Just down the road from me is Bletchley Park; one of the most important places during world war 2. During the second world war teams of people worked at the site secretly breaking the codes of the German, Italians and the Japanese.
What is astonishing is that despite many thousands of people working at the site it was completely unknown until 30 years after the war.
When you visit now you are presented with the main house surrounded by wartime huts and other buildings all secreted away in the small town of Bletchley which has been practically swallowed up by Milton Keynes. These run down huts and stark concrete building now house a massive collection of information and items based around the secret war. To visit takes several hours and even then you’ll not have seen everything.
Separate huts include information on, Ian Flemings wartime activities, secret agents and how they worked, double agents, women secret agents, a vast collection of Churchill memorabilia, general everyday wartime life and of course the code breaking itself.
It was at Bletchley Park that the famous Enigma code was first broken, this work was pioneered by Polish codebreakers prior to the war. The devilishly difficult code was prepared on enigma machines and then radioed across the war zones, different machines were used by the navy, submarines, air force, army, SS and then Hitlers headquarters. By the end of the war every one of them was broken. The work was carried out 24 hours a day, day in day out, the code letters were changed every day so each had to broken anew every morning.
The work carried out was absolutely secret, some of the people working there were criticised for not fighting and could say nothing back to defend themselves and their work. The capturing of enigma machines of the types they didn’t have was paramount and many people died attempting to get them. The most famous being U110 that was captured in May 1941 with both the machine and the code books. This was also kept quiet until 30 years after the war. Sadly the film U571 has distorted a lot of the truth and the story told of the capture and subsequent code breaking is fictitious, the American ships portrayed did capture a machine but it was in 1944 and had virtually no bearing on the war.
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- Alan Turing Statue
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- Bletchley Park
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- Bombe Codebreaking machine
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- Bombe Codebreaking machine rear
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- Enigma Machine
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- Enigma Machine
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- Alan Turing Statue
The display has many enigma machines, it has a working Bombe, a mechanical codebreaking machine that searched for the code letters that matched, as well as a replica of Colossus.
Colossus was created through the ideas of Alan Turing, he had an idea of a computing machine that you could programme, this was the first idea of a modern computer and Colossus was the first programmable computer ever built. It was able to speed up the breaking of codes massively.
The site is great to visit, the information on display is excellent and gives you a great understanding of what was going on as well as an insight into the real start of the computer age.
Chronicles of a Designer 