BLETCHLEY PARK

Bletchley Park 

1938 As a code-breaking centre.

1993 became a museum.

Lets get down to the history of this amazing place.

Bletchley Park was the central site for British and subsequently, Allied code breakers during World War Two. It housed the Government Code and Cypher School, which regularly penetrated the secret communications of the Axis Powers - most importantly the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers.

In the summer of 1939, British Intelligence moved the cryptology department to Bletchley Park, officially dubbed Station X because it was the tenth division of the intelligence organization. A large number of of women were trained for employment at Bletchley Park. The focus of operations at Station X shifted to active code breaking. By the outbreak of World War Two in September of 1939, Bletchley Park cryptologists had already made considerable progress against some German Diplomatic codes.

All staff signed the Official Secrets Act (1939) and a 1942 security warning emphasised the importance of discretion even in Bletchley Park itself.

In the months preceding the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Polish intelligence passed on to British intelligence information on their efforts to break Enigma. Most helpful was the information Polish Spies gathered on how the Cipher Machine operated, including sketches of the teleprinter and some of its components. With the information, Bletchley Park Cryptologists found Two Key weak links in the Enigma Code. Enigma Code prohibited that any letter be encrypted as itself, and German standards of communication dictated that the same phrase beggining all transmissions.

Exploiting these two weaknesses, British Cryptologists unraveled the Enigma code mathematically in late 1940.

I could write a massive report on this place as its history is fantastic.

We done this visit one day and what we saw and found was amazing we saw replica of The working rebuilt bombe, built by a team led by John Harper. Also lots of old paper work.