Bards and Heroes - Bletchley Park

The success of teams Bletchley Park in breaking the German codes shortened World War II by at least two years. That is the belief of those in the know. Rotary Club of Senlac heard about the work of Bletchley Park as they celebrated St Georges Day with a traditional English meal of roast beef and apple crumble. Ian Thomson from Bletchley Park gave a fascinating account of how the code breaking unit was set up, how it worked in virtual total secrecy within each team and how the codes came to be broken. Enigma machines were built for commercial use but the military saw the benefits of them and used them for transmitting their messages. It was not just the German codes that were broken; Japan, Poland, other European countries and even some in South America used Enigma and their codes were broken too. The statistical odds of breaking the various codes were astronomical but success came.

 Thanks to the work of people such as Alan Turing. Colussus, the world’s first computer, was built at Bletchley and was able to decode messages considerably faster than human brain! Despite all the work on code breaking the German Naval Code remained virtually unbroken throughout the war.