Read The Secrets of Station X Online
Authors: Michael Smith
The Secrets of Station X (18 page)
When the shifts changed over at 9am, 4pm and midnight, swarms of people descended from a variety of vehicles, many of them driven by young female Motor Transport Corps (MTC) volunteers, young debutantes who had no need to be paid for their war work. ‘The MTC drivers were really very attractive girls,’ said Barbara Abernethy. ‘They were usually quite wealthy and they had to buy their own uniforms, which were beautifully
cut, and they were all pretty. But they worked very, very hard.’ The staff coming on shift had been brought in from various billets all over the surrounding countryside and those going off shift were taken home in the same fashion.
‘We would do eight-hour shifts,’ said Morag Maclennan, a Wren working in the Hut 11 Bombe section.
You would come out of your transport, buses or shooting brakes. They were the great things, shooting brakes dashing all over the villages of Buckinghamshire bringing people in. Huts were being built all the time and extra pieces of equipment being installed. Things were going on in the far reaches of the park that I didn’t know very much about.
Some of the vehicles were extremely old and unreliable, said Julie Lydekker, a junior assistant in the Air Section.
They laid on extraordinary old seaside char-a-bancs, with doors all down the side. One of the people who used to come on this char-a-banc was A. J. Alan. He used to be in the Hunt Hotel, Lindslade, and when the buses broke down he would take us in and give us ginger wine. He was always very amusing.
In an attempt to relieve the pressure for new billets, the
servicemen
and women were moved into military camps, recalled Ann Lavell.
We were hauled out of our billets, many of us wailing and screaming mightily, and by this time we were all dressed up as flight sergeants. A flight sergeant is really quite somebody in an ordinary RAF station but we were nobodies. We were put into these frightful huts that took about twenty-four people and had these dangerous cast-iron stoves in them that got red hot and sent out smoke everywhere. There was a terrible feeling
between the camp authorities and the Bletchley Park people. They couldn’t bear it because they didn’t know what we did and because we could get in past the sentries. The guards actually said: ‘Halt, who goes there?’ If you arrived at night, they did the bit about ‘friend or foe’ and you said, ‘Friend’ and they said, ‘Advance friend and be recognised’. The camp people absolutely hated not knowing what was going on and some of the officers tried to bully out of the junior people what they were doing.
By now most people, apart from the dons, wore uniform. ‘There was a period when the hierarchy, such as it was, was completely chaotic,’ said John Prestwich, one of the Hut 3
intelligence
reporters.
Some people were group-captains, some people were
lieutenants
and so on. So for a longish period we all wore civilian clothes and we were perfectly happy about it, uniforms were uncomfortable. Then some wretched admiral came down and said: ‘Where are my Wrens?’ and there were these girls in skirts and jumpers and he said: ‘It’s disgraceful. My Wrens should be jumping up, hands down seams of skirts.’ So we were all made to wear uniform.
A branch of the Corps of Military Police known as the Vital Points Wardens (VPWs) mounted guard on the camp. The VPWs wore a distinctive blue cap cover rather than the
standard
Military Police red cap until somebody pointed out that this gave away the fact that Bletchley Park was a ‘vital point’ and the blue cap covers were removed.
Despite the increase in military control, man management remained relaxed and in keeping with the attitude encouraged by Denniston from the start. Stuart Milner-Barry, then deputy head of Hut 6, recalled that formal orders were rarely given out.
Orders were nearly always given in the form of requests and
accompanied by explanations. The reasons are partly
historical
. When we began there was in any one room no hierarchy; the people doing the job were all on the same level. As things became more complicated, it was obviously impossible to maintain this agreeable anarchy; somebody had to be
responsible
if administration was to be carried on at all. So the system of heads of shift grew up, an innovation looked at askance in the early days – chiefly because those appointed, particularly in the girls’ rooms, were extremely reluctant to appear to push
themselves
forward or to assume any kind of authority over their friends. So any kind of authority there was, was dependent on leadership and personality and not on any kind of sanctions.
Ann Lavell recalled that the atmosphere at Bletchley Park, even after the military tried to impose themselves on the members of the armed forces working there, was unlike any other and encouraged informality.
You did have this rather happy atmosphere of tolerance. Very eccentric behaviour was accepted fairly affectionately and I think people worked and lived there who couldn’t possibly have worked and lived anywhere else. People who would
obviously
have been very, very ill at ease in a normal air force camp with its very strict modes of behaviour and discipline were very happy, very at ease in Bletchley.
On 7 December 1941, Japan entered the war, attacking Malaya and Pearl Harbor within the space of a few hours and
bringing
America into the war.
*
Bletchley had been warning of the
build-up to war from the messages passing between the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, General Oshima Hiroshi, and Tokyo. The newly introduced Japanese military super-encyphered codes, in which the message was first encoded using a code book to produce a series of five-figure groups and then had random streams of figures added to it to encypher it, had been broken by John Tiltman in late 1938. A similar high-grade naval
super-encyphered
code was introduced by the Imperial Japanese Navy in June 1939; within weeks Tiltman had also broken that. At this stage of the war, most Japanese military and naval codes were broken at outstations with the Wireless Experimental Centre, which concentrated on Japanese military codes based at Anand Parbat, just outside the Indian capital Delhi, and the Far East Combined Bureau (FECB), which worked on Japanese naval codes based in Singapore. Shortly before Singapore fell, the FECB moved to Colombo in Ceylon.
The British and the Americans had already prepared for the latter’s entry into the war with the British first approaching the US Navy with an offer to exchange cryptographic information in June 1940. They were rebuffed by Captain Laurance Safford, the commander of the US Navy’s codebreaking operation Op-20-G, who was very much opposed to any major exchange of information. A direct approach to President Franklin D. Roosevelt succeeded in winning his backing for an exchange of technical information on Japanese, German and Italian code and cypher systems
This made complete sense. The US Army’s Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) had broken the main Japanese diplomatic machine cypher, which the Americans codenamed
Purple
, but had not broken Enigma. The British had broken Enigma but not
Purple
. A cryptographic exchange agreement was agreed by senior US and British representatives in Washington in December 1940. The following month, nearly a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the Americans into the war, a four-man American delegation – comprising two US Army
officers, Captain Abraham Sinkov and Lieutenant Leo Rosen, and two US Navy officers, Lieutenant Robert Weeks and Ensign Prescott Currier – set sail for Britain carrying ‘certain packages’. The presence in the party of Rosen, the technical expert who had reverse engineered the
Purple
cypher machine, was
significant
. At least one of the ‘packages’ the Americans brought with them to Bletchley was a
Purple
machine.
‘It was early in 1941,’ said Barbara Abernethy, who was then working as Denniston’s personal assistant.
Commander Denniston told me he had something important to tell me. ‘There are going to be four Americans who are coming to see me at 12 o’clock tonight,’ he said. ‘I require you to come in with the sherry. You are not to tell anybody who they are or what they will be doing.’
Currier described landing at Sheerness dockyard on the
afternoon
of 8 February, and being met by a small delegation from Bletchley Park which included Tiltman. The crates containing the precious Top Secret ‘packages’ were loaded onto lorries and the convoy headed west towards London en route for Bletchley.
It soon became dark and the countryside was pitch black with rarely a light showing except for the faint glow emanating from a small hole scraped in the blacked-out headlight lens of the cars. When we arrived at BP, the large brick mansion was barely visible; not a glimmer of light showed through the blackout curtains. We were led through the main doors, and after passing through a blacked-out vestibule, into a dimly lit hallway, then into the office of Commander Denniston RN, chief of GC&CS. Denniston and his senior staff were standing in a semi-circle around his desk and we were introduced to and greeted by each in turn. It was truly a memorable moment for me.
Barbara Abernethy served each of the American guests with a
glass of sherry. ‘It came from the Army & Navy Stores and was in a great big cask which I could hardly lift,’ she said.
But Denniston rang the bell and I struggled in and somehow managed to pour glasses of sherry for these poor Americans, who I kept looking at. I’d never seen Americans before, except in the films. I just plied them with sherry. I hadn’t the
faintest
idea what they were doing there, I wasn’t told. But it was very exciting and hushed voices. I couldn’t hear anything of what was said but I was told not to tell anybody about it. I guess it wasn’t general knowledge that the Americans had got any liaison with Bletchley. It was before Pearl Harbor, you see, and presumably Roosevelt was not telling everybody there was going to be any liaison at that stage.
The British kept to the precise letter of the agreement,
providing
detailed information on how they had broken the Enigma cypher and on their work on a number of other codes and cyphers, including Tiltman’s studies of the main Japanese Army system. But in line with the Washington discussions, no details were provided of any of the actual messages they had intercepted. Even if this had not been an American condition, it seems likely that the British would have raised it since they were concerned over the Americans’ lack of a secure system for the dissemination of the ‘Special Intelligence’.
Denniston told Menzies that Currier and his colleagues had been ‘informed of the progress made on the Enigma machine’. The Americans were given ‘a paper model of the Enigma machine, detailing its internal wiring and how it worked, together with details of the Bombes. This was as much as, if not more than, the Americans provided.
Without a shadow of a doubt, the most significant
contribution
on the American side had been the ability to break
Purple
, provided generously from the outset by the US Army codebreakers. The British were again able to read all of the
‘State Secret’ communiques passing between the main Japanese embassies and Tokyo, and in particular Oshima’s reports from Berlin on the intentions of the Nazi leadership and the German High Command.
Safford complained at what the Americans received in return, horrifying the British, and doing nothing to assuage their concerns over US security, by writing an unclassified letter to demand that the Americans be given an Enigma Machine. Safford later claimed that the British reneged on their side of the deal and had ‘double-crossed us’.
The US Navy sent the British all the Comint [communications intelligence] it had on the Japanese Navy in early 1941 and got nothing in return. For several months, US Navy personnel thought they had been double-crossed by the British and were reluctant to go ahead with collaboration in direction-finding and other matters which were greatly to England’s advantage throughout 1941. The US Army got German and Italian diplomatic systems from the British and were very happy with the deal.
The false perception that the British were holding back on the exchange deal, largely the result of the US Navy codebreakers, failure to understand the ‘paper Enigma machine’ the British had handed over, was to become endemic among a number of senior US Navy officers. Yet at the cutting edge, US codebreakers said there was nothing the British held back. Currier recalled an atmosphere of ‘complete cooperation’ and said the members of the American delegation were shown everything they wanted to see.
All of us were permitted to come and go freely and to visit and talk with anyone in any area that interested us. We watched the entire operation and had all the techniques explained in great detail. We were thoroughly briefed on the latest techniques applied to the solution of Enigma and in the operation of the
Bombes. We had ample opportunity to take as many notes as we wanted and to watch first hand all operations involved. Furnishings were sparse: a desk with a chair for each of us, a pad of paper and a few pencils. The rooms were a bit cold and uncarpeted and a bit dusty but we soon found out that this was a condition common to all work spaces, including the Director’s.