In March, 38 members of the ‘Out and About’ group went for a two day trip, our
main objective being to visit the popular Bletchley Park, which certainly lived up to
its reputation. We stayed the night at Milton Keynes, and visited Oxford on the
way home.
Bletchley Park is an estate located in the town of Bletchley, in Milton Keynes,
Buckinghamshire, England, and is run by the Bletchley Park Trust as a heritage
attraction. The site currently houses the Bletchley Park Museum, the National
Museum of Computing, tenanted office space, and a number of other attractions.
During the Second World War, it was here that an organisation called
the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS) studied and devised methods
to enable the Allied forces to decipher the military codes and ciphers that
secured German, Japanese, and other Axis nation’s communications.
The GC&CS mission was to crack the Nazi codes and ciphers. The most famous
of the cipher systems to be broken at Bletchley Park was the Enigma.
The German military used the Enigma cipher machine during WW2 to keep their
communications secret and believed in its absolute security. However, with the
help of Polish mathematicians who had managed to acquire a machine prior to
the outbreak of WW2, British code breakers stationed at Bletchley Park
managed to exploit weaknesses in the machine and how it was used and were
able to crack the Enigma code.
The Code breakers made a vital contribution to D-Day in other ways. The
breaking of the ciphers of the German Secret Intelligence Service allowed the
British to confuse Hitler over where the Allies were to land. His decision to
divert troops away from the Normandy beaches undoubtedly ensured the
invasion's success. according to historians, shortened the war by two years thus
saving many lives.
The process of breaking Enigma was aided considerably by a complex electromechanical device, designed by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman. The Bombe,
as it was called, ran through all the possible Enigma wheel configurations in
order to reduce the possible number of settings in use to a manageable number
for further hand testing.
AlanTuring read mathematics at King’s College, Cambridge,and was the head of
the code breaking unit. He used his profound mathematical skill with the help of
his colleague Gordon Welchman, to design the series of huge electromechanical
code breaking machines known as ‘bombes’.
The following are exhibits made out of slate as part of their exhibition.
March 2013