Read Online The Secret Life of Bletchley Park by Sinclair McKay - Free Book Online
Authors: Sinclair McKay
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Poles who, so far as Bertrand knew, had only been successful where Knox had failed …’ According to Hut 6 veteran John Herivel, too, Knox’s temper could easily have had the most terrible knock-on effect. As he later wrote:
If Knox had continued to be in such a bloody-minded and intransigent mood, the conference would have been wound up, the French and British delegations would have returned home empty-handed, the further breaking of Enigma by the method of Zygalski sheets would never have taken place, and the Red Luftwaffe code would have remained unbroken, so that the Allied High Command would have been deprived of what Nigel de Grey termed ‘the prime source of intelligence’ for the most of the time from May 1940 until the end of the war. 7
But the wild storm that Denniston seemed to recall must have passed very quickly. In a taxi on the way back from that forest rendezvous on the second day, Knox started cheerily chanting: ‘Nous avons le QWERTZU, nous marchons ensemble.’ And in a letter written at the time, he stated crisply: ‘I think we may hand some bouquets to the Poles for their lucky shot.’
Luck or skill aside, the information about the wiring was vital. Knox telephoned the information through to Peter Twinn. It is said that by the time Knox returned to Bletchley, Twinn had worked out the wheel wiring from this information alone, and had set to work on a few messages sent and intercepted the year before.
‘I was the first British cryptographer to have read a German services Enigma message,’ recalled Twinn lightly, adding, ‘I hasten to say that this did me little if any credit, since with the information Dilly had brought back from Poland, the job was little more than a routine operation.’ And, he pointed out, ‘of course, reading a few scattered messages [from] a single day in 1938 was a whole universe away from the problems that lay ahead.’ 8
The Poles also presented the British with a replica of the Enigma machine that they had built. ‘Dilly always said that we owed a huge amount to the Poles,’ says Mavis Batey, though she is equally adamant that the work of Colonel Bertrand should be properly celebrated. ‘Bertrand really did a good deal, with his Pimpernel pinches [the acquisition of coding information from the Germans]. Until the fall, Bertrand had his own cipher bureau in Paris and we had constant traffic and all the correspondence, and whoever got the key out that day shared it. That went on right up until the fall of France.’
Elsewhere, Alan Turing had been quietly busy upon his own researches. And by December 1939, quite independently of Knox and his new Polish friends, he managed to break into five days’ worth of Enigma material. Though this was, by itself, hugely encouraging, the messages Turing had worked upon were old – pre-war in fact. Neither he nor any other codebreaker had yet managed to crowbar their way into current German traffic.
In the deceptive quiet of those early weeks and months of the Phoney War, there was still time for theorising and experimentation. ‘Some days it was actually very slack,’ says John Herivel of his workload at that time. ‘You wouldn’t get that many intercepts in at all.’ But as the season grew darker, even with all the clues and the help given by the Poles, the codebreakers knew they were facing an increasingly fearsome proposition.
It was not just the mentally exhausting prospect of facing, day after day, these groups of random-looking letters, trying to think from every conceivable angle of some logical formula that wouldbring order to the chaos and make the letters resolve into language. It was also the knowledge that they simply had to succeed.
The Italians provided a little succour. It was discovered that they were still using the earlier commercial version of the Enigma system, which although ingeniously complex, was known to be breakable. Dilly, with his rods and his fillies, was kept furiously busy in the
If Knox had continued to be in such a bloody-minded and intransigent mood, the conference would have been wound up, the French and British delegations would have returned home empty-handed, the further breaking of Enigma by the method of Zygalski sheets would never have taken place, and the Red Luftwaffe code would have remained unbroken, so that the Allied High Command would have been deprived of what Nigel de Grey termed ‘the prime source of intelligence’ for the most of the time from May 1940 until the end of the war. 7
But the wild storm that Denniston seemed to recall must have passed very quickly. In a taxi on the way back from that forest rendezvous on the second day, Knox started cheerily chanting: ‘Nous avons le QWERTZU, nous marchons ensemble.’ And in a letter written at the time, he stated crisply: ‘I think we may hand some bouquets to the Poles for their lucky shot.’
Luck or skill aside, the information about the wiring was vital. Knox telephoned the information through to Peter Twinn. It is said that by the time Knox returned to Bletchley, Twinn had worked out the wheel wiring from this information alone, and had set to work on a few messages sent and intercepted the year before.
‘I was the first British cryptographer to have read a German services Enigma message,’ recalled Twinn lightly, adding, ‘I hasten to say that this did me little if any credit, since with the information Dilly had brought back from Poland, the job was little more than a routine operation.’ And, he pointed out, ‘of course, reading a few scattered messages [from] a single day in 1938 was a whole universe away from the problems that lay ahead.’ 8
The Poles also presented the British with a replica of the Enigma machine that they had built. ‘Dilly always said that we owed a huge amount to the Poles,’ says Mavis Batey, though she is equally adamant that the work of Colonel Bertrand should be properly celebrated. ‘Bertrand really did a good deal, with his Pimpernel pinches [the acquisition of coding information from the Germans]. Until the fall, Bertrand had his own cipher bureau in Paris and we had constant traffic and all the correspondence, and whoever got the key out that day shared it. That went on right up until the fall of France.’
Elsewhere, Alan Turing had been quietly busy upon his own researches. And by December 1939, quite independently of Knox and his new Polish friends, he managed to break into five days’ worth of Enigma material. Though this was, by itself, hugely encouraging, the messages Turing had worked upon were old – pre-war in fact. Neither he nor any other codebreaker had yet managed to crowbar their way into current German traffic.
In the deceptive quiet of those early weeks and months of the Phoney War, there was still time for theorising and experimentation. ‘Some days it was actually very slack,’ says John Herivel of his workload at that time. ‘You wouldn’t get that many intercepts in at all.’ But as the season grew darker, even with all the clues and the help given by the Poles, the codebreakers knew they were facing an increasingly fearsome proposition.
It was not just the mentally exhausting prospect of facing, day after day, these groups of random-looking letters, trying to think from every conceivable angle of some logical formula that wouldbring order to the chaos and make the letters resolve into language. It was also the knowledge that they simply had to succeed.
The Italians provided a little succour. It was discovered that they were still using the earlier commercial version of the Enigma system, which although ingeniously complex, was known to be breakable. Dilly, with his rods and his fillies, was kept furiously busy in the
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