Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [124]
‘Part of the trouble,’ Captain Roberts continues, ‘was that the Colossus machines were all destroyed, except two which got away. There were ten machines – eight were dismantled and destroyed, and two were kept at Cheltenham at the new GCHQ.
‘It was at the orders of Churchill. He didn’t want to reveal anything to the Russians. But this meant – crucially – that Britain couldn’t develop this new computer industry. And I’m sure they could have found some form of cover for the technology – helping building supersonic aircraft or whatever you like to invent.’
When interviewed some years ago, Dr Flowers himself recalled with some sadness the moment in 1960 when the orders came through to destroy the last two remaining Colossus machines, which had been shipped to GCHQ. ‘That was a terrible mistake,’ said Flowers. ‘I was instructed to destroy all the records, which I did. I took all the drawings and the plans and all the information about Colossus on paper and put it in the boiler fire. And saw it burn.’
As a postscript to his work, however, there is now, at the Bletchley Park museum, a fully working recreation of a Colossus machine. It stands, vast and unbelievably complicated, as an enduring testament to an outstandingly brilliant engineer.
25 1944–45: D-Day and the End of the War
The use of Enigma decryption was not confined to intercepted enemy messages; it also played an active role throughout the war in operations designed to deceive. And the most crucial of these was the Pas de Calais gambit of 1944, part of the preparations for D-Day. Indeed, it was reckoned by Bletchley Park veteran and renowned historian Harry Hinsley that, without Bletchley, the D-Day landings might well have been a catastrophic failure and the forces could have been ‘thrown back into the sea’.
Here is how they did it. Over the space of several months, German intelligence operatives found themselves monitoring a gigantic new military formation which was apparently termed the First United States Army Group (FUSAG). German Intelligence was also receiving word of the Twelfth British Army, whose many divisions looked poised to move into Norway, into Sweden, into Turkey, Crete and Romania. The Allies, it seemed, were massing. German Intelligence gradually gained an impression that the Allies were planning a substantial cross-channel assault. And no area was more threatened than the Pas de Calais, the point at which the Americans – apparently – planned to enter and then swarm into France.
It was all, of course, a vast and elaborately planned deception, which had the effect of taking German attention off the real target of the Normandy beaches. And on top of this, noted Ralph Bennett, ‘bombing and sabotage cut enough land-lines in northern France in the weeks before D-Day to force a proportion of useful intelligence on to the air’. Land-lines were a problem for Bletchley because communications made by telephone could not be intercepted. Now, thanks to the work of Bletchley, the Allied commanders were able to see that the lies had worked, receiving confirmation via broken messages from various corners of the German military machine.
With the coming of D-Day, the work of Bletchley was reaching its climax. As one veteran recalled, the approach of Operation Overlord changed the atmosphere of the Park quite dramatically, not least because there was a sudden travel ban: ‘This was a miserable restriction, as most of us had nowhere to go for our weekend off. We were also forbidden to eat at the cafeteria and had to eat in a Nissen hut by ourselves and the food was much worse. Our work intensified under pressure.’1
One Wren kept staccato diary notes of this pressure, recording such memories as: ‘Monday 12th June – Started the nightmare’, ‘Tuesday 13th – Gosh, what a day!’ and ‘Weds 14th – Hectic day!’ Another recalled the unexpected results of being briefed:
We started at midnight and the Head of the Watch said, ‘Before you young ladies