The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (27 page)

The Japanese ambassador had provided a detailed rundown of German forces in both France and Belgium, listing the number of divisions, where they were based and how they were controlled. He also
listed the reinforcements that would take place in the event of an Allied invasion, which included three top SS armoured divisions. Oshima provided the first authoritative figure for the number of
German forces in France, which he put at 1.4 million, and confirmed that the Germans believed the Allied forces would come ashore around Calais. That knowledge would be absolutely vital to the
D-Day deception plan that the British were putting together to confuse the Germans over where the invasion would take place.

The gaps in Oshima’s report – and there seemed at the time to be very few – were more than filled in by Colonel Ito Seiichi, the Japanese military attaché in Berlin, who
made his own tour of the entire German coastal defences, sending a highly detailed 32-part report back to Tokyo. This was encoded using the Japanese military attaché code that had been
broken by John Tiltman, and was decoded in Block F. Colonel Ito gave a comprehensive description of every part
of the fortifications, detailing everything from the heaviest
artillery battery to the smallest collection of flame-throwers.

The RAF had been flying aerial reconnaissance operations along the French and Belgian coastline for several years, taking photographs of every inch of the Atlantic Wall, but the intelligence
provided by Bletchley was far more comprehensive and allowed intelligence chiefs to send the RAF aircraft back so that more photographs could be taken of areas highlighted in the two reports.

The codebreakers expected the Japanese naval attaché in Berlin, Rear Admiral Kojima Hideo, to make his own tour of the defences as well, but they were struggling to break the Coral
machine cipher he used for his reports to Tokyo. A joint British-American operation to try to unravel the system was under way using methods pioneered by Hut 8 in the breaking of the German naval
Enigma, but they were struggling to make any progress. In February 1944, Hugh Alexander flew to Washington to lead the attack there and Joan Clarke and other members of Hut 8 stepped up their
efforts at Bletchley. Finally, in March, they cracked it.

Just a few weeks later, the Japanese naval attaché went ahead with his inspection of the German defences and his report back to Tokyo was decoded at Bletchley. It was more authoritative
than Oshima’s and critically – given that D-Day was only a couple of weeks away – Admiral Kojima was briefed by General Erwin Rommel, who was now commanding the German forces
defending the French coast, on how he planned to respond to an Allied invasion. Rommel made it clear that he intended ‘to destroy the enemy near the
coast, most of all
on the beaches, without allowing them to penetrate any considerable distance inland’.

The Allies were just a couple of weeks away from D-Day and – thanks to the codebreakers – they knew where the Germans thought they would attack, they knew the Germans believed the
Double Cross deception plan, they knew every detail of the German defences, they even knew precisely how the Germans intended to respond to the invasion. Everything they did could be tailored to
make maximum use of this information to catch the Germans on the wrong foot. It was to prove vital to the success of the D-Day invasion.

Marion Graham was recruited to work on the Japanese codes in early 1944. She’d been born in Bombay where her grandfather had been one of the engineers who built the Great
Indian Peninsula Railway. Her father worked for the railway and Marion was sent home when she was five to live with her aunt in Breconshire. She was fifteen when war began and after leaving school
she helped with refugees while waiting to go to secretarial college.

‘It was called Mrs Hester’s Secretarial College. It was quite famous. They’d been going for years and they always got you top jobs. The college had been evacuated from London
to Lincolnshire.’

After completing the course, Marion took a job while she was waiting to be called up. She’d volunteered for the Wrens so was rather surprised when she was summoned to the Foreign Office,
which unbeknown to her was in touch with Mrs Hester’s looking for likely recruits for Bletchley.

‘Bletchley couldn’t just recruit from the Labour Exchange, of course, so at first they had to recruit the director’s friends, get admirals’
daughters, generals’ daughters and suchlike, but then the net had to be spread wider and the Foreign Office was in touch with the secretarial colleges.’

There were a number of old ‘Hester’s Girls’ at Bletchley, including two of Marion’s best friends from the college, the Glassborow twins, Valerie and Mary.
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Initially, Marion was in a terraced house in Stony Stratford with a working-class family. It was not at all what she was used to. The lavatory was down the end of a
very narrow back garden.

‘But they were a good family. The house was spotlessly clean. You could skid on the lino. Outside loo. No bathroom. It was simple. But they were a very decent family. Then they had family
troubles and I had to move to Bedford, which I didn’t really like because it was such a long way. But the people there were a very nice family too so I was very fortunate with my
billets.’

Marion started out working in Block F typing up Japanese messages that were being sent to Washington and Colombo, mostly about Japanese troop movements. Around the end of 1944, she was moved to
a unit called Clinical Monitoring of Y, or CMY, based in the old Hut 6, where her job was reading the intercepted Japanese messages to make sure that the intercept stations, which were also known
as the ‘Y’ Stations, were taking
all the messages from the various networks they were monitoring. Different stations on the Japanese networks frequently
transmitted on different frequencies so an operator at an intercept station monitoring a specific frequency would only hear what one of the stations said. The responses were on a different
frequency again and it was important that the operators found both frequencies so the intelligence analysts and reporters could see everything that was being said.

‘Reams of paper used to come in and then you had to check it all off. It was incredibly tedious but there were a jolly nice lot of girls there. We just made the best of it, and the
Glassborow twins were on the same shift as me, which was good because they were fun.’

The Allies were by now aware that a sizeable faction within the Japanese government would be prepared to sue for peace, but the messages being decoded at Bletchley showed that,
despite horrific losses, the Japanese military remained determined to fight on.

The only man capable of bringing the Japanese Army to heel was the Emperor himself. On 12 July 1945, the Allies intercepted a Purple message from Tokyo to Japan’s ambassador in Moscow
ordering him to hand the Russians an urgent plea for peace from Emperor Hirohito. The message was sent just days before the Potsdam Conference at which Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was to meet with
Winston Churchill and Harry Truman, the new US President.

Truman was already on his way to Potsdam when Hirohito’s peace approach was decoded. Allied intelligence
had advised that if the Emperor ordered the Japanese armed
forces to surrender they would obey but that if ‘unconditional surrender’ meant the Emperor must lose his throne and be treated as a war criminal, the Japanese would fight to the last
man.

Four days after Emperor Hirohito’s message was intercepted, the first atomic bomb was tested in the New Mexico desert. For reasons which remain inexplicable, and despite an acceptance by
both America and Britain that the Emperor would have to be retained in order to control post-war Japan, no attempt was made privately to reassure the Japanese that he would not be forced to stand
down. America and Britain issued an ultimatum to Japan. If there was not an immediate and unconditional surrender, it would lead to ‘the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland’.

Lacking any assurances over the future of the Emperor, the Japanese were never likely to surrender. At 8.15 local time on the morning of 6 August 1945, a United States B29 bomber dropped an
atomic bomb on the southwestern Japanese port of Hiroshima, flattening two-thirds of the city. Three days later, a second bomb exploded over the port of Nagasaki, razing it to the ground. More than
200,000 people died as a direct result, with the number of deaths from the long-term effects of radiation impossible to calculate.

Even before the news that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima was officially announced, the messages arriving in Bletchley Park provided Rosemary Calder with a terrifying vision of
what had taken place.

‘I was on a day watch by myself and all this stuff came in and it was total gibberish. I didn’t know the bomb had been dropped but you could tell from the
disruption of all the messages that something terrible had happened. You could just feel the people standing there screaming their heads off.’

The dropping of the atomic bombs led the Japanese to sue for peace. Only then were they told that – despite the insistence on ‘unconditional surrender’ – the Emperor was
always going to be allowed to keep his throne. Had they been told that two weeks earlier, the war would almost certainly have been ended without recourse to the atomic bomb, and the countless loss
of life.

Marion Graham and the Glassborow twins were on duty in the Clinical Monitoring Section on the morning of 15 August 1945 when their boss Commander Williams came in and said: ‘Well done,
girls. A signal’s been intercepted and it does appear that the Japanese are about to surrender.’

Marion and the rest of them just sat there not sure what to say. Commander Williams shuffled about a bit looking embarrassed, as if he wasn’t sure what to do next. Then he said:
‘Well, you bloody well get on with your work now,’ before adding that he would come back if he heard anything more. Marion and her friends didn’t have long to wait.

‘About half an hour later, he came back and said: “The war’s over.” It was quite a moment. Of course, I wasn’t the first but I must have been one of the first to
know and he did say that a message had gone to the King and to the Prime Minister, so it was tremendously exciting.’

The girls didn’t have anything else to do so they just got on with their work, pointless though it now seemed, and when they went home on the transport they
didn’t say anything to anyone about it, unsure whether it was all still secret. When Marion got back to her billet one of the family asked her if she’d heard the news. The war was
over.

‘I couldn’t say, “Yes, I know,” so I just said: “How wonderful.” And that was it.’

Sally Norton was working the night shift in the Admiralty Citadel on Horse Guards Parade when the news came through from Bletchley that Germany had surrendered. It made for a
very busy night and she still hadn’t managed to collect her thoughts when she left work that morning and headed home to her flat.

‘I was too tired to be deliriously happy and just felt a deep contentment, but as I walked along the Mall the sound of church bells began to peal out all over London. We had not heard
those bells for five and a half years. I went back to my flat and fell asleep, too tired to take my clothes off.’

That evening, at a party to celebrate victory in Europe, Sally met her future husband Bill Astor, a Conservative politician and the future 3rd Viscount Astor. Afterwards she joined the throngs
of people celebrating in Trafalgar Square and along the capital’s streets. She’d had a
wonderfully rewarding job but it was coming to an end and she wasn’t
sure that anything she did would ever be quite so exciting again.

‘Looking back to VE Day, reliving the happiness and relief that the conflict was over, I remember a feeling of being forgotten. No campaign ribbons. Not that we deserved any. No
certificate such as our colleagues in the Red Cross received. Just nothing. Even a pat on the back might have elevated the psyche, but if you work for Special Intelligence that’s what you
must expect and on reflection it was well worth it.

‘We formed great bonds with the people we worked with. There was an extraordinary army of people there from all walks of life. Wrens, girls like me, people in uniform, army, navy, air
force, Americans. All walks of life, all classes of life, especially among the Wrens. Literally walk down any street in London, you’d see the same mix of people.’

Sally and Bill Astor had one son, William, later the 4th Viscount Astor, but were divorced in 1953 and she then married Thomas Baring. They had one adopted son, Edward, and were divorced in
1965. Sally never remarried. She died in 2013, a couple of weeks after her ninety-third birthday.

Colette St George-Yorke and some of her fellow Bombe operators were standing on the balcony at the small ‘Wrennery’ in Steeple Claydon when the bells on the little village church of
St Michael started ringing. They didn’t stop.

‘Someone came up and said the war’s over. We just stood there in the window and cried.’

The next day they were sent back to Stanmore to dismantle the Bombes. Roma Davies, or Wren Stenning as she then was, was at Eastcote, also dismantling the Bombes. Nothing
was to remain of them, supposedly on Mr Churchill’s orders. It was imperative that no one found out they’d been breaking the Enigma codes. Whether the decision to destroy the Bombes was
made by the Prime Minister is a moot point, but Roma and the other Wrens undoubtedly believed it was.

‘We were always told Mr Churchill was the only one to know our secret, so naturally it was very easy to believe that he ordered the dismantling of the machines. I was one of the people who
helped to take them to bits, right down to very tiny bits. We had huge bonfires to destroy all the paperwork. We demolished every bit of evidence of our ever being there.’

Roma was then sent to Bletchley to work on the Japanese codes until the war in the Far East came to an end. Dorothy Robertson was still out in Colombo when Japan surrendered. She found herself
doing what would be the most moving and at the same time most satisfying job of her life. Thousands of prisoners of war released from camps across the Far East were being brought back to Britain,
stopping off in Colombo for a period of rehabilitation.