Read The Secret Life of Bletchley Park Online
Authors: Sinclair McKay
Still there was an ungovernable streak though. His biographer Andrew Hodges writes that colleagues there:
complained of Alan giving no sign of recognition or greeting when he passed them in the halls; instead, he seemed to look
straight through them. [Colleague] Alex Fowler, who was an older man of just over forty, was able to take Alan to task.
He was abject, but made an explanation hinting at why he found so many aspects of life difficult. ‘You know at Cambridge,’ he said, ‘you come out in the morning and it’s redundant to keep saying hallo, hallo, hallo.’ He was too conscious of what he was doing, to slip into conventions without thinking. But he promised to do better.
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Turing even claimed aloud to have been approached sexually by another man in a hotel – the sort of boast that was assuredly not a conventional topic around the water-cooler in the US in 1943.
Later in 1942, Commander Travis went out to Washington himself but received what Gordon Welchman described as ‘a frosty reception’. On the US side, there was still intense resentment at Bletchley’s refusal to share the bombe machines.
Despite this difficulty, an agreement between Britain and the USA was signed concerning the pooling of cryptographical know ledge. Part of this agreement involved, finally, Bletchley relinquishing its knowledge in return for information and precious resources. The USA would develop bombe machines based upon Turing’s designs.
Construction got under way in Dayton, Ohio. The first two of the machines, the design of which was inspected by Turing, were called Adam and Eve. From that point in 1942, Bletchley continued to take the lead on German naval decrypts, but would also send raw decrypts over to Washington. This was an extraordinary arrangement – the first time ever that two sides, regardless of their ally status, had so readily and widely pooled their codebreaking intelligence expertise.
And while the Americans got Turing and new bombes, Bletchley Park got some Americans – soldiers who also happened to be expert cryptographers. Codebreaker Oliver Lawn recalls their arrival: ‘The American army sent over a batch of cryptographers to work with us in Hut 6. They were led by a chap called William Bundy, who was
then a captain in the American Army. Latterly after the war he became very prominent in American politics.
‘We got on very well with him. He brought half a dozen people with him and they mucked in with us on our shifts. Did the normal work with us and just became part of our team.’
According to his account of Bletchley Park, Peter Calvocoressi was equally impressed at the ease with which the Americans slid into day-to-day operations. He wrote:
One day in April 1943, a Colonel Telford Taylor was introduced into Hut 3, the first of our American colleagues. He already knew a great deal about Ultra and it seemed to take him no more than a week to master what we were up to. Others of similar calibre followed. They too were temporarily mobilised civilians and their backgrounds were roughly comparable with our own except that there were rather more lawyers among them than among us.
They were slotted into our various sections and in next to no time they were regular members of those sections.
When American army and air headquarters were set up in England and later moved to the continent, they had their own American Ultra intelligence officers and their own special communications with Bletchley Park, but at Bletchley Park itself British and Americans were integrated.
In 3A for example, some of the Air Advisers were American, but all the Advisers served all American and British commands without discrimination. The addition of the American contingent was so smooth that we hardly noticed it. Presumably this was in part due to the sense of common purpose but it must also have owed more than we realised at the time to the personalities and skills of the first Americans to arrive …
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This warmth was very much returned by Colonel Telford Taylor, who later wrote:
I cannot adequately portray the warmth and patience of the Hut 3 denizens (and to a lesser degree those of Hut 6 and other huts as well) in steering me around and explaining the many aspects of the work. At first I had no office, but Jim Rose and Peter Calvocoressi gave me a seat in their office … ‘C’, Travis and de Grey were entirely civil, and Travis really friendly …
I take pride at the ease, goodwill, and success with which the merging was accomplished by Britons and Americans alike.
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Colonel Taylor was also at the centre of something of a scandal; he embarked upon an affair with English cryptographer Christine Brooke-Rose. She later confessed to Michael Smith that her husband reacted in a way that seems inordinately of a piece with the times: ‘He was very very British and he and Telford talked together. Telford was terribly amused afterwards, because he thought my husband was so British, shaking hands and saying everything was all right – which of course it wasn’t, because our marriage broke up.
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Elsewhere, Mimi Gallilee also has a particular memory of these socially adept American newcomers: ‘I had a friend, in the Wrens, and I don’t even know which Hut she was working in, but at the end of the war, whiling away time before she was posted to the Admiralty to finish out her service, before she could be released … she was going out with an American army man there, Bob Carroll. I believe they got engaged before he went back to America. It took well over a year for her to be able to join him and marry out there.’
The notion of American soldiers coming to Britain and making free with the available women is one of those comical tropes as deeply embedded as the idea of the special relationship itself. It even featured in a recent episode of
The Simpsons
, where Grandpa feels impelled to revisit his English love. As we have seen, Bletchley Park lent itself to romances of all sorts.
Contemporary caricatures – good-natured ones, all the same – abounded in popular culture. One of the characters in the wildly popular BBC Radio comedy
It’s That Man Again
was an American
sergeant called Sam Scram; elsewhere, in Powell and Pressburger’s
A Canterbury Tale
(1944) one of the three leads was a young American sergeant who finds his ‘pilgrimage’ to Canterbury diverted temporarily by a quirky foray into Kentish village life. Powell and Pressburger were to return to this theme of Anglo-American melding in
A Matter of Life and Death
(1945); here, airman David Niven falls for American wireless operator Kim Hunter.
One Bletchley Park veteran, Harry Fensom, recalled with great good humour the ‘remark of an amazed American lieutenant’ who had been visiting codebreaking sites. This American observed that ‘the buildings contained marvellous machines and many attractive ladies. The machines were made by the British Tabulating Company and the ladies by God.’
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The American contingent at Bletchley Park clearly found life in the Buckinghamshire countryside congenial and stimulating in a variety of ways. Consider this account from an American soldier, collected by Marion Hill. He spoke wistfully of the lively social life he and his compatriots enjoyed among the Wrens:
‘We were 100 American men, at least half of whom worked side by side with the natives, many of them female. In the community at large, there was a shortage of men, many of the local lads being away in the service. Consequently, Americans were always invited to dances. At least half of us were married, but there is little evidence we forgot it. A few of the single men did marry British girls.’
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Similarly, some of the women who worked at the Park had starry-eyed (and curiously innocent) recollections of these American dreamboats. One said: ‘We used to go to dances with the American airmen … because they had beautiful food and ice cream.’ Another, equally artless, had this to say: ‘Bill, a Captain in the American signals, drove a jeep. I was looking at it with great envy – I’d never ridden in a jeep.’
Obviously, there was going to be the odd moment when the two cultures gazed upon one another with mutual incomprehension.
There was the matter, for instance, of culinary tastes. One American serviceman at Bletchley noted that one could always do swaps in the canteen: ‘The Britons were always hungry for protein and it was a delight to see the English girls attack my kipper with vigour while I ate my toast.’ Conversely, Lord (then plain Asa) Briggs found himself saucer-eyed at the prospect of American food – and indeed American further education. At Bletchley Park, he recalled, ‘I first heard of tomato juice, American bacon, American coffee, and, not least for me, American universities.’
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And an American officer after the war summarised what he considered the great charms of Bletchley Park: ‘If you had to be in the Army, it was nice to be in a place where you wouldn’t be shot at. If you had to have a desk job, it was satisfying to have one you believed was extremely important to the war effort as well as offering a heavy mental challenge. We could be smug in the knowledge that we had been in an important place at a crucial time.’
In 1944, it was Gordon Welchman’s turn to travel to the States, and his account of the voyage illustrates the frustrations and satisfactions that this secret life at Bletchley brought to a proud man:
I went to America on the
Queen Mary
in February 1944 and found myself sitting at the Captain’s table with several well-known people, including a minister in the British cabinet, the head of the National Physical Laboratory, and film producer Alexander Korda.
During the voyage it became apparent that the cabinet minister resented the presence at the Captain’s table of this Gordon Welchman, who didn’t seem to be doing anything important. However, when we reached New York, and the passengers were awaiting instructions, we heard a broadcast announcement: ‘Will Mr Alexander Korda and Mr Gordon Welchman please disembark?’ I happened to be standing near the cabinet minister and saw the look of amazement on his face!
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Welchman does not record the pleasure that he doubtless felt upon seeing this expression.
He was in the USA as an invitee of Sir William Stephenson, a senior Intelligence man who, at the behest of Churchill, had set up a shadow ‘British Secret Service’ in the USA, in the event that the Germans invaded and overran Britain. But the focus of Welchman’s admiration was on America and its people. He so enjoyed all he saw and experienced there that in 1948, he emigrated for good. This was his account of his first encounter with his US counterparts:
The Americans, I found, are particularly good at putting people at their ease by preliminary talk about this and that before serious matters come up for discussion. When I first arrived in Washington, before I was allowed to make contact with the cryptanalysts, I had to be introduced to some of the top brass, whose approval was needed.
No doubt they would have made things easy for me by a period of general conversation, but in my case no such ice-breaking was necessary. I had only just arrived from England, where our wartime diet was simple, and was suffering from my first exposure to American food. As soon as we reached the building, I had to ask: ‘Where is it?’ … when I finally arrived [to meet the dignitaries], everyone was grinning and there was no ice to be broken.
In other words, even as the two countries’ senior military personnel found themselves in continual dispute, among the code-breakers there was an unusual camaraderie, warmth and mutual respect. For America, the relationship was vital – Britain had made so many of the giant, and sometimes devious, intellectual leaps that made such an operation possible. Conversely, much in the way that America was helping Britain out with military resources, it was also proving invaluable in terms of supplying Bletchley.
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What then, from 1941 onwards, of Britain’s other allies? When it came to the existence of Bletchley Park, the French turned out on many occasions to be the source of tremendous anxiety in Whitehall.
It was of course alongside Gustave Bertrand, with his ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ pinches, that – before the start of the war – Alistair Denniston and Dilly Knox had been fed information by the Poles. After the Germans invaded France in the spring of 1940, the Polish mathematicians, having already left Poland, now had to be evacuated again. They pitched up in England, though they were felt to be too much of a security risk to allow near Bletchley Park. If this seems unjust, it has to be balanced against a thoroughly practical sense of paranoia. And as it happened, Rejewski and his fellow mathematicians were allowed to set up a separate unit in Middlesex analysing Russian intercepts. Meanwhile, the gallant General Bertrand remained in France, under the Vichy government.
This in turn caused the administration at Bletchley Park great anxiety; for what if the Germans were to find Bertrand and his French cryptography experts and force them to reveal Enigma secrets? As it happened, by some extraordinary oversight, they never did. But there was an incident concerning General de Gaulle’s Free French forces. In 1943, General Henri Giraud announced to a crowd that he had seen an intercepted message from a senior ranking German. This in turn was reported in London in
The Times
. An incandescent Churchill demanded an immediate investigation at Bletchley Park. The administration could not find any message or decrypt that matched the one that General Giraud claimed to have seen. Once again, it was a claim that appeared to set off no alarm bells within German intelligence; nevertheless, Bletchley Park ensured that the Free French were never passed any identifiable decrypts.
Another dramatic naval battle in 1943 was to hammer home both the Park’s tremendous power and its peculiar vulnerability. In
September of that year, Ultra decrypts were revealing, in close detail, the movements of the powerful German battleship
Scharnhorst
. This vast vessel, responsible for the sinkings of many Allied merchant ships, had become a near obsessive target for the British navy. It was based in Altenfjord, Norway. And by Christmas 1943, thanks to Enigma decrypts, enough was known of the ship’s movements and intentions for the navy to strike.