West London unscramble an Enigma
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West London unscramble an Enigma.
On Sunday 7th April 13 Howlers (blown along by storm Kathleen) enjoyed an absorbing day at Bletchley Park.
Here, 80 years ago, Alan Turing was part of a team tasked with breaking the codes and ciphers of the German Enigma machine.
The Enigma Machine
An Enigma machine is a famous encryption machine used by the Germans during WWII to transmit coded messages. An Enigma machine allows for billions and billions of ways to encode a message, making it incredibly difficult for other nations to crack German codes during the war — for a time the code seemed unbreakable.
Alan Turing and other researchers exploited a few weaknesses in the implementation of the Enigma code and gained access to German codebooks, and this allowed them to design a machine called a Bombe machine, which helped to crack the most challenging versions of Enigma.
Some historians believe that the cracking of Enigma was the single most important victory by the Allied powers during WWII. Using information that they decoded from the Germans, the Allies were able to prevent many attacks. However, to avoid Nazi suspicion that they had insight to German communications, the Allies had to allow some attacks to be carried out despite the fact that they had the knowledge to stop them.
The staff at Bletchley swelled from around 180 in 1939 to over 9000 in 1945.
The majority of equipment was run by women
The 'Bombe' developed with Polish collaboration
And the Colossus.
With plenty of hands-on exhibits and opportunities to try out code breaking exercises, the day was both awe-inspiring and a humbling experience.
75% of those involved in the codebreaking were women. Their invaluable work saved thousands of lives and is reckoned to have shortened the war by 2-4 years.
After the war the Bletchley Park became GCHQ and moved first to Eastcote in London, then to its present home in Cheltenham
GC&CS - The Government Code and Cypher School
High importance was given to staff morale and well-being
With ticket entry being valid for return visits for a whole year, it made for a brilliant venue for a Club run - maybe even a National Event/Run in the summer!
find out more at bletchleypark.org.uk
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