Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [35]
The messages would then be passed on to the Machine Room, in which British Typex code machines had been rigged up to act as Enigma machines. Here, operators, normally women, would set the machines up using the decrypted keys, sit down and start typing. If the code was correctly cracked, what they typed would appear in German.
Then there was the matter of translation. As historian and code-breaker Peter Calvocoressi recalled:
The Watch in Hut 3 sat around a horseshoe table. Their function was to translate the deciphered Enigma material from Hut 6, interpret it and transmit it abroad. What the Watch received was a stream of slips of paper the size of an ordinary Post Office telegram, or on two or more such bits of paper.
The letters were in five-letter groups and ideally they made German words. A dozen people sat around the semi-circular table with the head of the Watch inside the semi-circle and facing his colleagues who were scribbling away or scratching their heads. They all knew German as well as they knew English.
Schoolmasters were ideal for the job, as they were meticulous. If not satisfied, they would throw back a translation at even an eminent professor. It reminded me of Chief Examiners at ‘A’ level who would send back scripts to an Assistant Examiner to re-mark.6
Once the messages had been successfully decoded and translated, there was the organisational horror of the cross-referenced card system to be faced. And this, it seemed, was a problem that required a rather more upper-class sort of girl to take on. Oliver Lawn recalls: ‘The intelligence people could of course read the messages. They could decide what information, if any, to pass on to whom. And they were supported by a huge card index.
‘Let’s take as a random example someone called Bruno Schmidt. As the subject of a previously decoded message, he would have been entered into the card index. And from this, one could pull him out in the future when he turned up in other messages.
‘One could ask: “Ah yes, this chap is a rocket chap, he’s to do with rockets. He is being moved from A to B. Why?” And this information came about because of the accumulation of the card index. That was the information side. Now the index used to be put in a section which was locally called “The Deb’s Delight”.
‘This,’ Mr Lawn continues, ‘was because the debutantes, and ladies from high society, were regarded as suitable for doing this indexing work. Ladies – a few with rather modest brains – very well connected, and very loyal and security conscious.’
As a result of the ‘sheet’ system and the ‘cillis’, and thanks to the crucial involvement of the Polish codebreakers, Bletchley Park’s first break into current military Enigma traffic – as opposed to old messages – came in January 1940.
Alan Turing had been sent to Paris to confer with the Poles about such matters as wheel changes in the Enigma machine, taking with him some of the Zygalski sheets. In those few days, they managed to crack an Enigma key via this method. One of the Polish mathematicians, Marian Rejewski, remembered his dealings with Turing: ‘We treated Alan Turing as a younger colleague who had specialised in mathematical logic and was just starting out in cryptology.’7 At the time, he was not aware that Turing had quietly been making some astounding cryptographical leaps off his own back. Nevertheless, the Polish contingent based in Paris – even with their scantier resources – were still brilliantly helpful to the Bletchley operation.
Very shortly after Turing returned to Bletchley Park, the momentous breakthrough came. The veteran Frank Lucas recalled: ‘On a snowy January morning of 1940, in a small bleak wooden room with nothing but a table and three chairs, the first bundle of Enigma decodes appeared. The