Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [125]
These quibbles aside, Bletchley played its part on 6 June 1944, even as the Allied armada was setting sail across the Channel. Various messages from the Germans, involving U-boats and reports of parachute landings, were decoded, translated and sent to the relevant authorities all within the space of half an hour. Although the precise details of the landings were secret, it was clear that something very significant was about to happen. Mavis Batey recalls of the build-up: ‘I remember that we knew when D-Day was coming because I can see myself going up to London on a train from Bletchley and thinking “I suppose I am the only one on this train who knows D-Day is tomorrow.”’
For codebreaker Harry Hinsley, D-Day involved him sitting firm behind his desk for over twenty-four hours. The climax was marked by an important telephone call from Downing Street. First a woman asked him to confirm that he was Mr Hinsley, then he heard Churchill’s voice asking: ‘Has the enemy heard that we are coming yet?’ Hinsley assured the Prime Minister that the first Bletchley decrypts of German messages were coming on the teleprinter.
A couple of hours later, Churchill called Hinsley again: ‘How’s it going? Is anything adverse happening yet?’ After forwarding more decrypts, Hinsley finally allowed himself to leave his desk, return to his billet and go to bed.
But in general terms, 1944 was by no means the end. Following D-Day, there was a lethal German technological weapons breakthrough, targeted on London. Indeed, later in the year, one of the last V-1 rockets to land came down very close to the Stanmore bombe outstation, although damage was kept to a minimum because of the blast wall that had been built to protect the machines.
Sarah Baring was by working at the Admiralty. Under the forty feet of reinforced concrete, known as The Citadel, that sat atop this maze of passages and offices, the prospect of lonely night-watches, although not entirely welcome, did offer one consolation. As she recalled: ‘It was horrible sitting in my flat alone with these bloody rockets crashing down. And the short walk to the safety of the Citadel … was too tempting to resist … it may have looked like Lenin’s tomb to some people. But I got to love the old dump and was amused to notice on bad nights the portly figure of the First Lord of the Treasury prowling the corridors in his bright red silk dragon-patterned dressing gown.’
Mavis Batey vividly recalls the V-1 rockets and the means by which the codebreakers at Bletchley Park sought to thwart them. ‘We were working on double agents all the time, giving misinformation to their controllers. And because we could read the Enigma, we could see how they were receiving this misinformation. One of the things when the V-1s started was that the double agent was asked to give a report to the Germans on where the rockets were falling. Because of course they were wanting them to fall on central London.
‘At that point, the bombs were falling in central London so intelligence here wanted them to cut out at a different point. So this double agent was instructed to tell his masters that they were falling north of London. The result of this was that the Germans cut the range back a little and as a result, the rockets started falling in south London. Just where my parents lived.’
In this case, it seemed that to Mrs Batey at least, ignorance was preferable to any other state; for security reasons, she knew nothing of this double-cross operation, or the messages that confirmed its success. ‘I had no idea and it is just as well that I didn’t. So when I saw the devastation at Norbury, I did not know that it had anything