The Imitation Game : who were the real Bletchley Park codebreakers ?

14 Nov 2014

The Imitation Game : who were the real Bletchley Park codebreakers ?
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Benedict Cumberbatch stars in The Imitation Game as Alan Turing, the genius
who cracked the Enigma code. But Turing wasn't alone at Bletchley Park

By Nigel Farndale

There are secrets and there are secrets. The work done during the Second World
War at Bletchley Park, a Victorian mansion in Buckinghamshire, was so secret,
the people who worked there didn't talk about it even to their parents, let
alone their husbands and wives. Some took the secret with them to their
graves.

No wonder Winston Churchill called the place his "goose that laid the golden
egg and never cackled". The "golden egg" was nothing less than the ability to
decode the secrets of the German war machine. Station X, as it was known, was
so efficient it could read coded messages from German generals on the
battlefield before they were even seen by Hitler in Berlin.

And the Germans never suspected a thing – which was not surprising, given that
they had invented the most complicated encoding machine the world had ever
seen. Enigma, as it was called, resembled a large typewriter with lights and
could, letter-by-letter, turn a message into unintelligible gibberish that
could be decoded only by using another Enigma machine.

Thanks to a series of lettered rotors, which were reset each day, Enigma
machines could be configured in 150million million million different ways.

Such was the scale of this complexity, the Germans thought it completely
safe..../snip/


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/11229240/The-Imitation-Game-who-were-the-real-Bletchley-Park-codebreakers.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/11231608/Breaking-the-Enigma-code-was-the-easiest-part-of-the-Nazi-puzzle.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/11226192/Bletchley-Park-codebreakers-dried-their-knickers-on-Hitlers-Enigma-machine.html