"I told you to leave no stone unturned, but I didn't expect you to take me so literally."
- Winston Churchill, about Bletchley Park's oddball group of code-breakers.
Purchased by 'S', the head of MI6, using personal funds in June 1939 to house the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS, the somewhat transparent code-name for the department's code-breakers) for the upcoming war's duration, Bletchley Park is an ugly manor house in Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, about 50 miles north-west of London, and midway between Oxford and Cambridge. Since it was the tenth of a series of special establishments MI6 were setting up, Bletchley Park also became known as Station X.
At first, GC&CS was crowded into the mansion itself, the stables and the ground's cottages. The Commercial and Diplomatic sections were later moved to a neighbouring boys' school following its purchase, and large pre-fabricated huts were erected on the site of the maze and the rose gardens to house the military decryption and intelligence sections. Some of these were later replaced by purpose-built concrete buildings.
Hut 6 was occupied by the army/air force Enigma cryptanalysts; hut 8 was for the naval Enigma cryptanalysts, including Alan Turing. The bombe machines were installed in hut 11. Huts 1 and 3 translated the decrypted messages. Hut 4 collated and indexed the intelligence gleaned from the naval messages, while hut 5 did the same for army and Luftwaffe messages. Hut 7 housed the punched-card machines used to sort, filter and analyse the outputs of huts 5 and 6. Hut 10 decoded German weather reports. Hut 9 was the pay and admin section, and hut 2 was the recreation hut.
Raw encrypted messages were intercepted by the Y stations, large radio listening posts, the largest of which by 1942 had up to 1200 operators working in shifts around the clock. The Y Service also had a number of small stations in Palestine, Egypt, Malta, Gibralter, South Africa, and Singapore (later moved to Ceylon), and after D-Day had many mobile units stationed on the continent.
GC&CS was highly compartmentalised; no staff were allowed to discuss the operations of their hut with other personnel. An intelligent person (of which there were quite a few at BP) could work out in general terms another hut's operation if their hut worked on the other's output, but details were top secret. No staff outside huts 6 and 8 knew the name Enigma, for example, let alone that British intelligence had a working model of the German encryption device. The staff of hut 10 thought they were just passing on German weather information for the use of the Allies in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and North Africa, and had no idea that breaking the German Short Weather Cypher gave vital cribs for Enigma decryption. Fortunately, at its peak of operations Bletchley Park had several thousand staff, so there was no shortage of personal gossip to go around.
Senior cryptanalysts such as Turing seldom read the messages they decrypted; once they were sure they had the right key by decrypting the first dozen words or so, they passed the messages on to decryption clerks together with instructions for decyphering the rest of that day's traffic.
Outside of BP, the Enigma secret was surrounded by more secrecy. All Enigma intelligence was sterilised of identifying features and referred to collectively as BONIFACE in the early days or ULTRA later on. At first, BP's output was low enough that it was easy for those charged with controlling the information to imply that BONIFACE was a highly-placed mole in Berlin. As decryption improved and traffic increased, ULTRA intelligence would often be accompanied by spurious detail, such as, "Recovered from the fireplace of so-and-so..." or "A flimsy of a message found in the wastebasket of such-and-such...". Only those directly involved or at the highest levels -- generals, admirals and prime minister -- knew the true source of ULTRA.
After the war had ended, many of the staff of Bletchley Park were demobbed, or chose to return to civvie street. Those remaining were moved to other premises, together with some of the equipment, and Bletchley Park was closed. All of those who worked at BP had signed the Official Secrets Act, and so none were able to speak of their experiences to even their spouses or children until the official records were released in the 1970s.
Despite the large number of military personnel stationed at BP, a great deal of eccentricity was tolerated, especially from the boffins in huts 6 and 8 (see Alan Turing). Though the effect of working in a prefab hut on the grounds of an country estate sometimes gave the place a holiday camp atmosphere, everyone stationed there was aware of their importance to the war effort, and none was allowed to talk of their work in even the most general terms outside of GC&CS. Listening to BBC reports of convoy losses while in the middle of a naval Enigma blackout could have a draining effect on morale, though sometimes offset by reports of successes in which one was involved, such as the sinking of the Bismark. One way for some to cope was not to worry too much about conformity and the symbols of discipline.
In common with many British organisations during the war, the sex ratio at Bletchley Park and the Y stations was naturally skewed towards the female; male staff were either senior enough to be more valuable in their current roles than on active service in the armed forces, or unfit for military service while having the right talents for GC&CS. Skewing the ratio even more, the requirement for secrecy meant that it was desirable for the much of staff to be military, which in practice meant that ATS, WAAF, and WREN personnel filled many of the posts in the Y Service and Bletchley Park, supplemented by Foreign Office clerks and young women and men with talents for language or mathematics recruited directly from university. For example: the Army Y Station at Beaumanor had 900 ATS personnel and 300 male civilian operators; by the end of the war, of the 2000 bombe operators stationed around the country, 1676 were WRENs; and an official photograph of a particular shift of the staffs of huts 3 and 6 taken on VE Day shows nine men and 22 women.
Disclaimer
This is an unofficial fansite, but note: GURPS and GURPS WWII are registered trademarks of Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy.
This page updated Mon, September 04, 2006, around about 24:00 ish (BST).