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Bletchley Park (the breaking of Enigma) Travelling under the guise of 'Captain Ridley's Shooting Party', a small team of scholars-turned-codebreakers arrived at Bletchley Park in the summer of 1939. Their mission: to crack the Nazi Enigma cypher. They thought it to be unbreakable, and not without good reason. Enigma's complexity was bewildering. Typing in a letter of plain German into the machine sent electrical impulses through a series of rotating wheels, electrical contacts and wires to produce the encyphered letter, which lit up on a panel above the keyboard. By typing the resulting code into his own machine, the recipient saw the decyphered message light up letter by letter. The rotors and wires of the machine could be configured in many, many different ways. The odds against anyone who did not know the settings being able to break Enigma were a 150 million million million to one. The team's success in breaking this seemingly 'unbreakable' code was one of the greatest intellectual achievements of the twentieth century and it is estimated that over 10,000 people worked here at the height of the Park's wartime activity. Working conditions were cramped and spartan, and the work itself often arduous. But for many recruits, it was the time of their lives. By March 1946 they were all gone, removing every scrap of evidence of their codebreaking exploits as they left. Their efforts in breaking the codes in the utmost secrecy caused Winston Churchill to coin the phrase "the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled". It would be decades before Bletchley Park would start to reveal its secrets In 1991 the Park was deserted and its buildings facing demolition. The Bletchley Park Trust was then formed with the aim of preserving the site for posterity. This is very much part of our history and you can visit the great mansion house and find the codebreaking, learning how it was done and the conditions in which the codebreakers worked. Bletchley Park is 200 yards from
Bletchley railway station in Milton Keynes Information Bletchley Park Trust |
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