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Near London, you can visit the place where Allied Codebreakers of World War II (WW II) carried on secretive, vital work. It’s an unassuming spot outside of the city called Bletchley Park, a Victorian mansion and its grounds and outbuildings. The house, on its way to ruin, was used by the Allies in WWII. Some of the greatest secrets of the war were uncovered there by brilliant codebreakers, recruited to work in huts that were hastily built on the property. The whole operation remained top secret through the war, and those who worked there kept their wartime occupation a mystery for decades.
Bletchley Park has been open to the public for about 20 years. You can tour the mansion, the grounds and some of the huts that have been restored. More than 250,000 people visit yearly. You can learn how German messages were decoded using Enigma machines and elaborate precursors to computers called “bombes.” Two men headed the development of these machines: Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman.
All the “bombes” were destroyed after the war, but an organization raised funds to rebuild one from existing plans. You can see one in a movie about Bletchley Park called “The Imitation Game.”
Demonstrations at Bletchley Park give an idea about the complexity and noise of these computers. Be sure to visit Hut 11A, which was home to one of the “bombes”. An excellent and detailed exhibition explains the machines role in the Allies’ success. There are original blueprints for the complicated mechanism along with decrypted Nazi messages. The hut itself is nothing more than functional. It’s clear that day-to-day life at Bletchley was not glamorous.
The steps before the final decoding were complex and done by different teams of people. Enigma messages arrived in Hut 6, then went to Hut 3 for translation and analysis. Most people who worked at Bletchley Park knew only their small part of the operation, which helped maintain the mission’s secrecy. Everyone knew that if the Germans discovered that their Enigma machines were being decoded, their mission would fail.
More than one million German Air Force and Army messages were decoded at Bletchley Park. One example of the impact these decoded messages had was the intelligence uncovered about German plans before the battle of El Alamein in 1942 . The Allied victory in this Egyptian campaign was one of the turning points of the war.
The codebreakers working at Bletchley Park held their secrets for decades after the war ended. When visiting, a tour guide mentioned that former employees have visited the historic place, but they would still keep all details to themselves.
