The Secrets of Station X (42 page)

The three-rotor Enigma cypher machine used by the
Wehrmacht
with the lid open and the plugboard, or steckerboard, visible at the front of the machine. The three rotors or wheels can be seen at the top of the picture. The letters on the side of each wheel were used to indicate its precise starting position.

The Polish codebreaker Marian Rejewski (
TOP LEFT
) was the first man to break the ‘steckered’ Enigma machine. The Poles were assisted by information provided by Hans Thilo Schmidt (
TOP RIGHT
), codenamed
Asche
, a French spy inside the German Defence Ministry, who sold Enigma manuals and key settings to the French intelligence service. Gustave Bertrand (
BELOW
with wife Mary),

The codebreakers arrive at Bletchley Park in August 1939 (
TOP
). They include Dilly Knox (
BOTTOM RIGHT
), the only British codebreaker at this stage to have broken Enigma cyphers, and Alan Turing (
BOTTOM LEFT
), who was to play a key role in the breaking of the German Navy’s Enigma cyphers. Knox subsequently broke the German intelligence service Enigma cypher. That break was crucial to the Double Cross deception operations that helped ensure the success of D-Day.

Alastair Denniston (
TOP LEFT
) was the first head of Bletchley Park. Professor E. R. P. ‘Vinca’ Vincent (
TOP CENTRE
) worked on Italian naval cyphers. John Tiltman (
TOP RIGHT
) was the chief cryptographer from early 1942, breaking numerous codes and cyphers. 

Hugh Alexander (
LEFT
) another of the leading codebreakers and head of the Naval Enigma section Hut 8.

RIGHT:
A rare photograph of German operators using the Enigma machine.

Photographs of the codebreakers working inside the Bletchley Park mansion before the moves to the wooden huts are very rare. Leslie Lambert (
TOP
), who worked in the Air Section, was better known as the popular BBC radio personality A. J. Alan. Joan Wingfield (
RIGHT
) was a 24-year-old Italian linguist who had joined GC&CS in 1937.

Codebreakers watching a game of rounders. Standing (
LEFT TO RIGHT
): Captain William Ridley, MI6 Chief Administrative Officer; John Barns, Naval Section; George McVittie, Head of Meteorological Cyphers in Air Section; Marjorie de Haan, Diplomatic Section; Alastair Denniston, Head of Bletchley Park. Seated (
LEFT TO RIGHT
): Edward Smith, Hut 3; Edmund ‘Scrounger’ Green, Naval Section; Barbara Abernethy, Denniston’s PA; Patrick Wilkinson, Naval Section; Alan Bradshaw, GC&CS Chief Administrative Officer.

Two thirds of the people working at Bletchley Park were women. They included around 2,000 members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, or Wrens, most of whom operated the Bombes (shown here) testing possible solutions of the Enigma wheel orders and key settings.

Women worked in a wide variety of roles, including codebreaking. These woman are working on the Enigma cyphers in Hut 6. There is an Enigma machine on the table to test solutions.