Intelligence

Lair of secret wartime code-cracker opens

Lair of secret wartime code-cracker opens

By Jeremy Lovell
LONDON (Reuters) - Once the most secret place in Britain, Bletchley Park is giving the public a first look into the hut where mathematics genius Alan Turing worked on cracking Nazi Germany's supposedly unbreakable Enigma codes.

Turing's Hut 8 is included in an exhibition at the complex some 50 miles (80 km) north of London that opened this week.

"The public can't actually enter the hut yet. We have much more restoration work to do before that is possible. But they can see through a window into the room where Turing worked," said Bletchley Park director Christine Large.

"They can see things like the tea cup he used to keep chained to his radiator," she said. "We hope to have it fully opened by the end of the year."

Turing was part of the team that invented Colossus, the machine that enabled cypher sleuths to crack not only the normal Enigma codes but the key Lorenz cypher that Adolf Hitler used to communicate with his field commanders.

The cracking of the code was crucial to the success of the D-Day allied invasion of mainland Europe and is credited with having shortened World War Two by some two years.

Colossus, a giant machine that used hundreds of valves to make its calculations, was the world's first programmable electronic computer. Its existence was a closely guarded secret.

Bletchley Park -- codenamed Station X -- near Milton Keynes was secretly transformed into a code-breaking centre in mid-1939 as war loomed, with the first codebreakers to arrive there -- scientists and classicists -- disguised as a shooting party.

The odds of them cracking the Nazi codes were put at 150,000,000 trillions to one, and their ultimate success was deemed one of the greatest intellectual achievements of the 20th century.

Huts three and six worked on the German Army and Air Force codes, while huts four and eight concentrated on the German naval codes -- crucial in winning the war in the Atlantic as U-boats sank millions of tonnes of vital Allied shipping.

The intelligence they supplied was codenamed "Ultra" and its circulation limited to a handful of top Allied commanders, to prevent the Germans finding out their codes had been cracked.

At the height of the war, more than 10,000 people were working at Bletchley Park, but barely nine months after hostilities ended the entire complex had been abandoned and all traces of the work there removed to maintain secrecy.

It was a secret that remained until the mid-1970s when details slowly began to emerge under a government rule that keeps such information under wraps for 30 years or more.

June 11, 2004 at 11:09 AM in Cold War | Permalink | TrackBack (14) | Top of page | Blog Home