by Sue Black
And so we had a cup of tea...
The next Sunday, I was invited to lunch again with Jerry Roberts and his lovely wife Mei. The lunch had been arranged so that Jack Copeland and I could meet and discuss the campaign. I took along my copy of Colossus, thinking to myself how cool it would be if they would both sign it for me. After arriving and making introductions we all sat down with a cup of tea and started discussing Bletchley Park. Jack has an amazing knowledge of its history, along with a deep knowledge and understanding of code breaking from both a theoretical and historical point of view.
I felt like I was in heaven during that conversation. I had to pinch myself. I was sitting in the house of an amazing Bletchley Park codebreaker, having lunch with him, his wife and a Bletchley Park expert who knew all kinds of interesting things about what happened there and what effect it had on WWII.
After a long chat about Bletchley Park and code breaking we turned to the subject of the campaign:
What can we do to help Bletchley Park?
Captain Jerry Roberts, me and Professor Jack Copeland (author of the book Colossus) We talked all through lunch; after lunch Jack left, Jerry went to have a lie down, and I wrote down a list of the ideas that we had discussed. When Jerry awoke from his nap we had another cup of tea and continued our chat. I talked to Jerry about writing his autobiography. I was desperate to ensure that all of his memories about Bletchley Park and his time there were captured; Jerry said that he found writing hard as it took a lot of energy. (Now, having written this book, I know what he meant!) When I got home, I emailed the list of ideas to Jerry and Jack; a day or two later I had a reply from Jerry:
Subject: Saving Bletchley Park
From: Jerry Roberts
To:Dr Sue Black
Sent: 19 November 2008
Dear Sue,
Thank you for your imaginative and practical list!
This reply a bit delayed because we were down at German Dept. UCL yesterday. We had a really wonderful day. Prof. Kord arranged this visit and she looking after us so well, we also had lunch and the Champagne. It was fun, a great day out, and we both really enjoyed, it was certainly one of the best birthday at my 88!!
With Jack together, we visited DIVERSE already (prod.co) and now await the reactions to our “pitch” of last Thursday. It seems a very interesting subject to them. We will follow up approach to other companies.
I need time to digest your excellent list, will try to follow up on it. Meantime, well done!
Best wishes,
Jerry
Even at the age of 88 Jerry was out there pitching to a production company a television programme about Bletchley Park. His enthusiasm amazed me and continues to inspire me now. When I began writing this book, Jerry was still alive; sadly, he died in April 2014.
And now it’s only falling apart
About a month later, I got some great news from Simon Greenish: “It’s been a record year for visitors this year, with 70,000 regular visitors plus 5,000 schoolchildren. With all the publicity that Bletchley Park is getting I’m sure that numbers will keep increasing.”
It certainly did feel like Bletchley Park was becoming more visible. Around the same time, I was delighted to see that Mavis Batey, the Bletchley Park codebreaker that we had met during our July visit, had been interviewed by CBS News. (I wonder if Fran Allen had talked to CBS when she got back to the US . . . )
The CBS report, “World War II Code Breaking Compound Crumbles”, focused on the importance of Bletchley Park, the achievements there and its current state of disrepair. Mavis told the reporter about the message that she had decrypted, Simon Greenish showed the reporter the inside of one of the huts, and Tony Sale gave a demonstration of the Colossus rebuild.
The report also showed Mavis and her husband Keith as they were during the war, as well as today. It was lovely to see them, especially as Keith and Mavis – like Jerry Roberts – are sadly now no longer with us.
One of the most wonderful things that has happened during my involvement with Bletchley Park has been getting to know some of the people who worked there, like Jerry Roberts and Mavis Batey, most of whom are in their 80s and 90s. It’s obvious to anyone who meets them that they are interesting and important people. They have a certain spirit, an intelligence, and a matter-of-fact way of looking at life. Everyone that I have met has been an absolute pleasure to speak with, and listening to them talk to each other, sharing stories about what they did at Bletchley Park and what they have done since, is an even more joyful experience. Knowing that these wonderful people would not be around much longer helped me to redouble my efforts throughout the campaign. I wanted everyone to realise and experience the same feeling that I had: these stories must be heard.
In November 2008, I sent 5 tweets
08
The Ultra effect
“Those people who worked at Bletchley Park could be thought of as a living jigsaw. Each piece dependent on those around it.”
—Chris Hicken, Bletchley Park Padre
In February 1941, Dilly Knox’s team broke the Abwehr16 cipher, which helped the Allies to find and sink the German battleship Bismarck. By this time, Knox was very ill; he’d been treated for cancer for several years and would not live to see the end of the war. But it was his team’s work on Enigma that would have the biggest impact. The fact that they had broken the code in 1940 immediately became one of the Allied Forces’ most well-kept secrets. If the Germans got even a hint that their ciphers were compromised, a few simple changes in operating procedure could easily render all of the code breaking work useless. This was, in part, why activity at Bletchley Park was so very secretive. Careless talk really could have cost lives.
Quite apart from the complication of the ciphers, the biggest problem faced by Station X was the sheer weight of message traffic from not only the Germans, but also the Italian, Russian and Japanese military forces. It meant that between 2,000 and 6,000 messages needed decoding and translating every day. “Chaos is a mild term to describe our condition at the outset,” says Edmund Green, who worked in the Naval Section. “I am told that I once swapped a small and incompetent typist for a large and priceless card index.” And cryptanalyst Harry Hinsley adds: “At one time the Germans were operating concurrently about 50 Enigmas, some in the Army, some in the Air Force, some in the Navy, some in the railways, some in the secret service. And so you were faced not merely with understanding the machine and with breaking a key regularly, but with breaking 50, sometimes regularly at once, or as many of them as you could without delay.”[17]
In October 1941 some of the senior codebreakers broke all military protocol and wrote directly to the Prime Minister bemoaning the lack of resources to deal with such huge numbers of messages. They emphasised that their needs were small when compared to other areas of the military but that investment would produce results of staggering importance. “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 wrote. “No doubt in the long run these particular requirements will be met, but meanwhile still more precious months will have been wasted, and as our needs are continually expanding we see little hope of ever being adequately staffed. We have felt that we should be failing in our duty if we did not draw your attention to the facts and to the effects they are having and must continue to have on our work, unless immediate action is taken.”
Churchill understood, agreed and immediately directed: “Make sure they have all they want extreme priority and report to me that this has been done.” The message was famously marked “Action this day”. This was when the building programme at Bletchley Park really took off.
“As soon as the government knew how much could be done at Bletchley Park they pumped more money in. It turned from a cottage industry into a production line,” says Mavis (Lever) Batey. Station X grew
into a network with outstations in Middlesex and at Adstock, Gayhurst and Wavendon in Buckinghamshire. “There simply wasn’t room at Bletchley Park to allow for more huts to be built,” explains Bombe operator Anne Pease. “So outstations were formed, usually in large country houses in the area, with special huts built for the Bombes, and there were also two big purpose-built outstations at Eastcote and Stanmore, near London. The first outstation I went to wasn’t far from Bletchley, in a village called Wavendon. After a few months, we were transferred to Wavendon House so we were able to live and work in the same place.”
Sorting the important messages from the admin was vital but, even after distributing them around the now fully operational huts, each of which had a particular area of focus, there were simply too many to handle with pencil and paper alone. The process of passing messages quickly between huts had been solved mechanically with a “Lamson” vacuum tube system between departments, and the wooden box tunnel between Huts 3 and 6 contained a permanently rolling conveyor belt. But the business of decoding needed to be mechanised too. Therefore, Alan Turing proposed the construction of a machine based on, but quite different and significantly more powerful than, the Polish Bomba. With help from Gordon Welchman, he designed a new electromechanical device that they christened the Bombe and called upon the services of Harold Keen – chief research scientist at the British Tabulating Machine Company in Letchworth, Hertfordshire – to construct it.[18]
“At my interview in London they told me to stand up and sit down again,” says Jean Valentine, a wartime Bombe operator. “At the time I didn’t understand why. And I don’t think they knew why either. I only found out why when I saw my first Bombe.” The Bombe consisted of a bronze-coloured cabinet within which were set a series of rotating drums – each performing the same role as an Enigma rotor. The drums were stacked in twelve banks of three with every bank of three emulating the slow, middle and fast rotors. As a result, each Bombe acted like 36 Enigma machines working simultaneously and at a higher speed than a human. In addition, another cabinet behind emulated the Enigma plugboard settings. The reason that Jean Valentine and many other female Bombe operators were asked to stand up and sit down at their interviews was to gauge their height. The Bombe stood at over seven feet tall, and taller operators were needed for the higher drums and plugs.
At midnight every night, the enemy Enigma operators would all change the settings on their machines. This meant a new selection of plugs on the plugboard, new selection of rotors, new ring settings and trip settings, and new rotor start positions. The details of what settings to use each day were contained in codebooks and key sheets; a typical entry might have looked like this:
Datum [Date]
Walzenlage [Rotors]
Ringstellung [Ring settings]
Steckerverbindungen [Plug board settings]
Grundstellung
[Initial rotor settings]
3
I III II
S M C
EA DH LO NS CW JM
H P W
4
III II I
G K R
SL OH FA
BK JF MW
D M A
5
II I III
T B Q
XT DA RB PQ LE KS
M D C
So, every day, Station X had to figure out what the new settings were from the 158 million million million possibilities. However, they did have several clues to help them.
Firstly, one supposed strength of the Enigma machine was that no letter could ever be coded as itself, no matter how many times you pressed a key. You could jab at a letter M for all eternity but it would never generate an M. However, this supposed strength was actually a weakness. Removing one variable significantly reduced the number of possibilities and therefore helped the codebreakers.
Secondly, as John Herivel had surmised, the enemy operators were so confident that the messages were undecipherable that they sometimes got a bit lazy. At midnight, after setting the machine, they would then send their first coded message accompanied by something called an Indicator – three letters chosen at random and typed twice.[19] This Indicator allowed the receiver to check if their machine was set up correctly to decode messages; Enigma machines decoded as well as coded. For example, the sender would type three letters twice, let’s say HIT HIT, and the machine would encode it into YGD UPL. They would then send this message to the receiver. If they have set their machine up correctly using that day’s settings, typing YGD UPL into their machine would then generate a repeat of three letters, in this example HIT HIT. If this happened, they could be confident that they’d set it up correctly. The Enigma operators were supposed to use three letters at random but they often took the lazy route and used, as predicted by the Herivel Tip, three adjacent letters on the keyboard or even the same key three times.
Thirdly, the codebreakers noticed that certain words and phrases appeared fairly frequently in communications. For example, many German messages ended with HEIL HITLER and many weather reports began with WEATHER REPORT. These became known as “cribs” – best guesses as to what small portions of a message were. Dilly Knox had a particular knack for recognising patterns of language. If he felt that a cipher took on a kind of rhythm, he looked at popular German poems and nursery rhymes and would sometimes find that an operator had typed them in an idle moment. These too became cribs.
The combination of cribs, Cillis, lazy operator practice, and the fact that no letter would code as itself helped the codebreakers to reduce the number of possible settings for the Enigma machines by discounting those that couldn’t work. But there were still many more variables to consider, which was why the Bombes were so necessary. By October 1944, the Bombes were averaging 35,000 hours of operation per week, and by the end of the war there were over 200 Bombes in operation.
Using what they knew, the codebreakers would give the Bombe operators a “menu” of how to set up the rotors and plugboard. The operator would set up the first bank of three rotors, then set up the next bank with the rotors moved by one position, then the next, then the next, etc. The Bombe would then run, looking for the Indicator by disproving every incorrect combination. Once they had the Indicator they could decode messages sent using Enigma. “The menus came from Huts 6 and 8 – I think Hut 8 was naval signals and Hut 6 others,” says Anne Pease. “We never knew what the messages were about. Although we did get snippets of information, and some codes like weather forecasts were much easier to break.”
“We were thrilled when we got a ‘stop’. It meant that we’d been successful,” says Daisy Phillips. “When the Bombe had found a possible setting for the Indicator, the machine would stop and a bell would ring. We would pass on the settings and then wait. If we got back the message ‘job up’, it meant that we’d been successful and we’d have to strip the machine and put in a new menu. We usually had no idea what message we’d helped to translate but occasionally they’d put up a notice to tell us. We were delighted when we got it right.” Another Wren remembers that, after each run, one row of drums would be removed and another placed in situ. Then the removed set had to be “inspected and trimmed – the circles of copper wire brushes were set at an angle and if a single rogue wire bent and caused a short-circuit, that run was invalid and had to be repeated”.
The Bombe operators, nearly all women, worked in teams of two with one operator setting the rotors and one setting the leads on the plugboard. A third operator would use a Letchworth Enigma machine to check the Indicator before passing the detail
s on to the code breaking team for that unit. If it turned out that the crib and the menu were wrong and the Indicator didn’t work, they would be sent back to the codebreakers for a rethink.
Initially, Post Office engineers would do running repair on the Bombes but, over time, many of the female operators became maintenance staff. “I got a rudimentary idea of how the Bombes worked, so would maintain them, do soldering where it was needed,” says Anne Pease. “Coaching others in the technical details to pass the promotion tests was more interesting than just operating a Bombe.” It was not a job free of danger, however, and electric shocks were common. One technician describes an incident in which a Wren got more than she bargained for: “She was prettying herself using a metal mirror which slid across two large electrical terminals. There was a bright flash, the mirror evaporated and her lipstick shot across her throat. I was working nearby. The scream made me look up. I thought she had cut her throat.”
In recent years, much attention has focused upon the codebreakers – particularly Alan Turing – while the army of people who supported them has remained largely unnoticed. But the facts speak for themselves: at the height of wartime activity Station X had 10,471 personnel, an eclectic mix of “Boffins and Debs” of which 80 per cent were women.20 They came from a wide variety of backgrounds, Wrens, WAAFs and debutantes, all working side by side to support the code breaking effort, or indeed, working as codebreakers themselves. There were also 152 house staff – cleaners, handymen, etc. – five barbers, and four people who ran the NAAFI.21 There were 151 maintenance workers, 139 catering staff, 14 medical staff and 29 people sorting out the billeting. Add to that the registry and despatch staff, the people looking after the staff records, the finance department, the five Air Raid Wardens and the three people who ran the recreation group, and the numbers start to swell. One of the largest departments was Transport, which boasted 169 drivers, 50 of whom were women. Security on the estate was covered by a 44-strong corps of Military Police and a Home Guard platoon.