‘I was longing to be asked, “Where were you when you were adrift?” so that I could say, “Clinging to a buoy, ma’am.” It would have been so wonderful, but I never got the chance unfortunately.’
Once the settings and rotation of the first row of Lorenz wheels were worked out in the Newmanry, the Testery took over, breaking the messages by hand using pencil and paper. Once they had cracked them and knew the complete settings of the Tunny machine, they were passed through to Room 27, where ATS operators used teleprinters linked to Tunny ‘emulators’. The ATS staff pressed buttons to enter the settings for each of the Tunny wheels on the emulator and then typed out the encoded message on the teleprinter. If the settings had been worked out properly and the message typed in correctly, German text printed out.
Helen Pollard, one of the ATS teleprinter operators, had been working as a typist in Fleet Street (then the base for all Britain’s major newspapers) when war broke out and she was called up. She worked as an intercept operator in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, during the early years of the war but in the summer of 1942 was picked out for Bletchley and sent to work for Major Ralph Tester in the Testery, ending up in Room 27, working the teleprinters and Tunny emulators.
‘Even without knowing the language it was easy to recognise German, and just as easy to see that gibberish was coming out when something went wrong. This happened when a letter was missed out, or one was typed that wasn’t there. The gentle clack of the machines as they operated became a background to our working lives. The work never got tedious. There was something about the atmosphere at Bletchley Park that generated an all-pervading excitement.’
Helen fell in love and got married in August 1943 to a young airman, but he was killed ten weeks later. ‘The whole section grieved for me. Peter Hilton, a very sweet man, brought me the best and clearest message he could find, which would give me no trouble to type. It was his way of bringing me comfort.’
The run-up to D-Day in the Newmanry was dominated by the need to get ready for the arrival of a new improved Colossus and to hone their skills so that every task was carried out as swiftly and efficiently as possible. The intelligence the codebreakers in the Testery were producing was sent out via Hut 3, like the reports from the German army and air force Enigma messages. Everyone at Bletchley knew that once the invasion of Europe began, the slightest delay in getting the intelligence to the right people could result in the loss of lives. But the social life of the Wrens was dominated by what Marigold and her colleagues saw as the section’s ‘great romance’.
Odette Murray, the daughter of a Surrey doctor, had worked in the Home Ambulance Service throughout the Blitz, a harrowing but rewarding task. But after having to have her tonsils removed she was told she shouldn’t return to working on the ambulances, so she joined the Wrens. Odette was very keen on the idea of being a Wren and travelling to exotic places, so she was extremely disappointed to be sent to Bletchley.
‘I wanted to be a boat’s crew, I wanted to be going out to places like Colombo. I didn’t want to be stuck in the Midlands at all. We turned up at Bletchley Park where we were taught to be touch-typists, still not knowing what it was all about, and eventually got into the Newmanry, it was just starting up. I think at the beginning it was just Max.’
When Odette arrived Mr Newman was working in Hut 11, while the Testery was in the mansion, but in November 1943, the two ‘Tunny’ sections moved into the newly built Block F and a number of other codebreakers joined the Newmanry, including Shaun Wylie, who at thirty was now a veteran and one of the older, more senior, men in the section.
Odette was not only one of the first Wrens to arrive in the Newmanry, at twenty-five she was slightly older than the other girls and as a result was put in charge of one of the watches; Shaun was her duty officer, the codebreaker who oversaw their work.
‘He was my boss. I was head of a watch and I was given instructions by Shaun and, still not having the remotest idea what I was doing, I worked with a slide rule, produced a lot of figures and gave it on to the next person, who gave it on to the next person and eventually it was run on a tape on Colossus. But we really didn’t know what it was about.’
Odette also couldn’t understand the younger Wrens’ fascination with Shaun. They were swooning over him, telling her how wonderful he was all the time. As if she cared.
‘The other Wrens thought he was absolutely wonderful: “Oh, Mr Wylie this, oh, Mr Wylie that.” I couldn’t see what they saw in him. I didn’t think much of him. However, he thought something of me.’
They began going out, spending a lot of time walking in the grounds of Woburn Abbey. Shaun would cycle down there on their days off to meet Odette.
‘The abbey is a huge, imposing building. There’s an enormous great triangular pediment right up at the very, very top, very high up, and I used to go leaping across two-foot, three-foot chasms so that I could sit on the top of this to watch Shaun on his bicycle coming up the drive. It was one hell of a climb.’
The other regular place where they would do their ‘courting’ was a pub, the Bedford Arms.
‘The wonderful walks we had in Woburn Park. Most of our courting was in Woburn Park and the Bedford Arms, where there was an old woman who was . . . I suppose you would call her a waitress. We used to call her droopy drawers. You could always see her pants hanging down under her dress.’
Despite being the watch leader, Odette had no more idea what she was doing in technical terms than Marigold, Jean or Maggie.
‘I knew we were getting something out but I didn’t really know what the something was. When Shaun tried to explain to me exactly what my contribution had been in a successful thing, I just didn’t understand. I’m not a mathematician. I’m not a linguist. I’m just somebody who’s given instructions and does little funny calculations with a slide rule, and bingo. A few days later a smiling Shaun comes in. I don’t know what my contribution is but OK, satisfactory.’
They were married in the early spring of 1944 ahead of the ban on travel introduced for D-Day, but the Wren officers were unhappy that Odette and Shaun would be working together and tried to get him moved out of the Newmanry. Eventually, a compromise was agreed whereby he was never allowed to supervise Odette’s watch. They were billeted together in the Swan Hotel in Woburn Sands, which also didn’t go down well with the Wren officers.
‘It was a blasted nuisance. I rather think that they’d expected me back at Woburn, I know I was given a real bottle. I think I slightly blotted my copybook by losing my leave pass when we had been on our honeymoon, turned up twenty-four hours late or something.’
The extent of the intelligence provided by the teleprinter links broken with the help of Colossus and the Wrens was extraordinary. The Jellyfish teleprinter link between von Rundstedt’s headquarters near Paris and Berlin carried all the conversations between the German commander in France and Hitler, including von Rundstedt’s plans for how to defend against the impending Allied invasion, and which plans Hitler had ordered him to change, often leaving weak points that could be exploited by Allied commanders. Jellyfish also gave extensive details of the German defensive positions and the strengths and capabilities of the 1.4 million German troops waiting for the invasion. Most importantly of all, it confirmed that Hitler himself had been completely fooled by the Double Cross operation and was convinced that the Allies’ main invasion force would come ashore around Calais rather than in Normandy.
On the morning of 6 June 1944, as Allied forces came ashore in Normandy, the bosses at Bletchley Park were very well aware that some of the young men working there would be wondering whether they shouldn’t be fighting alongside their friends and relatives, who were now thrust into the thick of battle. Eric Jones, the head of Hut 3, told his staff that the work Bletchley was doing might not be so dangerous but it was just as important to the war effort. There was ‘no back-stage organisation that has done more for past Allied operations and Allied plans for this assault; and none that can contribute more to the de
velopment of the invasion once the bloody battles for the beaches have been won’.
The extraordinary intelligence produced by the Tunny and Enigma sections ahead of D-Day was unprecedented in its scale, saving countless Allied lives. But initially, the panicky reaction of some of the German forces caused problems in Hut 6, because the Germans were so anxious to report the invasion that they forgot to enter the new day’s keys on their Enigma machines. Pamela Draughn came into the Duddery at nine o’clock that morning completely unaware that the invasion had begun.
‘I didn’t know. I hadn’t heard the news before I went into the office and when I got there the night shift was standing there looking absolutely desperate. Wire baskets everywhere full of paper which hadn’t decoded.’
The Machine Room had spent most of the night unsure which of the settings the Germans were using was correct, with large numbers of Enigma messages proving impossible to decode. They’d all been sent to the Duddery, where the night shift had become completely overwhelmed.
‘At first I really wanted to laugh because it was quite obvious the Germans had got into a complete panic. Obviously the minute they saw the invasion they’d all started reporting it to one another and they’d completely forgotten that they had to change the code. It was absolutely frantic but we could decode them all and eventually we got them all sorted out.’
One of the messages from that night so exemplified the German response and seemed to Pamela to be so poetic that it stuck in her head.
‘It said: “We are about to retreat. We can no longer face up to the von den immer wieder von allen Seiten anfliessenden Feind.” It means we’re fleeing from the from all sides on-flowing enemy!’
From that point onwards, the codebreakers really did feel that they were part of the battle, in much the same way as they had during the North African campaign, and in the same way that Hut 4 and Hut 8 had during the Battle of the Atlantic. Everything was urgent. Everything was important. No one could afford to slacken off. Pamela and her colleagues knew there were too many people, too many lives, depending on them.
‘The mood in the hut was always the same. After the invasion it all seemed very much more urgent in a way, as you can imagine. I enjoyed it immensely. You really felt all the time that you were doing something worthwhile.’
Susan Wenham was one of the new female codebreakers working in the Machine Room. She was quite old at thirty-two, having gone to university late following the death of her mother, and was one of the young women recruited into Hut 6 by Stuart Milner-Barry from Newnham College, Cambridge. She’d started out in the Registry as a ‘Blister’ and was one of the women transferred to the all-female Machine Room in 1942 in time for the move into Block D, which was far from a major improvement in terms of working conditions.
‘Hut 6 was not luxurious; the rooms might not be left when the cleaners came to sweep and the red dust got into our noses and throats; Bovril from the urn was revolting and put me off it forever. Meals in the canteen were adequate if unexciting and there was always salad and, unfailingly, beetroot in small cubes.’
As the Allies began building up a massive foothold in northern France, Hitler became frustrated with the inability of his commanders to find a way to hold back the US and British advance. The Newmanry received a teleprinter message from Hitler ordering his commanders to strike north to the Channel to cut the Allied advance in two and turn the tables on them. It was extraordinarily risky, if not foolhardy, and would have been highly unlikely to succeed even if Bletchley had not been reading Hitler’s teleprinter conversations with his generals. Given that Allied commanders were fully aware of the plans, it had no chance of success. But the German generals had no choice but to obey Hitler. Any other route would have been treason and, effectively, suicide. They pressed forward into the Falaise Gap, twenty-five miles south of Caen, and found themselves caught between the advancing US forces and the British and Canadian forces moving in from the north.
Susan was on duty in the Machine Room and in ‘the most exciting night’ she had at Bletchley found herself working on a long message giving the German plans to try to get out of the Allied trap.
‘It was at the time of the Falaise Gap and the Germans were making plans to make their last terrific push to try and get out of the pincer they were in. I was on the night shift and the day shift had had an enormous message.’
The long German Enigma messages had to be sent in sections in an unsuccessful attempt to make it harder to break. The sections were known as Teile, the German word for ‘parts’.
‘It was a ten-Teile message, a huge message, and they had managed to break it during the day and it was to say how the Germans were planning to get out of this impasse, and six of the Teile came through to us.’
The German generals had realised that they had no chance of obeying Hitler’s orders and so rather than lose 300,000 men they decided to withdraw.
Then, during Susan’s shift, another six-part message came through in a different code. When the Registry checked it, each part had the same number of groups as in the earlier message that had been broken, so they knew it was exactly the same message in another Enigma army code that hadn’t been read before but could now be broken.
‘During the night, a very obvious re-encodement of the earlier message came in. We could see that it was a word-for-word re-encodement. So we let Hut 3 know and got all the Bombes cleared. We worked like mad on this thing, creating menus. It was a very tiring business. By morning it was all put through and finished. So that was a very exciting night.’
As the Allied forces moved across France, Belgium and Holland into Germany, more and even better Colossus computers were delivered to Bletchley until in the end there were ten in all. With the German troops largely on the retreat, the Enigma messages became less important. It was the Tunny messages which were producing by far the best intelligence, revealing the increasingly desperate responses of Hitler and his generals. Helen recalled that she and the other girls in the Testery found themselves working nonstop.
‘The last stages of the war were hectic. The traffic became almost more than we could cope with. Sometimes, having staggered off duty and dropped exhausted into bed, we were aroused from deep sleep a couple of hours later to return to the Testery and carry on.’
Although Helen had lost her husband in the most tragic of circumstances there was no option for the young widow but to go back to work and get on with life.
‘I and many of my friends in the Testery made the most of life. There were some passionate romances. We lived totally in the present, greedy for life and with no thought for the future. We didn’t know if there would be a future.’
On days off and even between shifts they would take the train to London. Sometimes, they went to a film in the morning, a theatre matinee in the evening and followed that with dinner and dancing.
‘Catching the last train back to Bletchley, we arrived just in time to change into uniform and report for duty, to relieve the girls who had been bashing away at the machines all evening. It was a stimulating, exhausting life.’
On 30 April 1945, with German resistance almost over and Russian troops closing in on his bunker in Berlin, Hitler committed suicide. Then, in the early hours of 7 May 1945, Hut 6 received a message they didn’t need to decode. It was from Grand Admiral Dönitz, Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy and Hitler’s successor, saying that Germany had surrendered unconditionally. The message was passed to Hut 3, which reported it immediately to London. The contents were known throughout both Hut 6 and Hut 3 almost immediately but none of them said a word to anyone outside their hut. That was the way it was at Bletchley. The news remained a secret even within the Park until it was broadcast later that day on the BBC.
9
The JappyWaaf
Mary Wisbey’s recruitment to Bletchley Park wasn’t just like something out of a spy novel. It was the real thing. She’d been due to take up a place at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, but to the dismay of her father,
a Northamptonshire farmer, she insisted on joining the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. What was the point of going to university when the country was at war? Everyone else was doing something; she should be doing something too. Her father disagreed. He’d served in the First World War, been taken prisoner by the Germans. He knew the war wouldn’t end quickly. He wanted Mary to take up the place at Oxford now. She could always join the WAAFs later once she’d got her degree.
But Mary wasn’t to be dissuaded. Initially too young to join up, she worked in a canteen for wounded servicemen in the morning and helped the vicar organise the village’s air-raid protection in the afternoon until she reached that all-important age of seventeen and a half and was old enough to join the WAAFs.
‘We had fifteen days’ training at Innsworth, near Gloucester, and we weren’t in uniform.’ The Women’s Auxiliary Air Force had only just been set up and they hadn’t yet got enough equipment or uniforms. ‘After the tenth or eleventh day we got our uniforms. I had no idea at all what I was going to do, I had no qualifications at all; I just was hell-bent on being a WAAF.’
After training and a stint in Coastal Command, Mary was transferred to a recruitment post and sent to Downing College, Cambridge, to study ‘the psychology of the interview’ under Professor Frederic Bartlett, then one of the world leaders in the field of cognitive psychology, the science of how humans think.
‘I rather imagine that already I’d been earmarked for some sort of intelligence work and I think it was Professor Bartlett who was responsible for what followed.’
Mary was called back for a second course in psychology and then given an intriguing set of orders. She was told to go to H. Sichel’s, a wine merchants based in Soho, and say a coded phrase to one of the assistants behind the counter.
‘I said what I had to say. I was taken to the back of the shop and a button was pressed – a door opened up and closed behind me and I was in a completely different world.’
The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories Page 18
