Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [22]
‘I was the first British cryptographer to have read a German services Enigma message,’ recalled Twinn lightly, adding, ‘I hasten to say that this did me little if any credit, since with the information Dilly had brought back from Poland, the job was little more than a routine operation.’ And, he pointed out, ‘of course, reading a few scattered messages [from] a single day in 1938 was a whole universe away from the problems that lay ahead.’8
The Poles also presented the British with a replica of the Enigma machine that they had built. ‘Dilly always said that we owed a huge amount to the Poles,’ says Mavis Batey, though she is equally adamant that the work of Colonel Bertrand should be properly celebrated. ‘Bertrand really did a good deal, with his Pimpernel pinches [the acquisition of coding information from the Germans]. Until the fall, Bertrand had his own cipher bureau in Paris and we had constant traffic and all the correspondence, and whoever got the key out that day shared it. That went on right up until the fall of France.’
Elsewhere, Alan Turing had been quietly busy upon his own researches. And by December 1939, quite independently of Knox and his new Polish friends, he managed to break into five days’ worth of Enigma material. Though this was, by itself, hugely encouraging, the messages Turing had worked upon were old – pre-war in fact. Neither he nor any other codebreaker had yet managed to crowbar their way into current German traffic.
In the deceptive quiet of those early weeks and months of the Phoney War, there was still time for theorising and experimentation. ‘Some days it was actually very slack,’ says John Herivel of his workload at that time. ‘You wouldn’t get that many intercepts in at all.’ But as the season grew darker, even with all the clues and the help given by the Poles, the codebreakers knew they were facing an increasingly fearsome proposition.
It was not just the mentally exhausting prospect of facing, day after day, these groups of random-looking letters, trying to think from every conceivable angle of some logical formula that would bring order to the chaos and make the letters resolve into language. It was also the knowledge that they simply had to succeed.
The Italians provided a little succour. It was discovered that they were still using the earlier commercial version of the Enigma system, which although ingeniously complex, was known to be breakable. Dilly, with his rods and his fillies, was kept furiously busy in the Cottage, formulating means by which the Italian codes could be cracked by hand. At about the same time – the first Christmas at Bletchley Park, the ducks flapping in the freezing waters of the lake – Knox was also looking over Turing’s plans for new ‘bombe’ machines – which were to prove revolutionary in their potential.
But another obstacle for Bletchley was the fact that the different arms of the German military used subtly different versions of the Enigma system. The army Enigma machine was already fearsomely complex; the naval Enigma, as the cryptographers knew, was quite a different proposition – more complex, with extra code-wheels and more disciplined settings, using strict tables. Denniston doubted it could ever be beaten. For some of the new recruits making their way in blithe ignorance to Bletchley Park in the early months of the war, this would be the overriding priority.
6 1939–40: The Enigma Initiation
From the start, one of the disorientating elements about Bletchley for a new recruit was the ambiguity of its status. It seemed to be neither a military nor a civilian operation, but – especially in its earliest days – a curious blend of the two.
In other words, this was not an environment of uniform, parade grounds and drill. And as work gathered pace, and the responsibility for breaking