16. The story was repeated by Tadeusz Lisicki in an episode of the 1977 BBC series The Silent War which told the story of Enigma and Ultra.
17. In researching his book, Enigma: The Battle for the Code, Hugh Sebag- Montefiore interviewed Paul Paillole in 1998. Paillole became head of French Counter-Intelligence during WW2 and provided details of Schmidt’s involvement with the French. Montefiore also interviewed Hans Thilo Schmidt’s daughter, Gisela.
18. A number of authors who wrote about this meeting years later mistakenly believed that it was not Sandwith who attended the meeting, but the future head of MI 6, Stewart Menzies, in disguise as a distinguished British professor.
19. Rejewski’s description is taken from his 1981 paper in the Annals of the History of Computing. He wrote several other papers around the same time and in 2005, the city of his birth, Bydgoszcz, published a book dedicated to him (see Bibliography).
20. TNA, HW 25/12.
21. TNA, HW 25/12.
22. TNA, HW 25/12.
23. GW corresponded with Winterbotham between 22 January 1975 and 15 March 1977.
24. GW corresponded with Robin Denniston from 19 January 1978 until his death in 1985.
25. GW corresponded with Twinn between 5 August 1975 and 12 March 1985.
26. TNA, HW14/3.
Chapter 3: The Ultra Architect
1. Interview in 2002.
2. TNA, HW 14/2, HW14/22.
3. Milner-Barry’s only account of his wartime activities appears in Hinsley and Stripp’s The Codebreakers.
4. GW engaged John Cushman of John Cushman Associates Inc. as his agent at the beginning of 1976 on the recommendation of Peter Calvocoressi. Cushman remained GW’s agent until his death in 1984. His colleague, Jane Wilson took over the role until GW’s death.
5. TNA HW14/4.
6. Kozaczuk, Enigma, p. 97 describes the farewell dinner and claims that Rejewski told him about it with ‘photographic precision’ in 1975. Guido Langer, in his unpublished memoir: ‘Report on the work of Lieutenant-Colonel Langer’s team during the French Campaign from 1 October 1939 to 24 June 1940’ says that a British codebreaker, presumably Turing, was staying with the Poles in France when the first wartime Enigma message was broken on 17 January 1940.
7. The History of Hut 6 Volume I, TNA, HW 43/71–2.
8. Interview in Station X, a four-part documentary series. Darlow/Smithson production. Tx. Channel 4. 19 January 1999–9 February 1999.
9. Herivel describes this in his own memoir published in 2008 (see Bibliography).
10. TNA, HW 14/11.
11. TNA, HW 14/17.
12. According to the official history of MI 6, Denniston’s removal from BP by Menzies was a demotion. GW always believed that his removal was due to ill health. However, Harold Fletcher told him in a letter dated 26 October 1979 that: ‘I have a clear recollection that you told me that Travis had had to tell C “Either he goes or I go’’.’
13. Ralph Erskine, ‘The Development of Typex’, The Enigma Bulletin, No. 2, May 1997; Kruh, Louis, and C. A. Deavours, ‘The Typex Cryptograph’, Cryptologia, 7: 2, 1983, pp. 145–66.
14. TNA, HW 43/72.
15. TNA, HW 43/71–3.
16. GW corresponded with R. V. Jones between 1 May and 7 September 1979.
17. Jones sent GW a complete transcript of the report in September 1979.
18. TNA, HW 43/73.
Chapter 4: Turing, the Bombe and the Diagonal Board
1. See Bibliography for details of Rejewski’s papers.
2. TNA, HW 14/1.
3. Twinn made a point of this in a letter to GW in 1985.
4. See Bibliography for details of a short book about Keen and the work of BTM by his son John.
5. The document was given a classification of ‘Top Secret Umbro’, the highest level security for an intelligence-related document in the US and, remarkably, was only declassified on 30 October 2001. See Bibliography.
6. An entry in GW’s diary for 15 July 1941 reads: ‘With Turing, Alexander to London. 3.15 at H.Q. Cadogan’.
7. Extracts from Cadogan’s unpublished diaries were passed on by the historian Christopher Andrew in a letter to GW in 1985.
Chapter 5: Expansion and Consolidation
1. The bombe would ‘stop’ when it found a wheel configuration which did not contradict any of the electrical connections described by the menu. It would provide part of the key: the rotor order, the wheel settings relative to the starting position of the bombe drums (usually ZZZ) and one of the plug letter pairs. Further hand testing would either produce the rest of the key (a valid stop was called a story) or it would reveal contradictions such as one letter being plugged to two others (this type of stop was called a random stop), in which case further bombe runs were required.
When a key was broken at BP (all the settings of the Enigma machine for a twenty-four-hour period on a particular network were known), the key was said to be ‘out’.
Each bombe run was called a ‘job’ at BP and when a run was successful, the members of the WRNS who operated them were told that the job ‘was up’.
2. TNA, HW 43/71, HW 43/72, HW 43/73.
3. TNA, HW25/27.
4. C. H. O’D. Alexander, ‘Cryptographic History of Work on the German Naval Enigma’, TNA, HW 25/1.
5. GW corresponded with Fletcher between 19 August 1974 and 2 December 1984. The Welchmans often stayed with the Fletchers when they were in the UK. They remained close friends from the end of the war until Fletcher’s death, a year before GW’s.
6. TNA, HW 14/77.
7. BP was not alone in exploiting Hollerith technology. During WW2 Germany deployed more than 2,000 IBM punch-card and card-sorting systems throughout Europe. The equipment was used to help identify and destroy the Jewish people of Germany and Europe. IBM’s collusion with Nazi Germany and its part in the Holocaust is a startling story. (See Bibliography for details of book on the subject by Edwin Black.)
8. Google has made a generous donation to the BP Trust to help restore Block C which housed the Hollerith operation. This was in part, in recognition of the importance of BP’s early ‘data search’ technology.
9. Ronald Whelan, ‘The Use of Hollerith Equipment in Bletchley Park’, personal paper, 1994, BP Archive.
10. TNA, HW 3/164.
11. TNA, HW 25/27.
12. GW corresponded with Lewis between 21 September and 4 December 1984. As Head of the Central Party at BP, Lewis had fond memories of Katherine Welchman and her skill at log reading. For another view of the ‘Fusion Room’ see the Bibliography for Neil Webster’s account, prepared by his daughter Joss Pearson in 2011. In late 1943 Lewis was asked to join Mountbatten at SEAC to take command of the No. 6 Intelligence School in Delhi. Instead, he ended up in America at Arlington Hall and attended the important British/US conference there in 1944 along with key BP people such as Travis and Tiltman.
The comments on the term ‘Fusion Room’ may explain why, in correspondence in July 1984 with Jean Howard (née Alington) who had worked in Hut 3, Welchman said that he had no recollection of the expression. GW corresponded with Howard between 12 July 1984 and 10 August 1985. She was researching a prospective BBC programme about the ‘Y’ Service, which, in the end, was not produced.
13. Fish was the name used at BP for the high-level encryption system used by the German Armed Forces High Command. It used teleprinters and was used for transmitting much longer messages than the Enigma systems.
Chapter 6: The Americans
1. Friedman signed the visitor’s book in Hut 11 on 7 May 1943. The book is held in the BP Archive.
2. When Denniston died in 1961, Friedman had written a moving letter to his daughter. Friedman subsequently sent GW copies of the letter along with several other documents. Friedman went on to say:
‘Your father was a great man, in whose debt all English-speaking people will remain for a very long time, if not for ever. That so very few of them should know exactly what he did towards achievement of
victory in World War I and II is the sad part of the untold story of his life and of his great contribution to that victory. His devotion to the supremely important activities to which he gave so much of himself unstintingly, and with no thought to his own frail strength and physical welfare will not be forgotten by those of us who had the pleasure of knowing, admiring and loving him.’
Friedman’s papers are held in the Marshall Library, Lexington Vermont.
3. See Bibliography for Yardley’s account of the Black Chamber.
4. Friedman’s work has been documented in a number of books. See Bibliography for books by Kahn and Clark.
5. Prescott Currier, ‘My Purple Trip to England in 1941’, Cryptologia, 20:3 (1996), pp. 193–201.
6. Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, Stanford University Press, 1962.
7. This myth gained such strength that even GW believed it, telling friends in the 1980s that he thought it had probably happened.
8. Denniston’s reception by the US Navy’s OP-20-G group was not so cordial. He met one of their top codebreakers, Agnes Driscoll, fifty-three years old and a twenty-year veteran of cryptanalysis. Her approach bore startling similarities to that of Dilly Knox. She rejected BP’s automated solutions based on mathematics and claimed to have developed a much better hand method based on intuition. Her influence waned considerably following Pearl Harbor.
9. Turing’s visit to Dayton was confirmed in 1999 with the release of a document written by him and titled: ‘Visit to the National Cash Register Corporation of Dayton Ohio’. See Bibliography.
10. Bundy left Harvard Law School early in the war to join the US Army Signal Corps. After the war, he went on to a distinguished career in American politics and was foreign affairs advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Welchman and Bundy renewed their friendship in the early 1980s and finally met again at the 1982 convention of the American Cryptogram Association at which Welchman was guest of honour.
11. 6812th Signal Security Detachment (Prov) APO 413 US Army, 15 June 1945.
12. Interview in Station X, a four-part documentary series. Darlow/Smithson production. Tx. Channel 4. 1999/01/19–1999/02/09.
13. William Bundy, ‘The Literature of Spies and Codebreaking in the Second World War, A Layman’s Guide’, paper presented at Princeton Library, 1 November 1981. In the paper Bundy was very critical of the early books by Cave Brown, Winterbotham and Stevenson but praised works by Ewen Montagu, R. V. Jones, Patrick Beesly and Ronald Lewin. He also mentions Calvocoressi’s ‘small jewel of a book’.
14. Interview with Vanaman by Thomas Parrish on 12 May 1982.
15. Description of the flight of No. 783 from an account by Air Marshal Sir Ronald Ivelaw-Chapman.
Chapter 7: Bletchley Park: The Last Two Years
1. TNA, HW 62/5.
2. TNA, HW 14/87.
3. TNA, HW 62/6.
4. TNA, HW 62/6.
5. GW corresponded with Wallace between 18 December 1978 and 19 August 1984. They remained good friends after the war and GW often stayed with Wallace and his sister Hope when he visited England in the 1950s and 1960s.
6. GW corresponded with Bayly between 19 May 1982 and 22 August 1984. He had lost contact with him after the war but finally managed to track him down in mid-1982. Bayly typed most of his letters on a computer from the beginning of 1983 because ‘I want to practice this gadget on my computer called a text editor.’
7. Many historians prefer the original biography by H. Montgomery Hyde. Fourteen years later, Stephenson commissioned William Stevenson to write a more colourful version of his life in which some quite outlandish claims are made about his wartime achievements.
8. In September 1983, frail and feeble at eighty-seven, Stephenson arrived in New York from his retirement home in Bermuda to accept the William Donovan Award, the intelligence community’s highest honour. Stephenson died in 1989, aged ninety-three, in Paget, Bermuda. For his wartime work, he was knighted in 1945. In recommending Stephenson for knighthood, Churchill wrote: ‘This one is dear to my heart.’ In 1946 Stephenson received the Medal for Merit from President Truman, at that time the highest US civilian award. He was the first non-American to receive the medal and General Bill Donovan presented the award. The citation paid tribute to Stephenson’s ‘valuable assistance to America in the fields of intelligence and special operations’. The ‘Quiet Canadian’ was recognized by his native land later: he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada on 17 December 1979.
9. GW had lost contact with Bayly after the war and in 1982, tried to make contact through Maidment. Eventually, Welchman made contact with both Maidment and Bayly and in November 1982 Maidment wrote to Welchman and offered some fascinating insights into Stephenson.
10. Years later, Bayly sent Welchman a copy of the photograph with an attachment which identified everyone in it. On a handwritten note also attached to it, Bayly said that he had another copy and not surprisingly, given some of the people in it, he went on to say: ‘Why this picture wasn’t classified I do not know!’ Philip Lewis told GW in a letter in 1984 that he also had a copy of the photograph. Rather surprisingly, it seems that all of the participants were given their own copy.
11. TNA, HW 43/71, HW 43/72, HW 43/73. Milner-Barry was subsequently refused access to it and, remarkably, it was not declassified until 2006, more than ten years after his death.
12. See Bibliography for details of Oakley’s Bletchley Park Diaries.
13. One former Wren, Ruth Bourne (née Henry), remembers removing the wiring from bombes and putting it in baskets, colour by colour. She cheekily kept a few strands of wire and wrapped them around the handle of her coffee mug. The mug can be seen today in a display cabinet in the Museum at BP. Happily, standing adjacent to the display cabinet stands a fitting memorial, not only to Turing, Welchman and Keen, but also to the intercept operators, cryptanalysts, Wrens and all the others who made the bombe such an effective tool in the attack on the Enigma system. The only operational bombe in the world stands proudly behind a small wooden fence. This rebuild of an actual bombe took a team of dedicated volunteers twelve years of meticulous reconstruction to complete using wartime design documents. On 17 July 2007, to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the British Computer Society, the machine was switched on. It is now regularly demonstrated to BP Museum visitors by a team of volunteers.
14. TNA, HW 62/6.
15. TNA, HW 3/169.
16. TNA, HW 3/169.
Chapter 8: Post-War and the Birth of the Digital Age
1. GW confirmed this in a letter to Fletcher.
2. Kent C. Redmond and Thomas M. Smith visited GW in Newburyport to interview him for books about Project Whirlwind. See Bibliography for details.
3. GW published a number of reports on this subject, some of which were approved for public release. See: http://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/39766.
4. See Bibliography for Tomash and Cohen’s account of CSAW.
5. This development should not be confused with the Atlas computer installed at Manchester University and officially commissioned in 1962. The British Atlas was one of the world’s first supercomputers and considered to be the most powerful computer in the world at that time.
6. In 1986, Sperry merged with Burroughs to form Unisys which today is a major IT service provider worldwide.
7. Quex Park remains a family home to this day. It now houses the Powell-Cotton Museum, which primarily contains a taxidermy collection of mainly African wildlife and ethnographical exhibits, but with many other items, including cannon, weaponry, porcelain and fine furniture.
8. Delay-line memory was a form of computer memory used on some of the earliest digital computers. Like many modern forms of computer memory, delay-line memory was refreshable but offered only serial rather than random-access memory.
9. Everett would go on to a distinguished career at MITRE, serving as President for seventeen years. He was also the recipient of numerous prestigious awards.
10. See Bibliography f
or details of Redmond and Smith’s account of the evolution of SAGE.
11. See Dyer and Dennis, p. 74.
12. JITIDS is the longest continuously running and most widely used command and control system in existence.
13. When former MITRE colleagues remember Welchman today, the words unassuming and gentleman are often used. One, having been approached to contribute to this book, decided to look Welchman up online. He was fascinated to read about his former colleague’s pre and post-war exploits, of which he knew little. He said that he was not surprised!
14. Interview with Diana Lucy and Bunny Westcott. When he published his book in 1982, they couldn’t resist playfully referring to it as ‘The Hot Sex Story’.
Chapter 9: Writing The Hut Six Story
1. See ‘Prologue’, The Hut Six Story.
2. GW’s discussions with Calvocoressi lasted five years and included many letters between 21 August 1974 and 24 February 1979. They also met several times both in Newburyport and London.
3. A complete list of Calvocoressi’s publications can be found at www.librarything.com/author/calvocoressipeter.
4. GW corresponded with Winterbotham between 22 January 1975 and 15 March 1977.
5. See Bibliography for details of Muggeridge’s personal memoir.
6. Colditz was a British television series co-produced by the BBC and Universal Studios and screened between 1972 and 1974.
7. Now ‘The National Archives’ (TNA).
8. See Bibliography for details of Denniston’s account of his father’s life and career.
9. A seven-part television series produced by the BBC in conjunction with the Imperial War Museum documenting various technical developments during the Second World War. It was aired during 1977 and presented by William Woollard.
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