Mr Churchill's Big Secret
Bletchley Park Mansion, Buckinghamshire

Throughout WW2 Bletchley Park Mansion, Buckinghamshire served as HMG Code and Cypher School. The staff at Bletchley came from a variety of backgrounds. There were experienced code breakers, secret service officers, mathematicians, scientists, crossword experts, chess Grand Masters, Post Office engineers, students, actresses and even astrologers and debutants.

The Bletchley Girls

             Breaking Hitler's Codes

During WW2 over 10,000 people recruited to work at Bletchley Park, eighty percent were women. When the "Bletchley Boffins" worked out a mathematical sequence to crack a coded message. It was left to the Bletchley girls to feed that sequence, accurately, into the "bombe" (analyzing machine) seen here on the right.  Another 5,000 girls were employed at the many wireless stations ("Y" Stations) set up to intercept Nazi radio traffic... In 1941, Scarborough's Sandybed "Y" Station intercepted signals from the battleship Bismarck. This enabled the code breakers to calculate its position and British war ships then attacked. Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent a personal message of thanks to the Sandybed staff for their contribution to sinking the Bismarck.
St. Augustine's Roman Catholic School now stands on the Sandybed ”Y” Station site.

The Bismarck

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Colossus

The world's first electronic computer. Colossus was built by a team led by the Post Office Engineer, Sir Tommy Flowers - it's inventor. Her Majesties Official Secrets Act kept it's existence secret until the 1970's.

 

The world's first electronic computer Colossus Mk 1 was built using 1,400 electronic valves.

Hitler's Enigma encrypted messages were fed through Colossus on "punch tape" that moved at 30 mph.

 

In March 1944, Bletchley placed orders for the Colossus Mk II with 2,400 electronic valves. It arrived on site on May 31 and was operational a few days later. Just in time for the start of the Normandy Landings (June 6).

 

For more than thirty-years the honour of being the world’s first electronic computer was wrongly attributed to the American built Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer ("ENIAC").
In the 1970's the government began declassifying and releasing some of the war time papers about Colossus.
In the light of this new information historians were forced to agree the British built Colossus Mk 1 was in fact the world’s first electronic computer.

Soon after taking power Mr Churchill had "wireless" listening stations (known as "Y" Stations) set-up all over Britain.

 

 

 

Some of the thousands of "Y" Station girls who intercepted German radio traffic for Bletchley Park (Station X) to analyse.

 

 

 

 

Pigeon-Parachute now on display
at Bletchley Park

When radio traffic of any kind may have betrayed the presence of a British agent, in certain parts of occupied France, pigeons were parachuted in.
The agent's report would come back to "somewhere in England by pigeon post".

 

The code breakers camp
at Bletchley Park

As Hilter's bombs rained down on London, Bletchley Park, just 50 miles north of the capital, worked round-the-clock.
It was here that Britain's best brains broke the Nazi Enigma codes.
Alan Turin was probably the best mathematician we had in WW2.  Turing's first code breaking "bombe" was up and running in May 1940.
Over 200 "bombes" were in operation by the end of the war. Many believe the code breakers shortened the war. 

 

 

right, Turin's wartime flat in the grounds of Bletchly Park. While working at Bletchley Turing, a talented long-distance runner, occasionally ran the 64 km to London in less than 3 hours.

 

 

Within weeks of arriving at Bletchley Park, Turing had specified an electromechanical machine which could help break the Enigma codes faster than the Polish-designed bomba. With an enhancement suggested by mathematician Gordon Welchman, Alan Turin's "bombe" became one of the primary tools used to attack Enigma-protected message traffic.   

Professor Jack Good, a cryptanalyst who worked with Turing at Bletchley Park, later said: "Turing's most important contribution, I think, was of part of the design of the bombe, the cryptanalytic machine. He had the idea that you could use, in effect, a theorem in logic which sounds to the untrained ear rather absurd; namely that from a contradiction, you can deduce everything."

The bombe searched for possibly correct settings used for an Enigma message (i.e., rotor order, rotor settings, etc.), and used a suitable "crib": a fragment of probable plaintext. For each possible setting of the rotors (which had of the order of 1019 states, or 1022 for the U-boat Enigmas which eventually had four rotors, compared with the usual Enigma variant's three), the bombe performed a chain of logical deductions based on the crib, implemented electrically.
The bombe detected when a contradiction had occurred, and ruled out that setting, moving onto the next.
Most of the possible settings would cause contradictions and be discarded, leaving only a few to be investigated in detail.

Of all the leading code breakers at Bletchley Turing was regarded by many as a genius. He played a leading role in breaking the more complicated Naval Enigma cipher (codenamed Shark) and also established the principles behind the modern computer.
Turing worked from 1952 until his death in 1954 on mathematical biology, his central interest in this field was understanding Fibonacci phyllotaxis, the existence of Fibonacci numbers in plant structures. He used reaction–diffusion equations which are now central to the field of pattern formation.
                         

The Enigma Machine

Enigma Code's

 

In 1915 two Dutch Naval officers had invented a machine to encrypt messages. This encryption tool became one of the most notorious of all time: the Enigma machine. 

Arthur Scherbius, a German businessman, patented the Enigma in 1918 and began selling it commercially to banks and businesses.

The Enigma's place in history was secured in 1924 when the German armed forces began using a specially adapted military version to encrypt their communications. They continued to rely on the machine throughout the Second World War, believing it to be absolutely unbreakable.

The Enigma machine is an electro-mechanical device with a keyboard; a set of rotating disks called rotors arranged adjacently along a spindle; and a stepping mechanism to turn one or more of the rotors with each key press.

How the Enigma machine worked

When a letter was typed on the keyboard, an electric current would pass through the different scrambling elements of the machine.
The movable parts of the machine would change position so that the next time the same letter was pressed, it would be enciphered as different letter. This meant that it wasn't possible to use traditional methods to try and crack the notorious cipher. To make things even more difficult, the Rotors could be set up in many different ways, with each setting producing a unique stream of enciphered letters. Unless you knew the exact settings of the machine, you couldn't decipher the messages.

German Army issue Enigma machines had three rotors that could be taken out and changed about. To complicate the rotor  encryption even further a plug board, with10 cables with which to link up pairs of letters, could be added to give the machine 150 million million - combinations of 10 pairs of 26 letters.  

 

 

 

The plugboard on the front of the machine.
If A were plugged to B then, on typing the letter A, the electric current would follow the path that was normally associated with the letter B, and vice versa.
Therefore, the total number of possible ways in which a standard army-issue Enigma machine could be set up was approximately 158 million million million.
For the relevant maths goto codesandciphers 

By 1940 Mr Churchill had listening stations
(Y Stations) set-up all over Britain. The information they gathered during the Battle of France proved the Germans were resetting their Enigma machines at midnight every night and led to a rapid increase in staff at Bletchley Park.
Enigma machine operators were issued with a Key Sheet every month, which told them how to set up their Enigma machines for every day that month. Key Sheets were extremely closely guarded and were printed in soluble ink. If it ever looked as though a Key Sheet might be captured by the Allies, German soldiers would dip it in water and wash off all the information.
The Germans believed the strength of the Enigma lay in the fact that it was impossible to work out the key from the billions and billions of potential keys every single day. As long as the Allies did not get hold of the key sheet, their communications would remain secure.
Fortunately for the British codebreakers, in the years running up to the war Poland had worked on various techniques for cracking Enigma. Shortly before the German invasion of Poland, they shared their work with their British allies. Poland's government was the first to employ mathematicians as code-breakers, and the mathematicians' logical minds proved to be just what was needed to tackle Enigma. This vital headstart from the Polish, coupled with the unique problem-solving and intuitive thinking skills of Bletchley's recruits, meant that Enigma was cracked in early 1940 a reliable technique for cracking Enigma was established. The British code breakers worked in shifts around the clock for the whole of the war, using paper and pencil as well as newly invented mechanical techniques to work out the particular Enigma machine settings for each and every single day.

Unwittingly, the Germans themselves helped the British to decipher the Enigma. For example:
Messages often enciphered routine information such as weather reports and phrases such as Keinebesondere Ereignisse (Nothing to report). Messages often ended with Heil Hitler!
These lapses provided the codebreakers with clues, called cribs, about how the Enigma machines had been set up on that day. These cribs were essential for breaking the ciphers. For example, without a crib it would still take several months today to decipher an A4 page of ciphertext using a modern PC with trial and error methods.

However, the cribs alone were not enough. The codebreakers at Bletchley Park developed new procedures and algorithms for determining the set-up of the Enigma and also had to develop electronic computing devices to implement these methods.

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A German U-Boat. Their relentless attacks on Allied shipping were only halted through the cracking of the Enigma code,

In order to preserve British security, the breaking of Enigma remained a tightly guarded secret for 30 years. The people who had worked at Bletchley Park were forbidden from talking about what they had done. Over the past 20 years more and more official information has been released about Bletchley but all the records of the actual messages deciphered were destroyed on Mr Churchill's orders days after the war.
The British Government still operates a code breaking department, at "Government Communication Headquarters" in Cheltenham. And to this day they rely on mathematicians for their problem solving abilities and logical thinking: GCHQ boasts the highest concentration of pure mathematicians in the country. Today's secret codes are much more sophisticated than the Enigma cipher and their strength relies on the inability to factorise large numbers, so with today's perceived worries about terrorism, the role of our code breakers is just as vital as during the second world war.

How Scarborough Sank The Bismarck

A branch line of GCHQ Cheltenham operates out of Scarborough old racecourse. Back bench MPs in successive governments have gloriously failed to find out precisely what goes on at Irton Moor, which MI5/6 operatives refer to as "Scarborough".
Irton Moor replaced an earlier naval wireless station at Sandybed Lane in Falsgrove, which is where St. Augustine's Roman Catholic School is now sited. In 1941, the Sandybed station intercepted secret signals between the German battleship Bismarck and its HQ in Berlin. This enabled its position to be calculated and British forces then attacked. Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent a personal message of thanks to the Sandybed staff for their efforts that contributed so greatly towards sinking the Bismarck.

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