Re: New Museums

From Dayton Daily News
cheers,

geoff
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Codebreakers' next task is preservation
Saving the Dayton building that turned the tide of WWII
By Jim DeBrosse

Dayton Daily News
DAYTON  - During World War II, Britain and America worked closely together to break the German Enigma codes, an effort that saved millions of lives by shortening the bloody conflict in Europe by two years, some experts say.
Now the two allies find themselves cooperating in another struggle, this time to preserve the key centers in the top-secret attack against the German ciphers- Bletchley Park outside of London and NCR's Building 26 in Dayton.
The chance to publicize the plight of both codebreaking centers is what brought Tony Sale, the retired British engineer who has led the fight to preserve Bletchley, to Dayton on Friday for the premiere of Dayton Codebreakers, a one-hour
documentary film detailing America's contribution to cracking the Enigma.
"The future of Bletchley is in question, and I don't think a lot of people understand the threat that it's under. (Dayton) has a similar problem in that public awareness must be raised" about the uncertain future of Building 26, Sale said in an interview.
Dayton Codebreakers debuted Friday night at the University of Dayton's Kennedy Center.
It will be broadcast on ThinkTV Channel 16 at 9 p.m. Tuesday, and ThinkTV Channel 14 at 10 p.m. Wednesday.
The film's producers, Aileen LeBlanc and Debbie Desch Anderson, have high hopes that the local production will be picked up by national public television.
The documentary tells the story of what happened inside NCR's Building 26 during World War II. By 1943, it had become the Navy's top-secret factory for designing and manufacturing sophisticated codebreaking machines, employing nearly 1,000 people.
NCR was a logical choice for the Navy project, since NCR's production had been idled by the war and because its chief engineer, Joe Desch, had designed the world's first electronic calculator using hundreds of tiny gas tubes that he had invented.
Desch - the father of Debbie Desch Anderson - is credited with designing an American version of Britain's Enigma-busting Bombe that enabled the allies to re-enter the German naval code in 1943 after Bletchley Park had been blacked out for months. The NCR machines also helped Bletchley cope with the mountain of German army and air force radio messages to be deciphered prior to and during the D-Day invasion.
"The American four-wheel Bombe was a magnificent, innovative technology," Sale said. "It was a brilliant design based on the same mechanical search (of the Enigma code settings) as the British Bombe, but the method of actually tracking and recording the settings with gas tubes was way ahead of Bletchley."
Sale operates the world's most popular Web site for World War II codebreaking aficionados, www.
codesandciphers.org.uk/, which receives 70,000 hits a week from all over the world, he said.
The future of Building 26 looked promising last May when NCR and the University of Dayton announced they had struck a tentative deal for UD to purchase 49 acres between Brown Street and Patterson Boulevard south of Stewart Street, including Building 26 at Stewart and Patterson. The former sales training center was closed several years ago by NCR as it began to consolidate its property holdings.
But talks between NCR and UD, ongoing for nearly a year now, have bogged down.
"We're still in the process, we hope, of buying the property," said UD spokeswoman Teri Rizvi. "It's just a very complicated legal deal because of the environmental issues."
UD is investigating environmental problems with the 49-acre property, which was once NCR's main manufacturing complex when it built mechanical cash registers.
The university is also looking into state and federal funding for cleaning up the property.
Thousands of miles across the Atlantic, Bletchley Park has had preservation problems of its own. Originally a Victorian country estate, it became the World War II center for breaking German, Italian and Japanese codes and ciphers.
At its height, in 1945, it housed 9,000 people, including a large contingent of Americans.
At the end of the war, the buildings still stood, but what went on in them remained completely secret for 30 years.
Sale is hoping to raise £5 million ($9.4 million) to buy the land and buildings and open a World Heritage Site devoted to World War II codebreaking.
He has incorporated The CodesandCiphers Heritage Trust
(bletchleyparkheritage.org.uk/) and will soon begin raising money for the campaign.
"It's something I don't really want to undertake at age 74, but it has to be done," Sale said.
At a reunion of 150 Bletchley Park employees in 1991, Sale and his wife, Margaret, "stood up on the platform and we promised that we would set up a fitting memorial to their work for their children and their grandchildren.
"And that's what we're going to do."
Contact Jim DeBrosse at 225-2437.