The Secret Lives of Codebreakers

by Sinclair McKay

  According to Nigel de Grey, commenting more diplomatically later, these and other internal Bletchley Park conflicts were “an imbroglio of conflicting jealousies, intrigue, and differing opinions.” Yet those furious threats of resignation from Dilly Knox—perhaps exacerbated by ill health or simple short temper—interestingly also accused Denniston of not being up to the job.

  Even the “Third Man,” Kim Philby, had a view on these intrigues, as he related in his memoirs: “Much of their work was brilliantly successful. I must leave it to learned opinion to decide how much more could have been achieved if the wrangling inside GC and CS had been reduced to manageable proportions.”6

  One can easily see how difficult everyone’s position at Bletchley must have been: for the more successful the huts and the codebreakers became at their work, the greater the demands that were as a result placed upon them. And these demands had to be met with finite resources. While a number of bombe machines were now in operation, there was continuing conflict about how much time was dedicated to the decrypts relating to each branch of the Services. Obviously there were only so many hours in every day, so which would receive priority? And who ultimately had the power to parcel out these chunks of time?

  Of course the leaders of the different huts were going to fight one another for use of the bombe machines—it was hardly professional rivalry, it was an understanding that the lives of countless others depended upon the work that they were doing. For all the jibes about “ambition” and some being “less scrupulous” than others, the conflicts at Bletchley were rather more than outbreaks of office politics. For all parties concerned, the stakes could not have been higher. Many who worked there had relatives who were out in Europe, in North Africa, in the Far East, fighting. Naturally they would stop at nothing to provide all the assistance and intelligence that they possibly could.

  In any case, there were a great many at Bletchley Park who saw the advent of Edward Travis as Director as unquestionably a good thing. He was a man much better able than Denniston to deal with the myriad administrative difficulties—from bombe time to security to the absurdity of tea rations—that the place regularly threw up.

  Gordon Welchman clearly had a lot of time for Commander Travis, as he revealed in his memoir:

  As a wartime leader, Travis had some of Winston Churchill’s qualities. He was definitely of the bulldog breed, and he liked to have things done his way, but he also had a great feeling for what it took to create happy working conditions.… He would get around to all our activities, making contact with staff at all levels, and he had the gift of the human touch. Once he personally organized a picnic for Hut 6 staff, which was a tremendous success. In spite of his heavy workload after he became Director, he still showed his personal interest in our activities, including those at the bombe sites.7

  It might also have been the case that the era of the gifted amateur was over, and that a new, more systematic and disciplined approach to the work was needed. With the sheer volume of traffic that was now being dealt with, day by day, hour by hour, the Park had to ensure that all this invaluable information was given to the right people. Moreover, with the coming of the machines, and the increase in personnel that this brought, there was a sense in which the functions of Bletchley were becoming industrialized.

  A new class of what might be termed “technocrats” were coming forward, of which cocksure young Gordon Welchman seemed the prime exemplar. The old ways of Alistair Denniston, and of Room 40, with its volatile and unpredictable individualists, had been extremely effective in their time. But how could they be expected to cope with these new and extraordinary demands? How could they match the most implacable enemy that Britain had ever seen?

  Codebreaker Ralph Bennett—who had been sent to Egypt to coordinate the work of Hut 6—came back to Bletchley Park in 1942. “I had left as one of a group of enthusiastic amateurs,” he wrote. “I returned to a professional organization with standards and an acknowledged reputation to maintain. Success was no longer an occasional prize, but the natural reward of relentless attention to detail.”8

  There were extra recruits coming in; the brilliant young mathematician Shaun Wylie, for instance, arrived in 1941. His recruitment had in part to do with Alan Turing; for the two men had met in the late 1930s at Princeton University. A formidable intellect, Wylie was also an excellent hockey player. He joined Turing’s hut, Hut 8, and the effort to smash naval Enigma. He was to become head of crib subsection, making a special study of phrases and subjects likely to form a part of encrypted texts, such as weather conditions and the locations of Allied attacks.

  And the debutantes in their pearls were proving their worth in the cross-referencing card index, which had been steadily growing and growing. Thanks to their painstaking and unimaginably tedious labors, the index was so minutely detailed that the codebreakers could now tell, for example, when Admiral Dönitz was communicating with a captain who was a personal friend, because of the appearance of the name of that captain’s wife.

  The card index was equally formidable for Bletchley’s Air Section. “My recollection,” said veteran Hugh Skillen, “is of many thousands of cards in shoe boxes along both sides of a long hut. When a new word came up in the message you were translating—a neologism, new type of jet fuel, or machine part—you looked for it and if it was not there, the indexer put it in with a reference time and a date stamp.”9

  After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941—the event that finally brought America into the war—Colonel Tiltman was determined that Bletchley’s codebreakers should be trying everything to master the Japanese codes. Immediately, however, he faced twin hurdles: in 1942, there were very few people in Britain familiar with Japanese, and nor is it an easy language to learn.

  Tiltman himself was a partial exception. By this stage, he had already taught himself some Japanese to get a feel for it, and to gauge the possibilities of new young recruits being able to master it sufficiently in order to handle encrypted messages. The colonel was an optimist. The call went out to Cambridge and Oxford for classics scholars who would by now be in some other part of the military structure. Sixth-forms with pupils about to sit for Oxbridge were also contacted.

  “I realized that this is EXACTLY what I wanted to do,” wrote veteran Hugh Denham. Invited for an interview with Colonel Tiltman and others, he was asked: “Do you have any religious scruples about reading other people’s correspondence?”10 What followed was an exhausting and intensive six-month course in Japanese, taught at the Gas Company in Bedford, and defying the conventional assumption that it took at least two years to grasp a working knowledge of the language. There wasn’t the scope, wrote Michael Loewe with nice understatement, “for much attention to the niceties of Japanese history or culture.”11

  A short introduction to codebreaking followed. But in the early days, there was, understandably, a lot of frustration; the intercepts they were working on were old. Moreover, “none of the thousand or so characters that we had learned were there on the [message] page before us,” commented Maurice Wiles, another Classics scholar.12 Michael Loewe talked of the “long weary hours” that would be spent simply indexing the code-groups that they had managed to identify.

  And there were not many people in the section—either codebreakers or clerical staff—to help with what must have been unbelievably complex filing needs. “At Bletchley Park, we were overawed by the presence of those whom we saw as experienced professionals,” wrote Michael Loewe. “The tall and lanky figure of Hugh Foss seemed to look down from a great height on the raw recruits assembled in his office.”13

  Nonetheless, “we got there in the end,” said Maurice Wiles. “Fortunately it was not the most difficult of codes, but it took time for us to figure out what was going on and how to tackle the problems it posed.” In other words, a magnificently insouciant response to a problem that most of us would not begin to know how to solve.

  Work on the Japanese codes also threw up an interesting rivalry with
Bletchley’s Washington counterparts, who were thought to outnumber the British staff by ten to one. Those at Bletchley found that the prospect of stealing of a march on the Americans, who were studying the same messages, offered a powerful incentive for getting codes cracked as quickly as possible. If a transmission came through from the United States with the solution to one such problem, the mood within the Bletchley section deflated accordingly. This rivalry with Washington carries echoes of America’s anger and frustration with the British—at least at the political and diplomatic level—for not sharing the Enigma secret in the early years of the war.

  Even more irksome were the occasions when they found that they had spent many of those “long weary hours” simply duplicating work that the Americans had been studying simultaneously. Michael Loewe said of the Japanese section of Bletchley that it was “the Cinderella” of BP, “where the main effort was understandably directed to German and Italian problems,” and in the midst of which its own efforts were not accorded anything like the same sense of paramount urgency.

  For some, like Hugh Denham and Wren Jean Valentine, the Japanese work would take them all the way out to Colombo, in what was then Ceylon, an extraordinarily exotic contrast to Bletchley, with its “woven palm-leaf cabins,” the “phosphorescent sea” and the “snakes in the filing cabinet,” as Denham recalled. The work of this small, concentrated team would mostly track Japanese activity in the Indian Ocean.

  “One thing to record,” Denham wrote, “is the priceless sense of community that formed. We were in our teens or twenties, thrown together, Wrens, civilians, and officers, working to a common purpose, sharing unusual experiences.”14

  Jean Valentine’s spell as a Wren based at Adstock and working at Bletchley came to a startling end in 1944. One day, as she says: “A notice went up on the wall saying, ‘The following are required to go overseas.’” Her name was among the “following.” For a nineteen-year-old girl who had never before left Britain, the notion of traveling across the world—U-boats or no U-boats—was extraordinarily daunting.

  “We went out into the Atlantic, down, and then through the Straits of Gibraltar, and eventually dashed across the Red Sea, and then across to Bombay,” says Jean. “We were in Bombay for a week, then got a dirty old tramp steamer—which had been condemned before the war—and that took us from Bombay to Colombo.”

  Upon arrival in her little concrete hut in Colombo, Jean found that the work was rather more congenial than simply tweezering the inner workings of a giant bombe. “We were breaking the Japanese meteorological code,” she says. “So I didn’t need to speak Japanese. It was all figures.” After the privations of Britain—the constant shortages, the rationing—this exotic new billet proved surprisingly pleasant. The ease with which this girl from Perthshire adapted to her new life tells us something about the last years of the British Empire, when even the remotest corners of the world had a sort of instant familiarity and comfort—as long as one made the correct introductions and got to know the right sort of people.

  “I was there fifteen months,” says Jean. “I left Britain in the middle of the blackout, with all that severe rationing. I got to Colombo and there was no blackout.” And, by pleasing coincidence, a family connection enabled Jean to settle in a little further. Her cousin’s fiancée, who had visited Ceylon as a member of a ladies’ golfing team, had told her, “If you should find yourself anywhere near Ceylon, I’ve got a business card for this tea planter, do use it…”

  Jean contacted the man, “And subsequently he invited us up to his beautiful tea-planter’s house, four thousand feet up. It was a different life. Here was a man sitting in his beautiful bungalow with bluegrass that he’d imported from Kentucky before the war. A bell at the end of the table. When anybody laid down their knife, he quietly rang and servants would come.”

  Back in Britain, despite the dreadful setback of the even more complex naval Enigma, the Battle of the Atlantic was by no means over. However intractable the new “Shark” U-boat key, Hut 8 began after a while to make headway with “Dolphin,” the codes that related to German ships. This was illustrated vividly in March 1942, when the formidable German battleship Tirpitz was stalking an Arctic convoy bound for Russia. “Tirpitz was the big bad wolf of the war in home waters,” wrote naval historian John Winton. “All by herself she constituted a ‘fleet in being’ and, while she still floated, she remained a potential threat…the mere knowledge of her presence lying up in some northern fastness cast a long shadow over the convoys.”15 Thanks to the almost instantaneous decrypts that Bletchley provided—the translated messages instantly being transmitted to the Admiralty—the convoy was able to take evasive action from both the Tirpitz and the U-boat wolf packs.

  However, an attack on the Tirpitz itself came to nothing. A few months later, and that “long shadow” was hanging over convoy PQ17, which consisted of thirty ships, sailing through the wind and the ice of the northern seas. The Tirpitz, and other enemy ships, started hunting them down; again, the codebreakers at Bletchley worked at terrific speed, and the decrypted messages were passed to Admiralty. This time, however, the messages were misunderstood.

  The Admiralty gave the order for the convoy to be dispersed; back at the Park, Hut 4 liaison officer Harry Hinsley tried to persuade the Admiralty that the convoy should not disperse and should instead sail back toward the home fleet. The Admiralty would not listen.

  Twenty-four Allied ships were sunk—some from the air and some by U-boats. This was no failure of Bletchley; rather, it was a failure of those who gave orders on the basis of the intelligence that they received.

  Yet in spite of such catastrophes, and the anguish of the 1942 code blackout, Bletchley could still console itself in one small sense, according to cryptographer Edward Thomas. “The evasive routing of convoys made possible by Hut 8’s [original] breaking of the Naval Enigma in the spring of 1941,” he wrote, “had, according to some historians, spared some 300 merchant ships and so provided a cushion against the heavy losses to come.”16 Despite the blackout, he noted, this earlier work of Bletchley Park meant that Dönitz’s new offensive came to very little, and that losses were in decline.

  And in the spring of 1942, Hut 3 made significant inroads into the Luftwaffe codes. As a result, better defensive measures could be taken as 1,000 bomber raids were carried out, meaning that the RAF could carry out more daring raids while keeping the loss of aircraft to a minimum. Although many of these raids were ineffective and inaccurate when it came to hitting serious industrial targets, they nevertheless had a powerful propaganda effect, especially among the British. The German raid on Coventry had hardened British public attitudes toward retaliation. After the destruction of the London Blitz—and horrific assaults such as that on Coventry—the RAF were at last seen to be giving it back.

  Despite its disastrous start, 1942 eventually proved to be the year that Churchill was able to describe as “the end of the beginning.” There was the key triumph of El-Alamein, possibly the most important British battle in the war: after months of morale-corroding setbacks in North Africa, General Montgomery’s armies at last pushed behind German lines, forcing Rommel’s Axis forces into a long retreat. “By the summer of 1942,” recalled Y Service signals Intelligence operative Aileen Clayton, who by that stage was based in Malta, “there can have been little Enigma traffic between the German forces in Africa and their masters back in Berlin and Italy that we did not intercept, and now that the cryptographers at Bletchley were so quickly decoding the messages, it was almost like being a member of Rommel’s staff.”17

  The results were spectacular. Thanks to Bletchley, Montgomery had access to an unprecedented amount of information about his enemy’s army; about numbers, about armaments, about the supply situations. “Alamein was marvelous,” recalled one veteran, “because you had these desperate messages from Rommel saying, ‘Panzer Army is exhausted, we’ve only enough petrol for 50 kilometers, ammunition is contemptible,’ and so on.”

  We do
see here some of the ambiguity felt by the British military toward the intelligence that Bletchley Park was providing—there is a suggestion that General Montgomery did not wholly trust what he was being told. “We told Monty over and over again how few tanks Rommel had got,” recalled Bletchley Park veteran and historian Ralph Bennett. “So Monty could have wiped Rommel off the face of the earth. Why he didn’t, I simply do not know.”18 Nevertheless, throughout General Montgomery’s attack on the Axis forces on October 23, 1942, and the subsequent twelve-day battle, he was given a stream of decrypt information concerning German troop and weapon positions. And as Montgomery launched his second attack, it was Enigma decrypts that gave him crucial insight into the crumbling state of the German and Italian forces.

  Meanwhile, on the eastern front, the Russians were engaged in the extraordinarily bitter and prolonged struggle of which Stalingrad became both the focus and the symbol. The turning point arrived after many grueling months in which the Germans had been convinced that the Russians would simply collapse under the weight of the German attack. Stalin himself was receiving information from Churchill “based on intelligence sources” concerning the state of the German forces and their possible next moves. As the Germans eventually began their retreat, Churchill provided more small gobbets of such information, while keeping the true source carefully concealed.

  The codebreakers still had little idea of how their work was being utilized. As Oliver Lawn recalls: “I was concerned with the codebreaking and that was it. When the code had been broken, the decoded message was passed through to the Intelligence people who used the information—or decided whether to use it. The content of messages was of no concern to me at all. I knew enough German to get an idea of what it was all about. But I had no idea of the context. And it wasn’t my business. I could read the messages but they were so much in telegraphese—jargon—that they would mean nothing.”