Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [84]
The card index was equally formidable for Bletchley’s Air Section. ‘My recollection,’ said veteran Hugh Skillen, ‘is of many thousands of cards in shoe-boxes along both sides of a long hut. When a new word came up in the message you were translating – a neologism, new type of jet fuel, or machine part – you looked for it and if it was not there, the indexer put it in with a reference time and a date stamp.’9
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 – the event that finally brought America into the war – Colonel Tiltman was determined that Bletchley’s codebreakers should be trying everything to master the Japanese codes. Immediately, however, he faced twin hurdles: in 1942, there were very few people in Britain familiar with Japanese; and nor is it an easy language to learn.
Tiltman himself was a partial exception. By this stage, he had already taught himself some Japanese to get a feel for it, and to gauge the possibilities of new young recruits being able to master it sufficiently in order to handle encrypted messages. The colonel was an optimist. The call went out to Cambridge and Oxford, for classics scholars who would by now be in some other part of the military structure. Sixth-forms with pupils about to sit for Oxbridge were also contacted.
‘I realised that this is EXACTLY what I wanted to do,’ wrote veteran Hugh Denham. Invited for interview with Colonel Tiltman and others, he was asked: ‘Do you have any religious scruples about reading other people’s correspondence?’10 What followed was an exhausting and intensive six-month course in Japanese, taught at the Gas Company in Bedford, and defying the conventional assumption that it took at least two years to grasp a working knowledge of the language. There wasn’t the scope, wrote Michael Loewe with nice understatement, ‘for much attention to the niceties of Japanese history or culture.’11
A short introduction to codebreaking followed. But in the early days, there was, understandably, a lot of frustration; the intercepts they were working on were old. Moreover, ‘none of the thousand or so characters that we had learned were there on the [message] page before us’, commented Maurice Wiles, another Classics scholar.12 Michael Loewe talked of the ‘long weary hours’ that would be spent simply indexing the code-groups that they had managed to identify.
And there were not many people in the section – either codebreakers or clerical staff – to help with what must have been unbelievably complex filing needs. ‘At Bletchley Park, we were overawed by the presence of those whom we saw as experienced professionals,’ wrote Michael Loewe. ‘The tall and lanky figure of Hugh Foss seemed to look down from a great height on the raw recruits assembled in his office.’13
None the less, ‘we got there in the end’, said Maurice Wiles. ‘Fortunately it was not the most difficult of codes, but it took time for us to figure out what was going on and how to tackle the problems it posed.’ In other words, a magnificently insouciant response to a problem that most of us would not begin to know how to solve.
Work on the Japanese codes also threw up an interesting rivalry with Bletchley’s Washington counterparts, who were thought to outnumber the British staff by ten to one. Those at Bletchley found that the prospect of stealing of a march on the Americans, who were studying the same messages, offered a powerful incentive for getting codes cracked as quickly as possible. If a transmission came through from the USA with the solution to one such problem, the mood within the Bletchley section deflated accordingly. This rivalry with Washington carries echoes of America’s anger and frustration with the British – at least at the political and diplomatic level – for not sharing the Enigma secret in the early years of the war.
Even more irksome were the occasions when they found that they had spent many of those ‘long weary hours’ simply duplicating work that the Americans had been studying simultaneously. Michael Loewe said of the