Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [88]
It was this man, with his huge blue eyes, who had, with the greatest gentleness, eased Turing out as head of Hut 8. There was no malice involved – simply a recognition that the job had to be done by someone with more of a sense of everyday practicality. As a brilliant mathematician, Turing was a rather vague and disorganised administrator. Moreover, the Bletchley authorities understood that he would work a great deal more effectively if he took a step back from the daily duties of hut work.
In fact, Alexander had slowly been doing more and more of the job in any case. And his admiration for Turing, as he later testified, was utterly untrammeled:
There should be no question in anyone’s mind that Turing’s work was the biggest factor in Hut 8’s success. In the early days, he was the only cryptographer who thought the problem worth tackling and not only was he primarily responsible for the main theoretical work within the Hut (particularly the developing of a satisfactory scoring technique for dealing with Banburismus) but he also shared with Welchman and Keen the chief credit for the invention of the Bombe … the pioneer work always tends to be forgotten when experience and routine later make everything seem easy and many of us in Hut 8 felt that the magnitude of Turing’s contribution was never fully realised by the outside world.20
The intransigence of the ‘Shark’ U-boat key was by November 1942 the source of acute anxiety in the War Office. The OIC sent a message to the Bletchley authorities. The Battle of the Atlantic, it said, was ‘the one campaign which BP are not at present influencing to any marked extent – and it is the only one in which the war can be lost unless BP do help.’
Help was to come very soon afterwards. Spotted sailing off the coast of Palestine, U-559 was depth-charged by HMS Petard; and thanks to the terrific bravery of the two British crew members who swam the sixty yards to the stricken vessel, a vital discovery was made.
The U-boat’s crew had abandoned ship – the vessel was sinking. By the time Lieutenant Anthony Fasson and Able Seaman Colin Grazier swam to it, followed by sixteen-year-old Tommy Brown, only its conning tower was visible above the waves.
Despite the fact that the U-boat was about to be submerged, Fasson and Grazier boarded the vessel. Some lights were still on inside. And what they found was the four-rotor Enigma machine that had defeated Bletchley, along with a book of the current Shark keys.
With astounding presence of mind, the pair ensured that both the Enigma machine and the keys and the bigram tables were wound securely in waterproof material. They passed the machine and the books to Tommy Brown, who was outside. He in turn passed them to fellow crew members in a whale boat. But it was too late for Fasson and Grazier. U-559 sank, taking them with it into the depths. They had given their lives so that this information could be passed back. Both men were posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, while Tommy Brown received the George Cross.
When the machine and the documents reached Bletchley Park a few weeks later, it at last became possible for the codebreakers to crack the ‘Shark’ key. And very shortly afterwards, they did. After the dark months of code blackout, the naval Enigma operation was back in business.
The relief at Bletchley, and throughout Whitehall, was immense. The task ahead was still formidable: ensuring Britain’s survival was not the same thing as winning the war, and the Wehrmacht, embedded throughout much of Europe, right to the edges of the continent, was ferociously resilient. Nevertheless, even if no precise details were known by most individuals at Bletchley Park, it was now possible for those who worked there to sense the impact that their work was starting to have; to have an inkling of how the German war machine, which two years before had seemed utterly indestructible, was now being