The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (18 page)

In questions of politics, as in many other things, Bletchley Park seemed a microcosm of the nation as a whole. Change was clearly in the air. Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited
(1945) was a cry of mourning for the passing of an aristocratic way of life. The opening chapter of that novel saw Charles Ryder returning to a house that he had once seen in very different, rather more gracious circumstances, and which was now requisitioned by the army. In real life, this was the case up and down the country. Yet there was still a smart set. And unless one was born into it, one on the whole never caught sight of it.

Similarly, most of the young people who worked at Bletchley would only ever have read about the aristocracy. Certainly they would have been highly unlikely in any other circumstances to meet such rarefied creatures, while the smart ‘gels’ who volunteered their services would only have had the patchiest idea about the lives of those alongside whom they were now working.

But Bletchley represented the last gasp of the notion of the smarter set and their sense of mucking in and doing what one could, just as it represented in miniature the oncoming triumph of the middle classes: the classes for whom the old snobberies were
being cast aside, not merely in the interests of the nation pulling together, but because they had read Orwell and Priestley and understood the terrible privations suffered by so many in the 1930s, and were determined that a better country should come of this.

When Captain Eric Jones was put in charge of Hut 3, everyone who worked with him could not help remarking on his Cheshire vowels and indeed the source of his wealth (‘… His qualifications for the post were not immediately apparent. He was a wholesale cloth merchant from Macclesfield,’ wrote William Millward. Peter Calvocoressi thought that he had been ‘something in biscuits’) – but, crucially, these same people stressed how brilliant he was in the role. All who worked with Captain Jones (later to become Sir Eric) were full of praise for his strong principles and the strength of character that enabled him to deal smoothly with ‘tiresome intrigues and controversies’, as Millward put it.

The point they seemed to be making – only slightly patronisingly – was that Jones’s background was an indicator of quiet strength, and that he was the reverse of a chinless wonder. And in contrast to the pre-war Foreign Office days, when recruits tended to be plucked from the more privileged classes, Jones was one of the men who was to form the post-war establishment, going on to head the successor to Bletchley Park, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

Even if they could not have known it, these young cryptographers, from the minor public schools and the grammar schools, and their peers, were set to become the dominating voices of the new age. And by 1941, the nature of the conflict was changing, intensifying further; for Bletchley, it would prove a crucial year in which Britain’s fortunes were ever more vulnerable. For all those who worked at the Park, it was a time of both exhaustion and occasionally elation.

As the war widened and unfolded, the importance of Bletch ley Park’s work – and the concomitant pressure to get every tiny detail absolutely right – increased accordingly. In 1941, during the Battle of the Atlantic, German spies in various ports reported back to German High Command that a vast British convoy, comprising thirteen cargo boats, four tankers and ships carrying innumerable aircraft parts, was sailing off the coast of Africa. This message to Hitler was sent by radio – meaning that it was also picked up by British Signals Intelligence. It was decoded at Bletchley perhaps even before German High Command got to read it. As a result, the British convoy was alerted to the imminent German danger and was able to take evasive action.

The nightmare dangers that the Atlantic convoys faced were all too easy for those back home to imagine; the vessel ruthlessly stalked by U-boats, torpedoed, with countless crew and sometimes civilian passengers perishing in the dagger-cold ocean waters. Anxiety over the peril to supplies was matched by the ache of sympathy for the men out on those seas. So a naval victory of any sort always proved to be an effective morale booster back in Britain.

There was an important lifting of spirits at sea in March 1941
thanks in great part to Mavis Batey, who had been working with Dilly Knox in the Cottage on the Italian Enigma. Mrs Batey recalls with a smile how Knox was brilliant at getting people to look at problems from unexpected angles. ‘Dilly would ask: “Which way do the hands on a clock go round?” One might say clockwise. But Knox would reply that that would depend on whether one was the observer, or the clock.’

And this lateral approach was applied to Enigma. Mrs Batey still has the ‘rods’ that were used to work out the order of the wheels inside the machine, and the starting position of those wheels for the message being cracked. But the rods were not much use unless the person employing them had a lively intelligence; and it was deep into one September night in 1940 that Mrs Batey had first found her way into the code, by guessing that the first word of a particular message, for which they thought they had the letters PERX, was in fact PERSONALE – ‘personal’.

That gave her a start, yielding up two or three more potential letters within the message. A night’s worth of infinitely patient and extraordinarily focused work later, and Mrs Batey had identified the wheel order and the message setting. It was a brilliant feat of inspiration and perseverance.

Now, in the spring of 1941, it was this same light-touch but inspired approach that cracked a message to an Italian naval commander: ‘Today 25 March is X–3.’ As Mrs Batey says now, ‘If you get a message saying “today minus three”, then you know that something pretty big is afoot.’

It was. Subsequent, more specific messages came in. Mavis worked through shift after shift, not leaving the Cottage. And then: ‘It was eleven o’clock at night, and it was pouring with rain when I rushed, ran, absolutely tore down to take it to Intelligence, to get it across to Admiral Cunningham.’

After some work, intelligence analysts deduced from the message that the Italian fleet was planning to attack British troop convoys sailing from Alexandria to Piraeus in Greece. Admiral Cunningham
was in charge of the operation that explosively ambushed four Italian destroyers and four cruisers off the coast of Sicily. From the point of view of the Italians, the British had sailed up out of nowhere.

It was a spectacular coup, as Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, was keen to tell Bletchley Park. He rang with a message: ‘Tell Dilly that we have won a great victory in the Mediterranean and it is entirely due to him and his girls.’

Mrs Batey illustrates vividly how, when something of vital importance was going on, the codebreakers would not budge until their job was done. ‘Finally,’ she says, ‘the work was finished in the middle of the night after three nights.’

Mrs Batey is modest about her pivotal role. ‘It was the Italians’ errors that gave the game away,’ she says. ‘Our eyes were so used to picking things out. I got a long message and it didn’t have a single “L” in it. The Italians only ever sent out a few telegrams, so the very idea that they were sending messages out automatically gave you the signal that they were going to do something for a change.

‘And so they sent out dummy messages all the time so it would look like a uniform transmission. And of course, what this Italian chap had done was just to sit with his finger on “L”, smoking a fag, the biggest crib there ever was.

‘A message that long that contained only “L”s! That actually broke one of the wheels of the Italian Enigma machine.’

Another 1941 sea battle of some significance to Bletchley took place inside the Arctic Circle, and featured a British attack on German ships. The real target was a trawler called
Krebs
; for it was known that on board this vessel was an Enigma machine, which could prove invaluable for breaking into those almost impossible German naval codes. The German captain, sensing the danger, threw the Enigma machine overboard into the freezing ocean, but he was killed before he had a chance to destroy his coding documents and bigram tables. The vital documents and tables were retrieved, eventually taken back to Bletchley and pieced together.

Then, even more brilliantly, came the episode of the U-110. This was the U-boat that had, in the first few days of the war, caused widespread public horror by torpedoing and sinking the passenger ship
Athenia
. Now the U-110 was itself depth-charged and captured in the Atlantic. The captain, Julius Lemp, was unable to prevent the British from seizing vital Enigma material, including bigram tables. These in turn were rushed back to Bletchley. The submarine was being towed to Iceland when it sank; the crew who had torpedoed and drowned so many sailors were now themselves lost. But it was from these courageous naval operations that grew Bletchley’s outstanding achievement – the breaking of the notoriously unbreakable naval Enigma.

Even back in 1940, Alistair Denniston had remarked to Head of Naval Section Frank Birch that ‘You know, the Germans don’t mean you to read their stuff, and I don’t suppose you ever will.’ However, from these tables, and other data, Alan Turing calculated a new method into the codes, which became termed ‘Banburismus’ – in essence, as his Hut 8 colleague and sometime fiancée Joan Murray recalled, it involved ‘punched holes on long sheets of paper, made at Banbury’.

Often on the night shifts, recalled Joan Murray, ‘around midnight was a particularly interesting time, since the German Naval keys changed at midnight, but results of analysis of most of a day’s traffic began to reach us before then.’
¹
The result, she recalled, was that very often people were too absorbed at the end of the shift – like Mavis Lever – to even think of going home. Instead, they preferred to stay on and carry on working with the following shift.

And the effect it began to have on the course of the war was almost incalculable. In the first few months of 1941, U-boat attacks on the convoys had meant that Britain was facing a catastrophic shortfall of imported food; if the submarines could not be thwarted, there would literally not be enough to feed the population. On top of this, there would not be enough imported oil for war production
to continue. Now, according to Jack Copeland, convoy re-routings ‘based on Hut 8 decrypts were so successful that for the first twenty-three days [of June], the north Atlantic U-boats made not a single sighting of a convoy’.
²

In the midst of these events, Joan Murray gave a short description of Alan Turing, and his own gentle abstraction. ‘I can remember Alan Turing coming in as usual for a day’s leave,’ she wrote, ‘doing his own mathematical research at night, in the warmth and light of the office, without interrupting the routine of daytime sleep.’ Another veteran recalls Turing’s abstraction when being congratulated for his work by a senior ranking officer, while later, Hugh Alexander was to say of Turing’s role that ‘Turing thought it [naval Enigma] could be broken because it would be so interesting to break it … Turing first got interested in the problem for the typical reason that “no one else was doing anything about it and I could have it to myself.”’
³

No better example then, of the partnership between unfettered mathematical inquiry and the national interest. For much of that summer, Bletchley was able to read the majority of German naval Enigma messages, and in so doing could provide protection beyond value to British shipping. In the days before either America or Russia had joined the conflict, and when Britain was standing quite alone, this feat could easily be counted as one of the decisive points in the war.

There were other examples in 1941 of just how vital the work at Bletchley was. It was entirely thanks to the decoders that the British were forewarned of the German intention to target not Malta – despite the false impression the Germans were trying to give – but Crete. In spite of this advance warning, Crete was to fall, but the warning did perhaps help with the evacuation of some 17,000 troops. Elsewhere, similarly, amid the generally dispiriting progress of the war in Africa, an Enigma decrypt concerning the size and formation of Rommel’s forces at the Halfaya Pass on the Egyptian
border offered at least the consolation prize of enabling the British forces to escape being crushed.

There was also the fantastic coup of the
Bismarck
. In May 1941, this mighty and formidable battleship, commanded by Admiral Lutjens, had sunk the British vessel HMS
Hood
. Out of the crew of 2,500 men, only three survived. A few days later the Royal Navy had, with the help of Bletchley, tracked the position of the
Bismarck
. In an effort to conceal the fact that the signals had been intercepted, it was arranged for the air force to fly two or three reconnaissance planes over the area, to give the
Bismarck
’s crew the impression that this was how they had been spotted.

In fact, the Bletchley Park intercepts had been the result of a certain amount of serendipity. Jane Fawcett MBE was there as the scenario unfolded. She recalls:

‘I was in Hut 6 and on the occasion of the
Bismarck
codes, I worked a 24-hour shift all the way through. We intercepted a message from one of the senior military commanders in Berlin – he was asking German High Command for the whereabouts of the
Bismarck
because his son was on board. His message went: “Where is my son?” And the message back told him. The
Bismarck
was at Brest.’ Interestingly, in 1974, the late Diana Plowman made an inscription for the benefit of her family in her copy of Frederick Winterbotham’s book. In this inscription, she gave a miniature portrait of life at the Park. And at the very end – again, solely for the benefit of her relatives – she wrote: ‘But the Bismarck was my own special piece of luck.’

After the message was intercepted, a ring of British warships attacked the
Bismarck
. In all, 2,300 of its crew drowned. The mighty symbol of the strength of the German navy was scuttled. The effect in Germany was serious. One senior Reich figure observed: ‘The Führer is melancholy beyond words.’