Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [126]
The decisive turning of the war brought Bletchley into a new phase. Plans were being made for the allocation of encryption work after the conflict. Nevertheless, as the Allies took France and it appeared, finally, that the Germans were in retreat, the workrate intensified dramatically at the Park, for the very fact of turning fortunes meant that the volume of German encoded traffic had risen dramatically. On top of this, German intelligence had further tightened security around the encryptions. In fact this was one of the most tiring phases at the Park. By September 1944, Hut 8 was recording naval decrypts at a peak rate of about 2,200 a day.
Happily, as the weeks of the Allied assault wore on, the effect on German communications staff was deleterious; as a result, attention to security became more slapdash. By this time, the Colossus technology was firmly bedded in. A further six of the revolutionary machines were delivered to the ‘Newmanry’ and a new block, Block H, was built to house them. More were to follow as the year went on.
Indeed, for this final stage of the conflict, personnel numbers at Bletchley had almost doubled from what they had been just two years previously. As well as the codebreakers and the Wrens, there were large support teams (including 152 house staff – cleaners, handymen, etc.) and a transport section comprising 169 drivers, some fifty of whom were women. Transport didn’t just deal with despatches – there was also, according to one who worked in the department, ‘a Wolseley and a Hillman … we would wait in the lounge for the phone calls. Whoever was there answered and you could find yourself going down Watling Street to St Albans with despatches or to the Admiralty.’
There was no let-up in pace, or indeed in focus and concentration. In December 1944, Hugh Alexander set up Naval Section IIJ specifically to make further inroads into the main Japanese naval code. And there were still outbreaks of tension between the military and Bletchley Park. That same month the Park found itself being blamed for failing to give warning of a surprise attack in the Ardennes, when the British and Americans found themselves facing fourteen infantry and seven Panzer divisions along a 75-mile front. The assault was termed by some as ‘the most notorious intelligence disaster of the war’. Those who worked in Hut 3 defended themselves with the explanation that they had picked up word of an imminent assault – and indeed a date – but there was nothing in the transmissions that could have indicated a location.
Part of the problem, it seemed, was that the Germans had used skilful deception – misdirection in the matter of troop deployments – as well as a tactic of radio silence. Moreover, the amount of decrypt material that Bletchley could harvest had decreased; rather than relying on radio transmissions, the Germans, back in their own territory, were using land-lines once more.
This ever-increasing intensity of work took its toll at the Park; by December 1944, it was estimated that the sick rate was running at four per cent, rather higher than normal. In the earlier years of the war, such intensity would have been tempered with the enthusiasm of youth. One can see all too easily, though, how the strict rota system, combined with the unremitting focus of the often repetitive and dull work, would have a corrosive effect. It is often said that for ordinary soldiers, any conflict is composed of moments of sheer terror and exhilaration, and the rest of the time of solid boredom. In the case of Bletchley, there was little in the way of exhilaration or terror.
Nevertheless, by January 1945, those in Hut 6 were cracking more German army signals than ever before, under the keys ‘Puffin’ and ‘Falcon’. And even though the tide was flowing so strongly, the work did not let up. Against the backdrop of the Yalta conference of February 1945 – at which Stalin assured Churchill that there would be free elections in Poland after the war – there was