The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (24 page)

On the morning of 6 June 1944, as Allied forces came ashore in Normandy, the bosses at Bletchley Park were very well aware that some of the young men working there would be
wondering whether they shouldn’t be fighting alongside their friends and relatives, who were now thrust into the thick of battle. Eric Jones, the head of Hut 3, told his staff that the work
Bletchley was doing might not be so dangerous but it was just as important to the war effort. There was ‘no back-stage organisation that has done more for past Allied operations and Allied
plans for this assault; and none that can contribute more to the development of the invasion once the bloody battles for the beaches have been won’.

The extraordinary intelligence produced by the Tunny and Enigma sections ahead of D-Day was unprecedented in its scale, saving countless Allied lives. But initially, the panicky reaction of some
of the German forces caused problems in Hut 6, because the Germans were so anxious to report the invasion that they forgot to enter the new day’s keys on their Enigma machines. Pamela Draughn
came into the Duddery at nine o’clock that morning completely unaware that the invasion had begun.

‘I didn’t know. I hadn’t heard the news before I went into the office and when I got there the night shift was standing there looking absolutely desperate. Wire baskets
everywhere full of paper which hadn’t decoded.’

The Machine Room had spent most of the night unsure which of the settings the Germans were using was correct,
with large numbers of Enigma messages proving impossible to
decode. They’d all been sent to the Duddery, where the night shift had become completely overwhelmed.

‘At first I really wanted to laugh because it was quite obvious the Germans had got into a complete panic. Obviously the minute they saw the invasion they’d all started reporting it
to one another and they’d completely forgotten that they had to change the code. It was absolutely frantic but we could decode them all and eventually we got them all sorted out.’

One of the messages from that night so exemplified the German response and seemed to Pamela to be so poetic that it stuck in her head.

‘It said: “We are about to retreat. We can no longer face up to the
von den immer wieder von allen Seiten anfliessenden Feind
.” It means we’re fleeing from the
from all sides on-flowing enemy!’

From that point onwards, the codebreakers really did feel that they were part of the battle, in much the same way as they had during the North African campaign, and in the same way that Hut 4
and Hut 8 had during the Battle of the Atlantic. Everything was urgent. Everything was important. No one could afford to slacken off. Pamela and her colleagues knew there were too many people, too
many lives, depending on them.

‘The mood in the hut was always the same. After the invasion it all seemed very much more urgent in a way, as you can imagine. I enjoyed it immensely. You really felt all the time that you
were doing something worthwhile.’

Susan Wenham was one of the new female codebreakers
working in the Machine Room. She was quite old at thirty-two, having gone to university late following the death of her
mother, and was one of the young women recruited into Hut 6 by Stuart Milner-Barry from Newnham College, Cambridge. She’d started out in the Registry as a ‘Blister’ and was one of
the women transferred to the all-female Machine Room in 1942 in time for the move into Block D, which was far from a major improvement in terms of working conditions.

‘Hut 6 was not luxurious; the rooms might not be left when the cleaners came to sweep and the red dust got into our noses and throats; Bovril from the urn was revolting and put me off it
forever. Meals in the canteen were adequate if unexciting and there was always salad and, unfailingly, beetroot in small cubes.’

As the Allies began building up a massive foothold in northern France, Hitler became frustrated with the inability of his commanders to find a way to hold back the US and British advance. The
Newmanry received a teleprinter message from Hitler ordering his commanders to strike north to the Channel to cut the Allied advance in two and turn the tables on them. It was extraordinarily
risky, if not foolhardy, and would have been highly unlikely to succeed even if Bletchley had not been reading Hitler’s teleprinter conversations with his generals. Given that Allied
commanders were fully aware of the plans, it had no chance of success. But the German generals had no choice but to obey Hitler. Any other route would have been treason and, effectively, suicide.
They pressed forward into the Falaise Gap, twenty-five miles south of Caen, and found
themselves caught between the advancing US forces and the British and Canadian forces
moving in from the north.

Susan was on duty in the Machine Room and in ‘the most exciting night’ she had at Bletchley found herself working on a long message giving the German plans to try to get out of the
Allied trap.

‘It was at the time of the Falaise Gap and the Germans were making plans to make their last terrific push to try and get out of the pincer they were in. I was on the night shift and the
day shift had had an enormous message.’

The long German Enigma messages had to be sent in sections in an unsuccessful attempt to make it harder to break. The sections were known as
Teile
, the German word for
‘parts’.

‘It was a ten-
Teile
message, a huge message, and they had managed to break it during the day and it was to say how the Germans were planning to get out of this impasse, and six of
the
Teile
came through to us.’

The German generals had realised that they had no chance of obeying Hitler’s orders and so rather than lose 300,000 men they decided to withdraw.

Then, during Susan’s shift, another six-part message came through in a different code. When the Registry checked it, each part had the same number of groups as in the earlier message that
had been broken, so they knew it was exactly the same message in another Enigma army code that hadn’t been read before but could now be broken.

‘During the night, a very obvious re-encodement of the earlier message came in. We could see that it was a word-for-word re-encodement. So we let Hut 3 know and got all
the Bombes cleared. We worked like mad on this thing, creating menus. It was a very tiring business. By morning it was all put through and finished. So that was a very exciting
night.’

As the Allied forces moved across France, Belgium and Holland into Germany, more and even better Colossus computers were delivered to Bletchley until in the end there were ten
in all. With the German troops largely on the retreat, the Enigma messages became less important. It was the Tunny messages which were producing by far the best intelligence, revealing the
increasingly desperate responses of Hitler and his generals. Helen recalled that she and the other girls in the Testery found themselves working nonstop.

‘The last stages of the war were hectic. The traffic became almost more than we could cope with. Sometimes, having staggered off duty and dropped exhausted into bed, we were aroused from
deep sleep a couple of hours later to return to the Testery and carry on.’

Although Helen had lost her husband in the most tragic of circumstances there was no option for the young widow but to go back to work and get on with life.

‘I and many of my friends in the Testery made the most of life. There were some passionate romances. We lived totally in the present, greedy for life and with no thought for the future. We
didn’t know if there would be a future.’

On days off and even between shifts they would take the train to London. Sometimes, they went to a film in the
morning, a theatre matinee in the evening and followed that
with dinner and dancing.

‘Catching the last train back to Bletchley, we arrived just in time to change into uniform and report for duty, to relieve the girls who had been bashing away at the machines all evening.
It was a stimulating, exhausting life.’

On 30 April 1945, with German resistance almost over and Russian troops closing in on his bunker in Berlin, Hitler committed suicide. Then, in the early hours of 7 May 1945, Hut 6 received a
message they didn’t need to decode. It was from Grand Admiral Dönitz, Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy and Hitler’s successor, saying that Germany had surrendered
unconditionally. The message was passed to Hut 3, which reported it immediately to London. The contents were known throughout both Hut 6 and Hut 3 almost immediately but none of them said a word to
anyone outside their hut. That was the way it was at Bletchley. The news remained a secret even within the Park until it was broadcast later that day on the BBC.

Mary Wisbey’s recruitment to Bletchley Park wasn’t just like something out of a spy novel. It was the real thing. She’d been due to take up a place at Lady
Margaret Hall, Oxford, but to the dismay of her father, a Northamptonshire farmer, she insisted on joining the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. What was the point of going to university when the
country was at war? Everyone else was doing something; she should be doing something too. Her father disagreed. He’d served in the First World War, been taken prisoner by the Germans. He knew
the war wouldn’t end quickly. He wanted Mary to take up the place at Oxford now. She could always join the WAAFs later once she’d got her degree.

But Mary wasn’t to be dissuaded. Initially too young to join up, she worked in a canteen for wounded servicemen in the morning and helped the vicar organise the village’s air-raid
protection in the afternoon until she reached that all-important age of seventeen and a half and was old enough to join the WAAFs.

‘We had fifteen days’ training at Innsworth, near
Gloucester, and we weren’t in uniform.’ The Women’s Auxiliary Air Force had only just been
set up and they hadn’t yet got enough equipment or uniforms. ‘After the tenth or eleventh day we got our uniforms. I had no idea at all what I was going to do, I had no qualifications
at all; I just was hell-bent on being a WAAF.’

After training and a stint in Coastal Command, Mary was transferred to a recruitment post and sent to Downing College, Cambridge, to study ‘the psychology of the interview’ under
Professor Frederic Bartlett, then one of the world leaders in the field of cognitive psychology, the science of how humans think.

‘I rather imagine that already I’d been earmarked for some sort of intelligence work and I think it was Professor Bartlett who was responsible for what followed.’

Mary was called back for a second course in psychology and then given an intriguing set of orders. She was told to go to H. Sichel’s, a wine merchants based in Soho, and say a coded phrase
to one of the assistants behind the counter.

‘I said what I had to say. I was taken to the back of the shop and a button was pressed – a door opened up and closed behind me and I was in a completely different world.’

Herbert Sichel, a member of a family of genuine and very famous wine merchants, had begun working for MI6 before the war, setting up his own wine importers, distinct from the family business,
and using it to gather intelligence on Germany and Italy. The various branches of his shops were employed as fronts for MI6 operations and for the recruitment and payment of spies.

‘There was a wine shop on one side and then when you went through the door there was a large place full of people, desks and things. I was told to go upstairs and at
the top of the stairs there was an office. There was a senior officer sat behind a desk and a row of coloured telephones and he was talking into two different telephones in two different
languages.’

Eventually, he put one of the phones down and a short while afterwards ended the other telephone conversation. He then asked Mary some fairly innocuous questions before telling her she would
have to go before a full selection board. She was called back to London a couple of weeks later and in a more formal setting sat before a board chaired by a senior RAF officer but made up mostly of
people who seemed to be civilians, including at least one woman.

‘They were terrifying people, eight or nine of them. The questions were extremely varied. They asked me about French poetry. They asked me about German philosophy. They asked me about all
sorts of things but then came that awful question. They asked me what I thought about the art of the Ming dynasty.’

Mary struggled for what to her seemed ages but was probably not much more than ten seconds. She was fed up with all the stupid questions that couldn’t possibly have any relevance to what
was going on in the war, and for a brief moment the only way out seemed to be flippancy.

‘I think it’s slightly different from the Ting.’

There was a deathly silence. Everyone seemed to be looking at her as if she was a stupid young girl who didn’t understand how serious everything was.

‘My answer was so frivolous and ghastly that I thought as soon as I said it, you idiot, what on earth did you say that for? That’s put the lid on everything.
And then to my great surprise, someone sniggered, and then they all laughed, and the chairman said: “Thank you. That will be all.”’

Mary was certain she’d messed it up, but a few weeks later she received a letter ordering her to report to the School of Oriental and African Studies in Russell Square, in the centre of
London’s Bloomsbury district, to study Japanese. She wasn’t the only one. There were six other WAAFs on the same course: Eileen Clarke, Evelyn Curtis, Cicely Naismith, Denise
Gifford-Hull, Margaret Brabbs and Peggy Jackson.

They hit it off immediately, seven young women living in London in RAF quarters off Harley Street, learning Japanese together, testing each other with cards depicting the various Japanese
Kana
syllables on their way to college, to the bemusement of the other passengers on the red No. 14 double-decker bus. The girls had no idea why they were learning Japanese, although the
fact that they seemed to be learning only words related to the use of aircraft gave them a clue. But they were young women, most of them away from home for the first time, growing up quickly
together. They bonded in an astonishingly inseparable way, calling themselves ‘the JappyWaaf’, although none of them could quite remember who suggested the title or why.