at all. So the system of heads of shift grew up, an innovation looked at askance in the early days – chiefly because those appointed, particularly in the girls’ rooms, were extremely reluctant to appear to push themselves forward or to assume any kind of authority over their friends. So any kind of authority there was, was dependent on leadership and personality and not on any kind of sanctions.

  Ann Lavell recalled that the atmosphere at Bletchley Park, even after the military tried to impose themselves on the members of the armed forces working there, was unlike any other and encouraged informality.

  You did have this rather happy atmosphere of tolerance. Very eccentric behaviour was accepted fairly affectionately and I think people worked and lived there who couldn’t possibly have worked and lived anywhere else. People who would obviously have been very, very ill at ease in a normal air force camp with its very strict modes of behaviour and discipline were very happy, very at ease in Bletchley.

  On 7 December 1941, Japan entered the war, attacking Malaya and Pearl Harbor within the space of a few hours and bringing America into the war.* Bletchley had been warning of the build-up to war from the messages passing between the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, General Oshima Hiroshi, and Tokyo. The newly introduced Japanese military super-encyphered codes, in which the message was first encoded using a code book to produce a series of five-figure groups and then had random streams of figures added to it to encypher it, had been broken by John Tiltman in late 1938. A similar high-grade naval super-encyphered code was introduced by the Imperial Japanese Navy in June 1939; within weeks Tiltman had also broken that. At this stage of the war, most Japanese military and naval codes were broken at outstations with the Wireless Experimental Centre, which concentrated on Japanese military codes based at Anand Parbat, just outside the Indian capital Delhi, and the Far East Combined Bu
reau (FECB), which worked on Japanese naval codes based in Singapore. Shortly before Singapore fell, the FECB moved to Colombo in Ceylon.

  The British and the Americans had already prepared for the latter’s entry into the war with the British first approaching the US Navy with an offer to exchange cryptographic information in June 1940. They were rebuffed by Captain Laurance Safford, the commander of the US Navy’s codebreaking operation Op-20-G, who was very much opposed to any major exchange of information. A direct approach to President Franklin D. Roosevelt succeeded in winning his backing for an exchange of technical information on Japanese, German and Italian code and cypher systems

  This made complete sense. The US Army’s Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) had broken the main Japanese diplomatic machine cypher, which the Americans codenamed Purple, but had not broken Enigma. The British had broken Enigma but not Purple. A cryptographic exchange agreement was agreed by senior US and British representatives in Washington in December 1940. The following month, nearly a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the Americans into the war, a four-man American delegation – comprising two US Army officers, Captain Abraham Sinkov and Lieutenant Leo Rosen, and two US Navy officers, Lieutenant Robert Weeks and Ensign Prescott Currier – set sail for Britain carrying ‘certain packages’. The presence in the party of Rosen, the technical expert who had reverse engineered the Purple cypher machine, was significant. At least one of the ‘packages’ the Americans brought with them to Bletchley was a Purple machine.

  ‘It was early in 1941,’ said Barbara Abernethy, who was then working as Denniston’s personal assistant.

  Commander Denniston told me he had something important to tell me. ‘There are going to be four Americans who are coming to see me at 12 o’clock tonight,’ he said. ‘I require you to come in with the sherry. You are not to tell anybody who they are or what they will be doing.’