Visiting Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing Cracked the Enigma Code

Visiting Bletchley Park, the former Top-Secret codebreaking centre from World War Two, where Alan Turing cracked the Enigma Code.

Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and a team of dedicated and highly intelligent individuals cracked the Enigma Code used by Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

Their efforts played a crucial role in shortening the war and shaping our future.

Bletchley – My Home Town

And all this happened in the town of Bletchley, not more than a 10-minute walk from where I was born, where I grew up.

Bletchley is a town, now incorporated into the New City of Milton Keynes. My birth certificate says: Bletchley – Bucks (Buckinghamshire), 50 miles, 80 km northwest-ish of London

Entering Bletchley, MK1, MK Dons Stadium behind me on the V7 Saxon Street (Bletchley Park is MK3, I lived in MK2):

And as I wrap up my life here, back in March 2022, following the death of my father, I take one last opportunity to go and backpack it.

The work was hush-hush. Everyone who worked there had to sign the Official Secrets Act.

After the war, almost everything was destroyed. But it wasn’t until 1987 that the place was finally closed. Yet still, no one talked about it. In the early 80s, I had delivered newspapers there. The big house was said to be haunted.

In 1994, it was opened to the public as a museum by HRH The Duke of Kent​.

I am fascinated by military history.

I love the history that I can relate to. My dad was born in 1940, evacuated to Liverpool, which incidentally got bombed way more than Stanmore. My mum was born in 1942. Her dad was RAF ground crew. Her mum was in the WAAF.

I lived through the Cold War era, the Falklands War and the Balkans War. This is history in my lifetime. It’s hard for me to relate to the Spanish Inquisition or other similar events, where history is based on what historians think happened.

I have been to the Resistance Museum in Copenhagen and the Cold War Bunkers, Checkpoint Charlie, the Glienicker Brücke and a few other key points in Berlin.

I have since visited the Battle of Britain Bunker Museum in Uxbridge, the Churchill War Rooms in Central London and the Western Approaches HQ in Liverpool.

Check out the Bletchley Park website for the latest entrance fees and opening hours.

Robert Harris wrote a novel, entitled ENIGMA (yeah, I read this book too). A film based on that book was produced in 2001, starring Kate Winslet, which I will watch with Miss CDMX when I get back to Mexico. And then there was The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, released in 2015.

And if you have watched this film, as I have, a few times, you might come away with the idea that Alan Turing single-handedly did everything.

The Enigma Machine:

The Enigma machine was designed by a German engineer, Arthur Scherbius, just after the end of World War I.

It was designed to encrypt messages by scrambling them into meaningless arrays of random letters.

When a message was typed into the keyboard, the 3 rotors changed each letter to a different one, which would then light up a display above the keyboard. The new letter would be written down, and then the whole message would be sent as Morse code. The operator on the receiving end entered the scrambled message, and the Enigma machine reversed the process. Fucking genius, if you ask me.

The German military was using the Enigma machine for years before the Second World War, and it was three Polish mathematicians, Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki, who had learned how to read the messages and this intel was shared, but on the outbreak of World War Two, the Germans increased the security and changed the cypher settings daily.

There is an original Enigma machine on display at the Alan Turing Institute, located in the British Library in London.

The Bombe:

The British BOMBE machine was produced by the GC&CS (Government Code and Cypher School) at Bletchley Park by Alan Turing, which was developed from the ‘bomba’, the machine the Poles had been using for seven years before the outbreak of the war, in 1939, with a significant upgrade designed by Gordon Welchman in 1940.
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The main thing about the Bombe machine was that it could break the codes faster than a human ever could.

The Huts at Bletchley Park:

Hut 3 was one of the most secret areas of Bletchley Park. It is where the deciphered messages were translated and analysed.

​Gordon Welchman headed the team at HUT 6, which was responsible for the German Army and Air Force ciphers.

​HUT 8 was responsible for cracking German Naval codes. German U-boats worked in the Atlantic, destroying Allied ships which supplied Great Britain with food during the war, so this was a crucial part of the war effort.

Alan Turing headed HUT 8 and developed a technique referred to as BANBURISMUS, which helped crack the Naval Enigma Cipher, which saw the development of TURINGERY, a manual codebreaking technique that was later used to break the Lorenz Cypher.

The Colossus Computer:

Colossus was a set of computers designed by Thomas Flowers (assisted by many others) at Bletchley Park between 1943 and 1945, and helped to break the Lorenz Cypher.

The Colossus is regarded as the world’s first programmable, electronic, digital computer.

Codebreaking:

The first step in the codebreaking process was to get hold of enemy messages. The main way to communicate during World War Two was with Morse code. Britain set up listening stations known as Y Stations to listen to the enemy’s messages, which were copied down and sent to Bletchley.

The second step was the most difficult. Messages arriving at Bletchley Park had to be deciphered. Basic ciphers could be broken by hand, but machine ciphers were more complicated, and to work through the billions of settings, machines were invented to speed up the process.

Once the day’s settings had been worked out, the encrypted messages were entered into a Typex Machine, and the deciphered message came out.

Translators had to turn the messages into English, and then everything was cross-referenced to create a bigger picture of what was going on. The results were seen by others at Bletchley Park who were not doing the actual codebreaking, who then turned them into intelligence reports. This was then passed on to MI6.

​Once the messages were cracked, the information known as ‘intelligence’, codenamed ULTRA. They were then dispatched by riders on Norton WD16H 500cc single-cylinder motorcycles to ‘WINDY RIDGE,’ a wireless station in Whaddon Hall, 5 miles away, where the messages were relayed to MI6 agents and military commanders on the frontline.

The Queen visited Bletchley Park on July 15, 2011:

How to get to Bletchley Park:

The easiest way to get to Bletchley Park is by train. From London Euston take a local train to Bletchley. Travel time is anywhere between 40 minutes and an hour, depending on the train.

If you are travelling from cities to the north, first, get a fast train to Milton Keynes. Then change to a local train for the short journey to Bletchley.

Then it’s literally just a 5-minute walk from Bletchley station to Bletchley Park.