Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [95]
He was abject, but made an explanation hinting at why he found so many aspects of life difficult. ‘You know at Cambridge,’ he said, ‘you come out in the morning and it’s redundant to keep saying hallo, hallo, hallo.’ He was too conscious of what he was doing, to slip into conventions without thinking. But he promised to do better.3
Turing even claimed aloud to have been approached sexually by another man in a hotel – the sort of boast that was assuredly not a conventional topic around the water-cooler in the US in 1943.
Later in 1942, Commander Travis went out to Washington himself but received what Gordon Welchman described as ‘a frosty reception’. On the US side, there was still intense resentment at Bletchley’s refusal to share the bombe machines.
Despite this difficulty, an agreement between Britain and the USA was signed concerning the pooling of cryptographical know ledge. Part of this agreement involved, finally, Bletchley relinquishing its knowledge in return for information and precious resources. The USA would develop bombe machines based upon Turing’s designs.
Construction got under way in Dayton, Ohio. The first two of the machines, the design of which was inspected by Turing, were called Adam and Eve. From that point in 1942, Bletchley continued to take the lead on German naval decrypts, but would also send raw decrypts over to Washington. This was an extraordinary arrangement – the first time ever that two sides, regardless of their ally status, had so readily and widely pooled their codebreaking intelligence expertise.
And while the Americans got Turing and new bombes, Bletchley Park got some Americans – soldiers who also happened to be expert cryptographers. Codebreaker Oliver Lawn recalls their arrival: ‘The American army sent over a batch of cryptographers to work with us in Hut 6. They were led by a chap called William Bundy, who was then a captain in the American Army. Latterly after the war he became very prominent in American politics.
‘We got on very well with him. He brought half a dozen people with him and they mucked in with us on our shifts. Did the normal work with us and just became part of our team.’
According to his account of Bletchley Park, Peter Calvocoressi was equally impressed at the ease with which the Americans slid into day-to-day operations. He wrote:
One day in April 1943, a Colonel Telford Taylor was introduced into Hut 3, the first of our American colleagues. He already knew a great deal about Ultra and it seemed to take him no more than a week to master what we were up to. Others of similar calibre followed. They too were temporarily mobilised civilians and their backgrounds were roughly comparable with our own except that there were rather more lawyers among them than among us.
They were slotted into our various sections and in next to no time they were regular members of those sections.
When American army and air headquarters were set up in England and later moved to the continent, they had their own American Ultra intelligence officers and their own special communications with Bletchley Park, but at Bletchley Park itself British and Americans were integrated.
In 3A for example, some of the Air Advisers were American, but all the Advisers served all American and British commands without discrimination. The addition of the American contingent was so smooth that we hardly noticed it. Presumably this was in part due to the sense of common purpose but it must also have owed more than we realised at the time to the personalities and skills of the first Americans to arrive …4
This warmth was very much returned by Colonel Telford Taylor, who later wrote:
I cannot adequately portray the warmth and patience of the Hut 3 denizens (and to a lesser degree those of Hut 6 and other huts as well) in steering me around and explaining the many aspects of the work. At first I had no office, but Jim Rose and Peter Calvocoressi