janeandbobandmore: BLETCHLEY PARK: ENIGMA CODEBREAKERS

BLETCHLEY PARK, ENGLAND: Home of the Codebreakers, September 8, 2017

In World War II, the British Government secretly purchased an available estate in a quiet rural location, not far from London. Here, in Bletchley Park, they centered their code breaking operation based on a small group of experts assembled through personal connections. Mathematicians, crossword puzzle solvers, engineers, chess champions, linguists were all brought to the site to clandestinely work together to break through German's Enigma machine.

They were not simply decoding, finding one word that stands in place of another. Theirs was a much more challenging, if not impossible, task as daily the German high command reset the Enigma machine rotors and plug board into billions of new possible combinations – where a different letter stood in place of the true one in the message being delivered. The secret message could only be read by the German officer who received it for he had instructions to set his Enigma machine to match the settings of the sending machine.

At Bletchley Park, thousands of British service personnel worked together, in compartmentalized units, three shifts a day, maintaining total secrecy about their efforts as they sought to decipher German war messages. Three times as many women served as men. Most were had enlisted in the British Royal Navy (WRENs).

Morse code radio messages were monitored across Britain by civilian as well as military radio operators. Every day 3,000 motorcycle couriers brought these coded messages to Bletchley to be analyzed.

The scientists assembled at Bletchley designed an electro-magnetic machine, fondly called the Bombe, to help break into the intricate German ciphering system. Alan Turing and Max Newman may be familiar to you. Closer to the end of the war, Tommy Flowers, a brilliant electronics engineer, designed Colossus, a precursor to today's computer that could read 5,000 characters per second significantly speeding up the effort to decrypt the enemy’s messages and uncover the key to the Enigma machine.

These brilliant minds working together at Bletchley Park contributed significantly to Allied Victory. Their success in breaking the Enigma code helped locate U-Boats, provided early warning of German air attacks on British cities, and gave other covert intelligence to the Allied war effort.