If you have been looking for a fascinating day out that’s just over an hour away, consider enveloping yourself in the intrigue of Station X, now more commonly known as Bletchley Park, home to the WW2 code breakers.
Set in expansive grounds just outside Milton Keynes, at its heart is an Edwardian stately home that is surrounded by numerous ‘temporary’ single storey buildings that chart the exciting race to break the secret codes of the German, Italian and Japanese axis powers. In addition, the site also houses the UK’s The National Museum of Computing, a collection of military vehicles and maritime collection, a working WW2 post office, wartime toys, wartime mini cinema, a Churchill collection and a new children’s playground.
The latest in our series of suggested days out sees Gerry Kirt take a visit to Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes – home of the World War 2 code-breaking machines. Pictured above is a member of staff at ‘Station X’, demonstrating how these immense machines helped in the war effort
Bletchley Park explains using graphic details, examples and equipment the story of how its information influenced key military decisions and shortened the war by at least two years.
The Germans used Enigma devices to transmit messages in total secrecy. With exception of the army high command all other areas of the war machine selected a different daily code from 159,000,000,000,000 settings that were used to programme the hundreds of message reception and sending machines. Given the mathematical difficulty in breaking the code, they were completely confident that the Allies would be unable to read the thousands of secret messages sent every day.
Back in the UK, Bletchley had been purchased in 1939 and had swiftly become ‘Station X’, home to a small team of mathematicians who were assembled from all walks of life to crack the Enigma code. Breaks such as the capturing of an Enigma machine and code book from a sinking U Boat helped, but it is the now famous Alan Turing who was the first to achieve this daunting task and went on to develop an automated machine known as the Bombe to dramatically speed up the cracking of the daily codes. A reconstruction of one of the 200 units produced is now regularly demonstrated at Bletchley. A rebuild of the world’s first semi-programmable computer is also in constant operation on the site. Known as Colossus, it was used to decipher the German army high command Lorenz code that used a series of high security teleprinter cipher machines.
By the end of the war, over 3,500 people were working on the site, but following its subsequent use as a BT training centre, it became dilapidated until a group of volunteers decided to establish a permanent reminder to the brilliance of the code breakers. Now benefiting from a Lottery grant the site is being extensively developed.
If you are interested and decide to visit the site I recommend you allow a full day. One essential element must be the free brilliant guided tour, without it a first time visitor may find it difficult to fully understand the history of Station X, attend the demonstrations and be aware of what the site contains.
For further information visit http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/
