Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [120]
I was greeted with news of instructions from the War Office that I was required for special intelligence work and that I was to proceed at the beginning of January to an unspecified ‘course’ at Bedford. I was destined for cryptography at Bletchley Park and work on the messages sent out by the German High Command in Berlin to the various commanders in the field, Rundstedt, Kesselring, Mannstein, Rommel and several others. A.D. Lindsay had been involved and had decided that the traditional role of Masters of Balliol … of placing Balliol men in what they regarded as appropriate jobs outweighed any irritation with my poor philosophy mark. Why he thought I would be a better cryptographer than a philosopher I do not know, but the fact that he did appeared to be decisive.
Those on the Bedford course gave the impression of having been incongruously gathered in from the hedgerows. There was Charles Buckingham, erudite curator from the British Museum who wore a private’s uniform … there was Francis Dashwood of West Wycombe Park, who was a civilian recruited straight from school, there was a very unglossy university-educated North Midlands second lieutenant who shared a civilian billet with me, there was a sophisticated Etonian other rank who lived in Sloane Street, and about ten others I cannot remember distinctly.4
As Jenkins recalled in an interview: ‘You could spend nights in which you got nowhere at all. You didn’t get a single break, you just tried, played around through this long bleak night with total frustration and your brain was literally raw. I remember one night when I made thirteen breaks. But there were an awful lot of nights when I was lucky if I made just one, so it was exhausting.’ Quite so, although another veteran recalled that Jenkins, although a first-class mind, was ‘not the world’s most talented codebreaker’.
But the work – when one hit a successful streak – had its own extraordinary rewards. The messages now being intercepted were invaluable. These were communications from Berlin to Italy, and to German divisions on the eastern front. Captain Jerry Roberts recalls one extraordinary day when he realised just how far into German High Command they had managed to penetrate: ‘The people the messages were going to and coming from would be given at the beginning of the message. So you would have General so and so sending to Army HQ in Berlin. Most of them were signed by a general. Some were signed by Hitler. I can remember myself deciphering at least one message – he just called himself: “Adolf Hitler, Führer.”’
For the brilliant minds who were making the Colossus possible, it was not so much knowledge as mechanical problems that they faced. It was very difficult to keep the teleprinter tapes synchronised. The machine also put a huge amount of strain on electronic valves, which repeatedly failed. But in the course of the many in-depth three-way discussions between Professor Newman, Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers that took place in order to improve the machines, what was debated was the feasibility of what was, in essence, the very first computer.
To be precise, they knew it as an ‘electronic valve machine’; what made it a step up from the Heath Robinson was that instead of relying on two tapes that had to be run synchronously, it had just one. Flowers also made other modifications, such as replacing the sprocket drive with a set of friction wheels. As a triumph of engineering, and of bringing a theoretical design to life, it was unquestionably his; although the astonishing machine had much of Turing’s logical reasoning at its core, there was also ingenuity in the way that Flowers improved upon the electronic valves, making sure that they were never switched off once they were in service, which hugely improved their reliability. Moreover, the