Bletchley Park : It's no secret, just an Enigma

29 Aug 2009

Bletchley Park : It's no secret, just an Enigma
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The country mansion where thousands toiled to crack the Nazi code will 
next weekend host a special 70th anniversary reunion, reports Max 
Davidson.
 
By Max Davidson

"This place changed the whole nature of warfare," says Simon Greenish, 
director of the Bletchley Park Trust. "Before Bletchley Park, wars were 
fought between armies, with human intelligence playing only a minor part. 
After Bletchley Park, intelligence gathering has lain at the root of every 
major military campaign."

We are sitting in a nondescript room overlooking a scruffy piece of lawn, 
overhung by trees. To our left, a potholed drive zigzags through low 
outbuildings, their windows cracked or boarded up. There is a tiny car 
park, part gravel, part mud. A guide shepherds a tour group through a hole 
in a fence. Pigeons drink from a grey puddle.

It is not an impressive setting but, if you know your British history, it 
is a place of pilgrimage. Here Alan Turing, a mathematical genius from 
Cambridge, worked around the clock with his colleagues to break the famous 
Enigma code. The Germans thought it could never be deciphered. It was. And 
the war was shorter as a result. Two years shorter, according to some 
historians. These shabby buildings don't seem so shabby any more.

"You know what one German visitor said to me ?" says Greenish, with a note 
of pride. " 'Thank you for the work done at Bletchley Park. Without it, 
the Americans would have nuked Berlin.' "

Like all the best-kept secrets, Bletchley Park has emerged so slowly, inch 
by inch, like a timid animal breaking cover, that it has retained its 
mystique. People who had never heard of the place 15 years ago have 
gradually come to appreciate that what went on here, in a red-brick house 
in rural Buckinghamshire, had the same momentous significance as the 
Battle of Britain or the D-Day landings. It is a piece of our heritage we 
neglect at our peril : a very English success story, as understated as it 
is extraordinary.

Next weekend, to mark the 70th anniversary of the day Turing and his 
colleagues reported for duty at the outbreak of war, the annual Bletchley 
Park Reunion, open to the public, will have a special poignancy. More than 
10,000 men and women worked at Bletchley Park during the war, but there 
will be no more than 150 at the reunion, the youngest well into their 
eighties..../snip/


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/uk/6103805/Bletchley-Park-Its-no-secret-just-an-Enigma.html

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk