Bletchley Park
Author: Drew Curry August 9, 2016 Prof. David Meyers Media History and Theory
Introduction We can all agree that the events leading up to and during World War 2 were terrible. However, there is a english proverb that says “Necessity is the mother on invention� and the need and drive for innovation was potentially never greater in modern history than it was in World War 2. While inventions during this time took the form of both incredible and terrifying, something that has come to define our lives as we know it was born out of the necessity to break German codes and save lives. The work done at the secret facility at Bletchley Park in the United Kingdom saved thousands of lives and played a major part in the victory for the Allies. In this report I will explore the role Bletchley Park played in the role and how it innovations made there lead to modern computing which is considered essential to everyday life in our society today.
Bletchley Park is located in Buckinghamshire, England at the crossroads of trains that ran between London, Cambridge, and Oxford which made it the perfect place for bringing in and recruiting academics to the war effort.
Top: Map of area around Bletchley Right: Map of the Bletchley Park facility
The site was located, and surveyed under the guise of gathering of friends called “Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party” in August 1938. This “Party” was made up of MI6 agents who were seeking a location away from London to relocate the Government Code and Cypher School or GC&CS for short. GC&CS had been established after the first World War and continued to develop as part of MI6 for two decades until put into action at the outset of the second World War. While the property was purchased at the above mentioned “Party” it was not fully utilized until England entered the war in September 1939.
A early version of ENIGMA used military ground forces.
The bane of the Ally codebreakers during the war was the German cypher machine known as ENIGMA. It was used by all three branches of the German military to send reports and tactics to each other, as well as orders from commanding officers, sometime even Hitler himself. Without digging into the technical aspects too much, it operated with mechanical rotors and electrical circuits and could generate 159,000,000,000,000,000,000 different code combinations. The Germans even developed a more complicated version of the machine to be used exclusively by their Navy which could pump out even more code combinations. Polish intelligence had figured out how to read the encrypted messages in 1939 before the war began and shared that knowledge with France and Great Britain. Months later the Nazi regime invaded Poland and the second world war began.
ENIGMA
A 3 rotor version of ENIGMA used mainly by the German Navy.
When the war started so many people were relocated to the manor house at Bletchley Park was overrun with people. Therefore they started locating teams of codebreakers outside of the main house on the property and into wooden buildings around the property affectionately known as huts. The buildings were little more than walls, doors and windows with a few desk and chairs, some were even formally the barns and stables that had been repurposed. Huts worked together in pairs, with huts 4 and 8 working together to break the ENIGMA code.
Alan Turing was assigned to the team working in Hut 8. Alan Turing is considered to be the other of modern computing. But who is he, what did he do to earn this title, and what does this have to do with Bletchley Park? Turing began to focus on breaking codes and cryptology when he arrived at Princeton in 1936 to complete his doctorate. He spent most of his time in the physics machine lab building a machine that turned letters into binary numbers which he used to create numerically complex codes that were almost impossible to decrypt.
Alan Turing
Alan Turing during his time at Cambridge.
Benedict Cumberbatch playing Alan Turing in the 2014 movie “The Imitation Game�
Alan felt the call of patriotism to return to his native country of the United Kingdom to help them crack German codes with the threat of war looming. In 1938 Turing joined the GC&CS as the first mathematician, but his work and success prompted them to hire several more over the next year. Alan moved with the rest of GC&CS to Bletchley Park 1939 which brings us back to his work breaking the ENIGMA code.
The Bombe One of the things that made it so hard to break the ENIGMA code other than the countless number of permutations it could create is the fact that the Germans changed the code make up every night at midnight. Turing and his team set to work on a sophisticated machine that could break the code and affectionately dubbed it “the bombe.” “The bombe” was an electromechanical device with relay switches and rotors that would rotate to calculate the permutations of the code to try and break them. It took a while but they were eventually successful, but there was still one problem, it took almost the entire day to break the code, which meant by the time they broke the code, translated the message, and acquired any actionable intelligence in the messages, the code had changed and plans had most likely changed.
Top Left: Inside one of The Bombe Bottom Left: Outside of The Bombe
A punch card used in the Bombe machine
So what was it that sunk the code for good? The weather. Once we started to decipher some of the Axis messages we started to realize that everyday, around the same time in the morning, they would send out a weather report for the day to their ships. The team started to focus on what they believed to be this report everyday, searching for terms that are commonly used in these reports. This was the key to breaking ENIGMA and “the bombe” was so successful that by the end of the war there were 200 in use breaking codes. While considered an incredible machine it did not represent a notable advance in computer technology, but the machine developed at Bletchley Park after “the bombe” would.
Colossus Left: Max Newman Right: Colossus
A team located in Hut 11 and lead by Max Newman was charged with breaking messages sent from German high command including Hitler himself on on and electronic digital machine. Newman and his engineering parter Tommy Flowers developed a machine that came to be known as Colossus. Even though Alan Turing wasn’t directly responsible for this machine it was his statistical approach called “Turingery” that allowed the Colossus to break the German codes. Flowers had worked with Turing to build “the bombe” and so he introduced him to Newman for input on their project. What set Colossus apart were it’s internal electronics memory, and it’s capability for conditional branching of task. While Colossus was built for the specific task of code breaking it is considered the first fully digital and electronic computer. It is Turing’s consulting and statistical approach on Colossus and his construction of “the bombe” along with his academic work on the subject that earns him the title of “The Father of Modern Computing.”
Conclusion The work done at Bletchley Park was essential to the Allied war effort. There are many who consider the work done at Bletchley Park to have shortened World War 2 by almost 2 years and saved countless number of lives. D-Day would may not have been possible and almost for sure not successful if not for the intel obtained from the code breaking machines at Bletchley Park. As the birthplace of the world’s first semi-programmable electronic computer and their incredible contribution to the Allied war effort Bletchley Park’s place is firmly cemented in not only technological history but also world history.