The Secret Lives of Codebreakers

by Sinclair McKay

  Indeed, thanks to Bletchley Park—the information was described as “heaven-sent” and “apparently sure”—Air Intelligence and the RAF gained a much more realistic idea of German bomber strength, and was given a vital boost of confidence; the enemy forces were not quite as multitudinous as had been first thought. On top of this, the cumulative effect of listening in to so many messages had the effect of bolstering Churchill’s determination. Thanks to the decrypts, he knew that he and the British had just a little extra time.

  In fact, on July 16, 1940, with the German subjugation of France consolidated, Hitler issued Directive no. 16, involving preparations for “a landing operation against England.” The plan was called “Operation Sea Lion”—a phrase that, ominously, was picked up with increasing frequency thereafter by the decrypters—and an initial air offensive was to begin on August 5.

  This then was the background to the Battle of Britain—that extraordinary moment when, as Bletchley veteran Captain Jerry Roberts now puts it, “one tiny blob to the north of the map of Europe” stood its ground while all others around it fell. Even though Bletchley could not be of practical assistance to British planes as the battle was fought, the help it had provided beforehand was immeasurably valuable.

  And in the midst of the national anxiety, there was one other small, but vital fillip for the Chiefs of Staff: they had learned that the Germans could be outwitted. Their sheer physical force may have seemed unbeatable but to have advance notice of plans and maneuvers made their threat, at last, surmountable in theory.

  Initially, the bombe machines were operated and serviced by specially picked RAF technicians, headed by a Sergeant Jones. After weeks of frustration during which Victory produced endless false stops, as Sergeant Jones wrote later, “it was realized that some radical change was still required…so the theorists, the cryptographers, the engineers, professors, doctors, got together and decided what was needed.”

  It was the first sign of serious friction at Bletchley Park. While it could hardly be said that the three services—army, navy, air force—were in competition, the fact was that some codes were being broken with reasonable success whereas others—the German naval codes—were still proving resistant. As a result, it was felt that the British navy was not getting the vital intelligence it needed.

  Although during the Battle of Britain in mid-August the emphasis was very much on air force intelligence, Frank Birch, head of the German Team of the Naval Section at Bletchley Park, wrote a memo to Edward Travis, Deputy Director of the Park:

  I’m worried about Naval Enigma. I’ve been worried for a long time, but haven’t liked to say as much.… Turing and Twinn are like people waiting for a miracle, without believing in miracles.…

  Hut 8 has not produced any results at all so far.… Turing and Twinn are brilliant, but like many brilliant people, they are not practical. They are untidy, they lose things, they can’t copy out right, and dither between theory and cribbing.4

  There might have been something in Birch’s complaints—Jack Copeland later stated that Turing was extremely bad at making himself understood—but in a wider sense, the complaints were unfair, as would become clear as the months progressed. Thanks to the stringency with which naval Enigma was employed, including the use of bigram tables, it was far harder to break than the military and Luftwaffe Enigma codes worked upon in Hut 6. The only reasonable chance Turing and his Hut 8 team had of cracking naval Enigma would be if one of these books of tables were to be captured.

  In the meantime, there was yet another breakthrough. Turing and Welchman saw that their “diagonal board” feature could allow for simultaneous scanning of all the possible twenty-six plug-board settings for an individual wheel setting. “Agnes”—an abbreviation of its real name, Agnus Dei, the sister machine to Victory—made her debut in August 1940 in Hut 11. Once both machines had been fitted with the diagonal boards, they were truly operational. One veteran recalled: “The bombes were bronze-colored cabinets about eight feet tall and seven feet wide. The front housed rows of colored circular drums—the naval colors were dark blue, black and silver.”

  “After the first two, a large number of machines were made to a fairly standard form,” says Oliver Lawn. “It proved its use. Altogether about two hundred were made. The first ones were located at Bletchley itself, in what is now called the Bombe Room, which still exists. But when the numbers grew bigger, they had to use other places, and as the war went on, most of them were put at two locations in north London—Eastcote and Stanmore. They had roughly a hundred machines each, run by a large company of Wrens in both cases.” The reason for the multiple locations was simple: the threat of bombing. To have such precious and irreplaceable machines working in a single location would have been unthinkably risky.

  The very first Wrens, eight of them, made their appearance at Bletchley Park in 1941. They were there to see if it was possible for young women to work the bombe machines. Some senior men held the view that “it was doubted if girls could do the work.” They were not merely being sexist; it was perfectly reasonable to wonder if such young people would indeed be up to the remorseless, ineluctable pressure of the job. However, clearly the Wrens were up for it. And as throughout the war the number of bombe machines crept up to a total of 211, so too did the numbers of Wrens. One estimate suggests that by 1945 there were 1,676 bombe operators. The effect of the work on those early Wrens, though—and indeed, among the many who were to follow—was often deleterious.

  The work was very hard for the young women who were drafted in to carry it out. To operate a bombe properly took all one’s concentration and focus. Accuracy was of the highest importance. One young Wren recalled: “The back of the machine defies description—a mass of dangling plugs…and a multitude of wires, every one of which had to be meticulously adjusted with tweezers to make sure the electrical circuits did not short.”

  According to Ruth Bourne, herself a Wren, the effect of this on individual women could sometimes be distressing. There were instances of the strain getting too much, of girls collapsing and having to go for periods of extended rest. Medical attention was sometimes needed. Bourne also recalls that bombe operating was unforgivingly harsh in less obvious, more psychological ways.

  “It was very pressurized because of the working hours. It was very intensive. You did an eight-hour shift—you only had thirty minutes off in the middle of the shift to rush across from the place where you were working to the place where you were eating, queue up for the food, eat it, and go back. Then the person who was working with you, called your oppo, went and had her thirty minutes. And the reason you worked together was because you alternated.

  “One night you were standing up operating the bombe for seven and a half hours. On the next night you could sit down for most of the time operating a checking machine, which was not very hard to do. Stops didn’t need checking that often. Maybe you would get four or five stops a night, which wasn’t arduous. The only time you worked together was plugging in the back of the bombe because it was so complex. But there was the noise, and it was smelly. And many people got what they called burnout.

  “I had it for a short period of time. You’d go to the sick bay and say ‘I don’t feel well.’ They’d say ‘What’s the matter?” and you’d say ‘I don’t know,’ and maybe you’d just cry or something.

  “And they’d put you to bed for about four and a half days—with a big jug of water. All you’d remember is wandering in and out of bed, drinking water, and sleeping. After about four and a half days, you’d wake up, and that’s what happened with me.”

  The other difficulty of the bombes was that they were so intricate to set up. Ruth Bourne recalls: “You had to be accurate as a bombe operator. You didn’t have to be a crossword puzzler or a Greek scholar, but you did have to be incredibly accurate. Because with all these little wires on a wheel—one little group of wires must not touch another. And if you were putting in twenty-six pin plugs, you mustn’t bend the pins. Anything you
did wrong caused a short circuit.

  “And every fifteen minutes,” Mrs. Bourne adds, “the machine stopped and some of the wheel orders had to be changed. So you’d have to check those wheels with a tweezer and put them back on the rack. You’d put on the new ones, check the old ones, and if there were a lot of wheels, you might have only just enough time to check them before the run was finished. At the end of fifteen minutes, you’d start again with another lot of wheels.”

  Ruth Bourne recalls in particular looking at the women who were just coming off a week of night shifts. “All their faces were terribly pale. I remember when I first went there, I saw all these scarecrow pallid women coming off their shift. And I thought, ‘My God.’”

  Tellingly, about a year into the bombe operation, one Dr. Gavin Dunlop, of Newcastle Street, Worksop, Notts, sent a concerned letter to the Bletchley Park authorities concerning one of his Wren patients:

  Dear Sir,

  Miss Adele Moloney is late on leave on account of the high temperature which is the cause of my keeping her in bed. This is not the first time that the same thing has happened when she has been on leave, and as there is no physical reason that I can find for this being thus, I wonder whether there is anything about the nature of her job to account for it.

  Miss Moloney has hypertrophy of the conscience to such an extent that she will not divulge the smallest detail of what she does, even though it is against her own interests. As I find it difficult to believe that this young girl is on work which is so important that her doctor must have his hands tied by lack of knowledge, I thought I would write to ask for your comments.

  It was a perfect illustration of how, at every conceivable level, the work at Bletchley was kept absolutely secret. Just a couple of days later, Commander Bradshaw sent a reply:

  I am sorry to hear of Miss Moloney’s indisposition. There is in the ordinary way nothing that we know of in the work that she does that is in any way likely to be prejudicial to her health. The same work is done by a large number of other girls, none of whom so far as we know have suffered in any way. The hours are not abnormally long and except that a good deal of standing is involved, it is not physically exhausting.

  Bradshaw went on to add, with pointed understatement:

  … there is nothing peculiar in her silence. That is perfectly correct in her behavior—in fact it is highly commendable. I think I have only to point this out to you to prevent you pressing her further on the subject. The sick return from the Section in which she works is exactly the same as all other Sections, where the work varies considerably, and the staff varies in age.…

  I think, therefore, that you will have to look elsewhere…to account for her indisposition unless it be that Miss Moloney finds the work a mental strain and worry. She is perfectly at liberty to say so if she does.…5

  It scarcely needs to be added that, even without the background of the war, this was not an era in which concerns about workplace health were given a sympathetic hearing or researched in any depth. From shipbuilding yards, to deep coal mines, to deafening factories filled with potentially lethal machinery, the discomforts of manual occupations were simply part of the burden that working men and women were expected to accept in return for their wages. Indeed, in industrial terms, there is something about the image of the bombes, ticking and clicking and spraying oil in unison, that puts one in mind of Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis—the image of small people tending to vast, inexorably functioning, demanding machines.

  Occasionally, the bombes could be downright dangerous. According to one account from a technician: “A Wren operator 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!”6

  For others, though, like Jean Valentine—a young Wren who later went on to break Japanese codes in Ceylon—the thing was simply to take a deep breath and get on with it. “I was sent to Adstock, living in a village called Steeple Claydon, and started working on the bombe. We worked shifts, or ‘watches’ as they were called; eight in the morning till four in the afternoon for one week; four in the afternoon till midnight the following week; and then midnight till eight on the third week. Then we went off duty at eight in the morning and were back on at four till midnight, so we did sixteen hours that last day. Once you had learned how to [work the bombe], it was OK. It wasn’t all that complicated.”

  Jean Valentine says that—speaking for herself—she saw few signs that working on these great machines was more stressful than any other part of the war effort. “Yes, there was a call for accuracy, but that was discipline. You disciplined yourself to do it because you were being disciplined. There was nothing serious done to us but it was the expectations on us as youngsters.

  “When you’re younger, your fingers are very flexible, you can do things much more quickly. And the brain works quicker.”

  On top of this, many have testified to the unendurable noise of the bombe machines working hour after hour. Again, Jean Valentine remembers slightly differently: “I don’t like noise. But to me, it was like a lot of knitting machines working—a kind of tickety-clickety noise. It was repetitive but I can’t say I found it upsettingly noisy. In fact, the bombe reconstruction in the Bletchley Park Museum sounds a lot noisier to me than a roomful of five of them.”

  One other side effect of the work, says Jean Valentine, was apparent when she went home. And it was another indicator of the general discretion of the time that this did not prompt more questions: “My mother never questioned anything, but she did say to me once: ‘What are you doing to your shirt cuffs?’ I used to take my washing home and the cuffs would be all black. It was the fine spray of oil, which you couldn’t even see so you didn’t know it was happening, a spray coming off the bombes.

  “So I just said, ‘Oh, it’s the work I’m doing.’ And my mother didn’t pursue it.”

  11 1940: Enigma and the Blitz

  “Ultra never mentioned Coventry,” commented Air Section head Peter Calvocoressi. “Churchill—so far from pondering whether to save Coventry or safeguard Ultra—was under the impression that the raid was to be on London.”1

  The German raid on Coventry on the night of November 14, 1940 is still the cause of debate and controversy today. Thanks to a pointed reference by Captain Winterbotham in his pioneering book on Ultra, the theory that Churchill allowed the Midlands city to burn—in order that the Germans wouldn’t suspect that Bletchley had broken into Enigma—has continually reappeared. And even though most Bletchley Park veterans firmly believe that the theory is nonsense, a few are not so sure. But in order to get a better idea of the searing events of that night, it is necessary to explain a little of the background, and of the increasing value of the intelligence that Bletchley was providing, through the Battle of Britain and beyond.

  Back in the summer of 1940, huge numbers of people in Britain had been bracing themselves for what seemed the inevitable. The Germans, triumphant in France and the Low Countries, would, it was popularly believed, now turn to Britain. There was little belief that in the event of an invasion, Hitler’s forces could be successfully fought off. Such pessimism would very rarely be heard out loud; one wouldn’t want to be reported for damaging morale. Nevertheless, to read contemporary diaries, and to hear contemporary accounts, it is clear that a great many people were sick with anxiety about what they saw as Hitler’s coming victory.

  Little wonder, nothing like the German war machine had been seen before. Added to this was the calculated sadism, together with the way that any conquered nation would be subject to the paranoia of informers and curfews, the terror of random public executions. News of what had been happening in Poland had come back to London. To listen to Churchill’s speeches now, one simply hears the growl of inspirational defiance. But as Mimi Gallilee says, whenever she went to bed after a day’s work at Bletchley, she would �
�pray first, and pray hard.” She and countless others lived in real fear of a lightning invasion.

  Secret preparations were made for such an eventuality. Among them was the recruitment of the “Scallywags,” outwardly passive-looking men such as clerics, writers, and intellectuals, trained in techniques of subversion and assassination, with the aim of starting as much mayhem as possible. But when would Hitler invade? From the Cabinet and MI6, down to the saloon bar debaters in the Anchor and Crown, it was a subject of intense speculation based upon little more than guesswork.

  In August, in preparation for Operation Sea Lion, the Luftwaffe launched a ferocious concerted attack from the air upon RAF airfields and radar stations. Yet in the succeeding weeks, during what became known as the Battle of Britain, the RAF pulled off astonishing repeated triumphs in its airborne skirmishes with the enemy. The image is ceaselessly evocative: that of the people of Kent looking up into a wide, pale blue sky to see, far above, the tiny forms of Spitfires firing upon the encroaching enemy, and of German planes spiraling downward, their bailed-out pilots floating down on parachutes.

  The end of August brought the conclusion of the Battle of Britain, and with it not merely a sense of relief but also a valuable raising of spirits. Churchill now gave the command for an air raid on Berlin. This in turn led Hitler to order the Luftwaffe to begin an even stronger attack on London. The unforeseen side effect of this German strategy, however, was that it relieved pressure on the RAF airfields which previously had been the Luftwaffe’s main targets.

  As mentioned before, Bletchley Park could offer little in the way of practical help to the air force at this time. However, come September, one particular decrypt was of great tactical importance. The message ordered the dismantling of air-lifting equipment on Dutch airfields. Its meaning was very swiftly deduced by the Chiefs of Staff: Operation Sea Lion was to be postponed.