Bletchley Park Code Break Essay

Bletchley Park was the center of British code-breaking operations during World War II. The codebreakers, who worked regularly, sought to find the secret communications of the Axis Powers, especially the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers. Bletchley Park was organized into sixteen different Huts, each with a different purpose. The codebreakers broke thousands upon thousands of codes countless times, that no one even kept track of how many codes were actually broken. They read messages from the German army, navy, air force, secret service, and even messages from the desk of Hitler. The Germans never suspected a thing. The codebreakers even cracked Italian and Japanese ciphers. The codebreakers, both male and female, helped win the war in North

Africa, in Italy and most importantly, by breaking the German secret service Enigma and the cipher used by Hitler to talk directly to his generals, this ensured the success of the D-Day landings.
The many codes that were broken had a significant importance in the war.

These codes that were broken helped the Allies win the war and have an advantage over the Axis powers. Since the Axis powers never suspected a thing about Bletchley Park and it’s codebreakers, many of their enigmas and ciphers were broken, making the Allies always one step ahead, because, most of the time, they knew what the Axis had planned next. It’s also been said that the work of Bletchley Park had shortened the war by two to four years. However, the code breaking required a lot of time dedication, as they weren’t just simple codes, they were complicated and took up a lot of

time.

Anyone and everyone who worked at Bletchley Park had to sign the Official Secrets Act of 1939. The intelligence produced at Bletchley was thought to be Britain's "Ultra secret.” It was considered to be even higher than the normally highest classification “Most Secret.” The security was also very important. A very few amount of people outside of Bletchley knew its operation, and even a fewer, inside or out, understood the range of that operation and the degree of its success. In 1942, a security warning emphasized the importance of caution even within Bletchley itself. It basically said, "Do not talk at meals. Do not talk in the transport. Do not talk travelling. Do not talk in the billet. Do not talk by your own fireside. Be careful even in your Hut..." The staff couldn’t talk to anyone about anything, even with the ones they were working with. The job required a lot of caution and security.
The staff usually worked a six-day week, switching through three shifts: 4 p.m.

to midnight, midnight to 8 a.m., and 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., each with a half-hour meal break. At the end of the third week, a worker usually went off at 8 a.m. and came back at 4 p.m., putting in sixteen hours on that last day. The irregular hours affected workers' health and social life, as well as the routines of the nearby homes. The work was tiresome and demanded intense concentration; staff eventually got a one week's leave four times a year. A small number of men worked part-time. By January 1945, at the height of the code breaking efforts, nearly twelve thousand people worked at Bletchley Park, the majority of these were women aged between eighteen and

twenty-four.
At first, the men in charge assumed that women were unfit and lacked the ability of operating the Bombe cryptanalysis machines and the later Colossus code-breaking computers. Although, when a group of women from the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) were brought in, they proved themselves to be capable for the job. Women held numerous roles at Bletchley, ranging from administrators, card index compilers and dispatch riders to code-breaking specialists. They performed very tedious roles, but still important jobs that required a great amount of concentration for hours. Women probably had the biggest and most important role at Bletchley. During the height of code breaking (1945), 12,000 people in total worked at Bletchley. From the total number, 10,000 of those people, meaning that two-thirds, or eighty percent of the workers, were women.

It was during the 1940s that many women were being recruited after the first Bombe machines were delivered. It was clear that many dedicated staff members were needed to operate them, so members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) were recruited, joined, and assigned to Bletchley Park. However, women took all kinds of roles. They took the Y-Service that intercepted the enemy codes, the Dispatch Riders who sent this information, Codebreakers, administrative or clerical work, Bombe and Colossus operators, and they even took the roles of cooks, cleaners, maintenance work, and transportation staff.
Early on, many of the young women recruited to Bletchley Park were considered to be “Debs,” who were found at the time to be reliable, young women who could be trusted not to give away the secret that it was Bletchley that was breaking the German codes. However, the women who worked at Bletchley Park weren’t just Debs, they came across from different social classes. Many of the women who worked at Bletchley had never even been to university, and found themselves working alongside highly educated men and, surprisingly, being treated as equals. Women and men were given the same jobs; gender did not matter. Though, women did earn less money than the men they worked alongside with for the same jobs. Even with this factor, Bletchley “was a remarkable community where neither rank nor status counted, and a girl of 19 with a bright idea would be encouraged to take it forward, long before any official equality for women”(Mavis Batey, codebreaker at Bletchley). Mavis Batey, a codebreaker at Bletchley, came up with one of those bright ideas and, as a result, became one of the top codebreakers at Bletchley Park. Women were able to advance to higher positions if the work they did was good enough, like Mavis, who became a top codebreaker.
Many of the women at the time probably didn’t know how big of an impact they had on the war. They felt that the life they led at Bletchley was so unnatural. At the time, women were expected to be married off and start a family. After the war, many of them did. They wanted a sense of “normality,” which, for most women was being married and having kids, or just working regular jobs. They didn’t know that all the work they did cut the war off by two years to four year, and even possibly saved many lives. The stories of the people at Bletchley Park only started to come to out in the 1970s because of the Official Secrets Act of 1939. Many of the women who worked there weren’t recognized until recently, when books and movies were created based off their lives at Bletchley Park. However, people within the Park gave recognition and praise to those who accomplished something important.

The remarkable work at Bletchley Park had changed the face of women in the 1940s. Though, many did not know that it was women who worked there, when their stories came out, it were an unforgettable shock. Women had worked on figuring out complicated codes and working on the Bombe machines and Colossus code-breaking computers. In the beginning, men had believed that women would not be able to complete these tasks. But, when more people were needed, and the men had no one to turn to but the women, they were proven wrong. The women were just as capable to do the hardest tasks as men were. The women who worked at Bletchley Park and the work that they did will never be forgotten.