Bletchley Park
Yesterday, I went to a nearby tourist attraction that I had been wanting to go to, and just hadn't made the time to do it. Bletchley Park was unknown to me before I arrived here, but it is a place we all owe a debt of gratitude to.
In 1939, at the start of WWII, MI6, the British Intelligence Office stationed a team of people at Bletchley Park to decipher the messages that the German troops were sending to one another. The Germans had perfected a machine called an Enigma.
As I understand it (please know that a lot of the information I learned was over my head!), the Germans would type in a message into this machine that would then code it into a different series of letters. They would then use morse code to send the message and the recipients would use another Enigma to decode the message. So, the British were picking up the morse code communications, but had a hard time reading them. To make matters even more complicated, the Enigmas would change their codes every two or three days.
The British officials gathered the brightest people to come and work at Bletchley: mathematicians were the most common profession around, but chess grandmasters and musicians were also employed. They broke the code using mainly pencil and paper, educated guesses as to what the letters represented. A machine called "The Bombe" was invented that helped to narrow down the possibilities of letter combinations, but it was still up to the individuals to decipher the codes.
The people at Bletchley Park were able to solve the mystery of the Enigma fairly early on, but German improvements to the machine baffled them for nearly a year. It is believed that the work that was done at Bletchley Park helped to shorten the length of the war by nearly two years. They were sworn to secrecy, and it was only in recent history that they were allowed to share all that they had done. In fact, the thousands of people that worked there were among the first to know that the war had ended, and yet, when they went home to their families, they were forbidden to disclose the brilliant contributions they had made.
One of my favorite parts of the museum was the pigeon exhibit, yes, pigeon exhibit. It was dedicated to the work that homing pigeons had done carrying top secret messages back and forth. There were even portraits of pigeons that had been given awards for the great work they had done. Quite impressive!
In 1939, at the start of WWII, MI6, the British Intelligence Office stationed a team of people at Bletchley Park to decipher the messages that the German troops were sending to one another. The Germans had perfected a machine called an Enigma.
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| Here's Herman with an Enigma. |
The British officials gathered the brightest people to come and work at Bletchley: mathematicians were the most common profession around, but chess grandmasters and musicians were also employed. They broke the code using mainly pencil and paper, educated guesses as to what the letters represented. A machine called "The Bombe" was invented that helped to narrow down the possibilities of letter combinations, but it was still up to the individuals to decipher the codes.
The people at Bletchley Park were able to solve the mystery of the Enigma fairly early on, but German improvements to the machine baffled them for nearly a year. It is believed that the work that was done at Bletchley Park helped to shorten the length of the war by nearly two years. They were sworn to secrecy, and it was only in recent history that they were allowed to share all that they had done. In fact, the thousands of people that worked there were among the first to know that the war had ended, and yet, when they went home to their families, they were forbidden to disclose the brilliant contributions they had made.
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| "We also served" |
I was really very impressed with the site and the work that these geniuses had done without any sort of praise. The teacher in me couldn't stop thinking, "Are we truly preparing our children to be able to solve all sorts of problems?"
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