Just Finished Reading: The Secret Life of Bletchley Park – The WWII Codebreaking Centre and the Men and Women who worked there by Sinclair McKay

What happened in Bletchley Park during WWII was one of Britain’s best kept secrets. Indeed the work carried out there remained a secret until the late 1970’s. For decades after the war friends and even partners of people who worked there, including rather surprisingly partners who actually met there, never knew the full story of its groundbreaking efforts in combating first the Germans and then the Japanese. It is widely believed that the famous breaking of the German military Enigma Code shortened the war by at least two years. Some authorities believe that the figure could be as high as five years. The significance of this result cannot be overstated. The codes broken in this most secret of places allowed Allied shipping to avoid U-boat attacks thereby allowing vital food and supplies to get to England to sustain her war effort. Without it the possibility exists that we may have lost the Battle of the Atlantic and have had to capitulate, leaving the US to fight alone.

What is almost as remarkable is the way the Park was set-up and operated and the kind of people who worked there. Initially it was a very British affair – when some very bright people managed to convince the military authorities that a modern code breaking service was needed. When the government turned out to be reluctant to provide the money it is rumoured that a wealthy senior naval officer bought the house himself and gave it to the Admiralty department staffed by many of his friends. The first recruits were largely made up of friends of friends and came from the higher echelons of society – in other words the ‘right set’ who were assumed to be loyal merely because of their social position. It was, in many ways, a very different world back then. Of course they needed academics too and these were recruited, again by word of mouth and private recommendations, from the great Universities of the land. Amongst them was the great Alan Turing who was instrumental in laying the foundations of the modern computer age.

The ultimate triumph of the breaking of the various Enigma Codes, despite its ramifications, is told here on a very human scale. Before the invention of the earliest computers it was human brain power exercised over long hours that chipped away at the German secrets. But as the war progressed and the numbers at Bletchley Park ballooned it became necessary to industrialise the process of cracking codes. This is where the technical genius of groundbreaking engineering ideas came to the fore which led, through necessity, to the invention of the world’s first computers. This in itself is a fascinating story. What the author brings home to the reader, through interviews with many of the people who worked there, is the human side of things. How they coped with the pressures when they knew that delays in code breaking cost lives and how many of them coped with being away from home for the very first time without the safety valve of talking about their work to anyone else. It reminded both myself and the author of going away to University – helped along by the fact that many of the senior code breakers where well known academics in their own fields – with the added elements of secrecy and inner knowledge of doing vital war work. It is, in many ways, a fascinating story of hardworking people doing incredible things in very difficult times. Recommended.