Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [2]
Many of those who reported for duty at Bletchley Park recall that suspense; the anticipation and excitement of not knowing what kind of work they were about to step into. For those who arrived on a winter evening, or even in the small hours, the total darkness around the station acquired a chillingly metaphorical depth.
And even for the others who reported for duty in more conventional, brighter daylight, the introduction to Bletchley Park was no less disorientating. The experience of another veteran, Sheila Lawn (née MacKenzie), just nineteen years old at the time, was not untypical.
Sheila was a young nineteen, too; she had never previously left her native Scotland. She had received the summons in some bewilderment, uncertain how anyone would have known about her, or who might have recommended her. She embarked upon a deeply uncomfortable eleven-hour train journey from Inverness to Bletchley (trains during the war were often jammed, and people would often have to sit on their suitcases in the corridors, and try to do without the lavatories, which were gothically horrible); eleven hours with the tension – and the thrill – of having no idea what was coming next.
She now recalls: ‘When I arrived at Bletchley station, I had been instructed to find a phone, which I did. The voice at the other end said: “Ah, yes, Miss MacKenzie, we are expecting you.” And a car came down to take me up there. How could I really speculate about what I was getting into? This was a very secretive business, you see.’
The most secretive business there could be. Years before the outbreak of the Second World War, one branch of the Foreign Office was acutely aware of the immense challenge it was facing; a challenge that would require not merely diamond-sharp minds, but also young people with the energy and the character to face exhausting trials of patience. Recruits with the strength to focus every single day upon tasks of stunning complexity, without letting the pressure undermine their mental well-being.
Upon arrival, most of the young recruits to this establishment immediately gathered that they were to be engaged upon intelligence work of the most crucial nature. There were sharp, serious warnings about total secrecy; glimpses of former university tutors, in civilian clothing; then the swift, giddying realisation that they were now close to the nerve centre of the British war effort.
Here, in these grounds fifty miles to the north of London, they would be introduced to the gravest secret of the war. Every intercepted enemy message, every signal from every captain, commander, military division, battleship, U-boat; all these encrypted communications, jumbled up into seemingly random letters in groups of four and five, and transmitted by radio, were gathered in by the many listening posts around the British coastline. And they were all assiduously sent on to Bletchley Park. It was here, in these nondescript huts, that the most powerful intellects of a generation struggled with a proposition that German High Command considered completely insoluble: that of outwitting – and mastering – its ingenious Enigma encoding technology.
The Enigma machines – compact, beautifully designed devices, looking a little like typewriters with lights – were used by all the German military forces; these portable machines generated the countless millions of different letter combinations in which most coded German communications were sent.
In the early stages of the war, when the Nazis had conquered much of western Europe, Britain looked alarmingly vulnerable – relatively ill-prepared and underarmed. From the beginning, the desperate need to break the Enigma codes was about much more than simple tactical intelligence. It was about survival.
To unlock the secrets of Enigma would mean penetrating to the heart of the enemy’s campaign; it would allow the British to read the encoded messages from U-boats, from Panzer divisions, from the Gestapo. It would allow them to read Luftwaffe messages,