Bletchley Park History

World War II was a time of strife and technological advancement. It was also the birth of the first computers. The British during WWII had a location called Bletchley Park. It housed The Government Code & Cipher School. This location decoded intercepted messages of German Axis members to gain information. These bits of information may have shortened the war by two years and made D-day possible. The process used to encode the messages sent by the German Axis was reverse engineered. This required a lot of human resources and effort to decode even after the breaking of the German Axis encoding methods. A machine called Enigma encoded the majority of German Axis messages. Crypto-machines at Bletchley Park during WWII led to modern computing and …show more content…
The decoding took much longer and the Bomba design, eventually, became obsolete. Although not prepared for what was to come they were not completely helpless, as explained by Harry Hinsley, "...as early as the 1920s they had concentrated all of their crypto-analytical effort in one place – The Government Code and Cipher School..." (Hinsley). The British government already had people working to break these codes. They had the basics for decoding and they were about to kick into overdrive, fighting the German Axis. It is to note that Bletchley Park was not the headquarters of The Government Code & Cipher School before the war. It was a modest privately owned country estate. Top secret and very selective there was a peak of roughly 12,000 people sworn to secrecy. They ranged from many different educational backgrounds. There were Educators, Scientists and newspaper puzzle experts. Anyone who could solve puzzles might have found themselves recruited to the code-breaking project. The British gave it a name. The secret location as stated by the Humes, "At first they called it 'Station X'" (Hume, Nic, and Hume, Jim). The vague names were due to the very acute fear of spies listening in on …show more content…
The article "Keeping Secrets" lists some of these people, "...Alan Turing, Stuart Milner-Barry, Hugh Alexander, and Gordon Welchman" ("Keeping Secrets"). Alan Turing was an inventor and created an improved version of a Bomba called a Bombe; Stuart Milner-Barry and Hugh Alexander were both professional chess players, Barry would also later become the treasurer of England, and Gordon Welchman was a mathematician and professor. All had monolithic intellects. In the article "Glory to The Bletchley Women" there is a quote from Stuart Barry, "'The main sensation of the bewildered newcomer that was he was participating in a miracle which he was entirely incapable of comprehending'" ("Glory to The Bletchley Women"). An average person working there had few ideas how everything worked and some of the people with the highest intellect might not have understood it all. The war continued and the Germans began to use more and more complex encoding. Gareth Davies explains the response of the Bletchley crew to this, " The later German codes had ten million million million permutations. The code-breakers responded by building Colossus, the world's first large electronic valve computer, two years ahead of the Americans"

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