The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park by Dermot Turing

Author:Dermot Turing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9781839404740
Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
Published: 2019-12-09T14:21:43+00:00

The four huts

The autumn of 1939 was the period of the ‘Phoney War’, where nothing much was happening, at least as far as the war on land and in the air was concerned. Yet there were still plenty of Enigma messages swimming about the ether: so many, in fact, that there were not enough interceptors to capture all the traffic. If and when the war turned into a hot war, the volume was likely to increase dramatically. Even assuming no codebreaking was possible, the intelligence derived from the preambles and call signs alone would be valuable and deserved an increase in staff. Furthermore, if you assumed – and Welchman was ready to assume this, in light of his own contribution to the bombe machine project – that Enigma messages could be broken, there would need to be a full-scale decoding room and a proper system for handling the deciphered messages, translating them, and evaluating their content.

‘With considerations such as these in mind, I formulated an organizational plan and took it to Commander Edward Travis, deputy director, under Alastair Denniston, of all Bletchley Park activities.’ The plan was this: there should be a system for registering intercepts, and carrying out the traffic analysis which Welchman had been doing in the school; there should be close liaison with the ‘Y’ service, which picked up the radio messages, to help them prioritize their work; there should be a cryptanalysis department, devoted to finding out the ‘key’ (Enigma settings) which the Germans were using; and there should be a decoding department, which would strip away the Enigma cipher once the key was known, and handle the messages. In this outline, the fundamental structure of the Hut System was born.

Even though Welchman was a newcomer, both to codebreaking and to intelligence, the merits of his ideas were soon accepted. He later recalled: ‘Travis’ response was all I could have hoped for…. He quickly obtained official agreement to the establishment of a new section in the Bletchley Park complex to handle the possibility of Enigma breaks on an interservice basis.’ In fact, it was not entirely inter-service: the navy wanted to be independent, and there were good reasons for this, since the naval version of Enigma used different ‘indicators’, and would be far more fiendish to break than ‘ordinary’ Army and Air Force Enigma. But the basics were accepted: Hut 6 would register the messages intercepted from army and air force sources, find the Enigma settings being used, and hand the results across to Hut 3, which would decipher, edit them (‘emend’, in Bletchley parlance, meaning to correct obvious typographical errors, fill in blanks where groups were garbled or omitted in transmission, and so forth), and turn them into intelligence. Similarly, on the naval side, Hut 8 would do registration and cryptanalysis, and Hut 4 would mirror the activity of Hut 3. Huts 3 and 6 were situated next to each other; the gap between them was sufficiently small that a wooden tunnel was constructed for communication between them.

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