Dan Snow's History Hit - Codebreaking at Bletchley Park

Episode Date: May 11, 2022

Bletchley Park, Britain's key decryption centre during WWI, is known for the success of breaking the Nazi Enigma codes - experts have suggested that the Bletchley Park codebreakers may have shortened the war by as much as two years.David Kenyon is the research historian at Bletchley Park. Recorded at the grounds, David and Dan walk through Bletchley’s latest exhibition, The Intelligence Factory. They uncover hidden stories from the height of Bletchley’s wartime operations and discuss the codebreakers’ significant contribution to the allied victory in the Battle of the Atlantic.Produced by Mariana Des ForgesMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm just walking up the hill in a not, what looks like quite a nondescript, mid-20th century government facility. It was the best kept secret in the world during the Second World War. I am just walking in to Bletchley Park. I've just got off the train and like thousands of recruits arrived at the train, just a few hundred meters or so to the gates of Bletchley Park and some of them I've been very lucky to talk to like Betty Webb the wonderful veteran of Bletchley Park she told me that when she came through this gate she had to sign the official secrets act immediately before she even knew what she was doing and as you walk

in here I can start to see the huts those temporary buildings that were built that's hut eight in front of me where they did the naval Enigma, which actually I'm here to talk about today, Battle of the Atlantic. Enigma played a critical role in the struggle against Hitler's U-boats, which let's not forget, Winston Churchill called the only thing that really caused him to lose sleep

during the Second World War. The thing he worried about the most was the naval blockade of Britain through Hitler's subsea warfare. And then under those beautiful horse chestnut trees, I can see the original mansion, kind of stately home really, which was bought by the British government

just before the Second World War broke out as tension in Europe was simmering, reaching a boiling point. That's where all the early recruits here at Bletchley Park were packed into that building. And then this little stable block that was once shown just behind that, but like a garage and outbuilding

where Turing used to work in the attic. It's quite eccentric, Alan Turing, one of the greatest scientists and codebreakers that worked here, who's going to have a huge impact on development of computing generally. He worked up in the attic and apparently it's a bit eccentric, they'd send his food up in a basket on a rope apparently. So that is Bletchley Park but I'm here to meet Dave Kenyon, he's a friend of the pod, you've heard him before, he's featured in a documentary on History Hit TV. He's an absolute legend, and he's going to talk me through the work that was conducted here at Bletchley Park, particularly in reference to the Battle of the Atlantic, the longest and most important campaign fought in the Second World War,

which raged from the first day of the war to the very last day of the war, 1939 to 45. And it's, of course, in so many ways, determined by the work that was going on here at Bletchley Park. They've got a new exhibition as well, which Dave's going to show me. So, I'm very excited about my day out here in Bletchley. Enjoy. Dave, how are you?

Very well, good to see you again. Good to see you man. So here we are, it's good to be back. We've got the mansion over there, Hut 8, but every time I come it seems to get bigger. We're always busy, we're always turning out new things for people to see and the sun is sort of shining so shall we go and find a spot under a tree and have a bit of a chat? Yeah, let's go and sit on the day chair. Perfect. Fill you in on what's been going on. Yeah. These are quite mature trees, these have been here during the war right? Yes, these are original parkland trees. I mean, that one, the sort of Cyprus-y thing in the middle,

you can see the top's missing. Yeah. And when the top fell off, I think it was in the 50s or 60s, it still had a copper ring around it where they ran a wireless aerial from that to the highest point of the mansion. So they could send wireless messages out when it was SIS.

Did they ever take breaks? Did they sit underneath the trees? Yes, yes. Well, we have actually photographs of them playing rounders on this actual lawn here. Oh, really? That's cool. Easy to forget that they had lives and they had fun here. I mean, they were young, presumably overwhelmingly,

in their early 20s or what kind of age? Yes, sort of 18 to 25. So kind of, if you think about sort of university age. Similar sorts of people as well, kind of mostly to 25, so if you think about university age. And similar sorts of people as well, mostly middle class background. There are documents actually in the exhibition about how the wrens used to come out and row on the lake, and the management were getting very frustrated with the damage. They kept breaking the oars and generally knackering the boat, so there's a memo saying, we bought new oars, but we don't expect them to last.

These are the problems you face when you're running the war effort so behind us got the mansion initially that was all that was here right yes yes well even before the war starts they start the hut building program so some of the huts would have been here in september 39 when most of the early code breakers arrived and they carry on building huts for the next sort of year and a half and for people listening they might think hut is a sort of estate agent sort of trendy expression but they are actually huts. Well they are timber built, timber and asbestos, World War II's favourite building material which we've had to remove but they're not garden shed huts they are 80 feet long.

Yeah they're big, they're big huts. You could fit a hundred people in one of these huts but they are pretty temporary. They're pretty temporary and here we are 80 years later and they're still standing proud thanks to the work that you and the team here at the museum have done. So we're looking over to our left here we've got our back to the mansion we've got hut three hut eight and each one would have had a different function yes and no one knew what was going on the other huts? Quite often not yeah it was a highly compartmentalised organisation from that point of view most people knew what they did in their room and maybe what the people in the room next door did but that was pretty much it so don't think this was a glamorous place to work in the second world war i don't

think it was it was long shifts of very boring tasks for a lot of people and you've brilliantly described this to me before as one of the world's first computers but not quite in the way that we might think of it as. Yes, this is something that I try and draw to visitors' attention, because a lot of people have heard of the mechanical devices that were used here, the bomb machines used for keyfinding for Enigma or Colossus that helped to break the rent cipher. But these machines are only part of a bigger machine, if you like, and most of the components of that machine are actually humans. But if you think about what the site is doing as a whole data is being fed in at one end in

enormous quantities from these intercepted wireless messages and that data is then being crunched in all sorts of ways and processed and decrypted and then stored in indexes and catalogues and then turned into useful intelligence and then emerges from the other end of the machine out to commanders in the field and governments and helps to win the war. And it's kind of one of the birthplaces of computing from the point of view of the mechanical devices, but it's also a birthplace of information technology and data management from the point of view of the wider information system. If you look up information system on Google, it'll tell you it's a combination of devices and people and that's exactly what happens here there's so many things that we

could talk about you and i've discussed in the past the importance of code breaking of signals intercepts and intelligence on d-day or the bismarck campaign the bismarck battle but your new big focus on the battle of atlantic. The new exhibition, which we're going to go and see in a moment, is in Block A. And Block A opened in 1942. And we've talked about the huts. And many people have this picture in their minds that Bletchley Park means huts.

But actually, it's only huts for the first two, three years. For the 42 to 45, the main part of the war, it's blocks. It's these big, huge big huge spidery concrete and brick buildings block a is actually two-story it's a massive building and rather than being what we refer to as the sort of cottage industry that you know alan turing in a tank top sitting in a hut it becomes a factory it becomes these enormous buildings with people not necessarily oxbridge geniuses,

but just regular folks who've been hired in to sit in these, what are literally production lines of intelligence. And as I say, intercepted German messages or Italian messages or Japanese messages are fed in at one end of this machine and they go through this factory and they come out as intelligence at the other end. So much of people's attention, and with films and TV shows, is that it's all about geniuses in huts. They figure out how to do it, but then in order to do that on the scale you need for a world war, you have to build a factory. You see that in so many areas of history when people build excellent institutions.

It might take a couple of geniuses to work it out in the first place, but the whole point then is to build and sustain that without needing geniuses to come along. Because geniuses are few and far between they are and also it's it's something that the allies do very well and the axis powers never really get on top of i mean the other analogy is willow run you know the famous bomber factory in the united states where henry ford was involved in all sorts and they managed to build a production line that was so efficient that a complete bomber came off the end of it something like every 17 minutes.

And you can't fight that in the end. And the same applies to intelligence. If you can produce it in the sorts of volumes that Bletchley Park was producing it, then it becomes really powerful. So we got the back Atlantic. A big part of this challenge must be sort of getting the intelligence,

but you've got to get it quick enough for someone to actually make the difference, some poor lieutenant on a freezing cold open bridge of a destroyer in the North Atlantic. Absolutely. And getting that system as refined and as slick as possible is really, really crucial. And you referred to Hut 8, where Alan Turing ran that hut for a while, and that's where they make the first progress on Naval Enigma. And so in 1941, you would have seen people in there furiously working away on messages from U-boats in the Atlantic.

The problem they have is, in the spring of 1942, the Germans introduced the famous four-rotor Enigma machine. Add an extra rotor. They add an extra rotor, which makes it even more fiendish than it was before. And there's a period of about nine or ten months when they can't read any of those messages at all but through real hard work and genius by Turing and other people but also they managed to capture a U-boat on the surface in the Mediterranean and steal lots of stuff off it and by 1943 they're

back in again and it's in the course of that period that naval section who produced the intelligence from this moved out of hut four which is over there behind the mansion which is relatively speaking small and they moved into block a where our new exhibition is and originally that building was intended to house naval section air section and military section so all three services in one building but well military section never got in there and air section were upstairs and naval section was downstairs and then air section got chucked out and naval section took over the whole building which gives you an impression of just how fast the people dealing with naval codes their team was growing frank birch is in charge starts with as he puts it five people and four chairs and he finished with over 500 so if i'm a german u-boat

i send a message to German high command saying this is my latitude and longitude. I'll wait here and try and intercept a convoy. That message is sent. It's encrypted on the Enigma machine, of which there are how many different... Go on, quickly give me the... There's about 20 different varieties.

Oh, how many keys? Yeah. Yes, this is the thing that people don't get right about enigma and the movies don't help having the machine doesn't help you if you had a four rotor enigma machine you couldn't just put the message in and get the answer and i've just sent that from my u-boat on the enigma machine which looks like a typewriter with all these funny wheels in it and is the most fiendishly complicated way of encryption that any human being has ever invented

at that point in history? Pretty much, yes. For the Army Air Force Enigma, there are 103 sextillion possible ways of configuring the machine. 103 sextillions? That's 103,000 million, million, million. In modern parlance, it's something like a 78-bit encryption.

What that means is you can't just get the machine, set it up, try an option and then move on to the next option. Because if you did one a second and you started a big bang, you'd be about 10% of the way through by now. So that really isn't an option. But the genius of Bletchley Park is that Turing figures out a way to exploit some of the failings of the way the Germans are operating the machine in that if you can guess

what one message might say and armed services always send stereotype messages they say the same thing every day quite often if you can guess what one message might say you can use the letter relationships in that message between the ciphertext and the plaintext to then work out what the setting of the machine is for the whole day and if you can do that then you can read all the rest of the messages for that day. So the German U-boats are changing their system at noon every day and so every day at noon there's a new setting to find or they change half of it every noon so it's a complete new setting every 48 hours and from noon Bletchley will be trying to find a message that they can guess and then using that message and some bomb machines they will then find the key for the day and they will then start reading the traffic. And so if they keep writing something like Heil Hitler at the end of the

message or morning you know how are you then that's what's going on. Yeah and submarines have relatively few things to talk about so they'll say I've just crossed this latitude on my journey to the battlefield or I've run out of torpedoes, they send pretty predictable messages and they send weather forecasts because part of their job is to report what the wind's doing. So that means that Bletchley can read these messages but the problem is often the message from the submarine is quite immediate. They're saying, oh I've just sighted a convoy or I'm in this particular position and it's Bletchley Park's job to get that information to the Admiralty as fast as possible so the Admiralty can then communicate with the ships at sea or the aircraft

or whatever and we tell an example of this in the exhibition ONS 20 and ON206 were two convoys that were quite close together actually empty ships going out to the US rather than coming back but equally vital because if the ships get sunk they can't come back and crucially the Germans send a message to form one of these wolf packs as they were called this group of submarines that are going to attack the convoy and Bletchley manages to read that message to see that this group is forming and that information goes in this case to the fleet air arm who by 1943 have really long range uh liberator bombers and sunderland flying boats and then get right out deep into the atlantic and six of those submarines are sunk at the cost of only one merchant ship that's in 1943 and it shows the power of that intelligence at that point i mean the story is

not like that all the way through by the time you get to 1943 the allies are really starting to win in the atlantic the period and you mentioned Churchill earlier, because it starts in 40 and in 41 and in 42 in particular, the pendulum is really in favour of the Germans for a lot of that period. So Dave, speaking of the Naval Service, the Senior Service, let's talk about the role that the work at Bletchley Park played in helping to change the course of the battle of the Atlantic, the longest running battle of of Hitler's ambitious attempt to blockade, starve, bring Britain to its knees. Exactly that.

Britain is, of course, an island nation at that point, and not only do we have all our overseas possessions that are supplying vital raw materials and bits and pieces to the UK, but also, even before 1941, when the Americans were still neutral, huge amounts of aid in terms of munitions and food and everything else is coming from the US and from Canada. So there's a constant flow of merchant ship convoys, these groups of 20 to even sometimes 50 merchant ships sailing in groups across the Atlantic in both directions because the empty ones have to go back. And they're escorted by Allied warships, typically small ones, destroyers, corvettes, trawlers even. by allied warships typically small ones destroyers corvettes trawlers even and the german submarine fleet the famous u-boats are out there trying to sink these convoys and prevent those supplies

arriving but crucially for the allies and to the disadvantage of the germans those u-boats have to be directed in what they're doing by their commanders on the land in france and they have to communicate back with their commanders so they're sending lots of wireless messages backwards and forwards. And it's being able to intercept and then decrypt those messages, because, of course, they're all deciphered with the famous Enigma, that is absolutely fundamental to being able to fight that battle effectively from the Allied point of view. If you know where the submarines are and you know when they're going to attack,

you can fight them. And if the submarines had succeeded in sinking enough of those allied merchant ships no matter how exciting your plans are in europe and things like d-day would never have been able to happen almost goes without saying that without the atlantic being open for those supplies to reach europe all of the strategies pursued by churchill in north africa italy and eventually northwest europe on supporting the Soviet Union. None of that would be able to happen. Absolutely not, because not only is stuff coming from the US to the UK,

but then we have convoys going round north of Norway to support the Russians. We have convoys going into the Mediterranean to support the campaigns there and fight the Italians. And so it's not just a battle of the Atlantic. It's a battle of the worldwide oceans. And Bletchley Park is involved in all of those different areas, intercepting messages and providing intelligence. Well, Dave, let's go and see where all that work took place. Absolutely. Walk this way, as they say.

You're listening to Dan Snow's History. More coming up. Hello, I'm James Rogers, and over on the History Hit Warfare podcast, history of war coming up. almost turned the Cold War hot? And who dropped the world's largest nuclear bomb on the Arctic? Through interviews with world-leading historians, policy experts, and the veterans who served, we find the answers to these questions and so much more. So come and join us on the History Hit Warfare podcast, where we're on the front lines of military history. where we're on the front lines of military history. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So walking up to it now, grey brick building, two storeys, pretty utilitarian, pretty government issue this building isn't it? Very much so and it's built to a Ministry of Works plan.

These buildings existed all over the country by the end of the Second World War. Most of them have been knocked down so ours have become increasingly rare and special. This is block A, so this was the first one that was built. By the end of the war they built eight of these buildings, and you see how big this one is. Another seven. It was an absolutely enormous site, and people just don't appreciate the scale of what went on here. And the purpose of the exhibition here is twofold. Firstly, because naval section were in this building, I thought it was absolutely crucial to tell that naval story where it happened in the rooms that it happened in. So we'll see some of that. But also the second half of the exhibition, we want to talk about this late phase of the site.

It's not about huts and geniuses. It's about the factory. It's about these enormous buildings and thousands of people, nearly 9000 people by the end of the war. So a huge staff of people all furiously working away in here and when we first took this building over I was astonished the corridor was like something out of Kafka it goes on for miles and you'll see when we go in. So loads of buildings 9,000 people Germans never had a clue it was here? No I mean they would have known that an organisation like Bletchley Park existed they had their own code breaking organisations as well so it was kind of a given that we were doing this but the the thing that they never appreciated, the real failure of imagination they had, was they never twigged on that it would be on such a large scale or that it would be so

effective. And it's effective because of scale. If you can read thousands of messages every single day then you know an enormous amount about your enemy. Anyway, shall we go in? Let's do it. amount about your enemy. Anyway, shall we go in? Let's do it. So here we are. We've got yellow brick, quite a bit of exposed wood and exposed steel. They didn't spend a huge amount of time on the decor, did they? They didn't at all, but it is what they call splinter proof. If a bomb dropped outside you would potentially be all right. You wouldn't survive a direct hit. No deliberate jam bombing ever took place here, didn't no one bombing by accident yeah which didn't cause any damage but otherwise the original concrete floor running throughout

and some of it's gray and some of it's red and we were talking about that compartmentalization earlier what you find as you go through the building is that the connecting spaces the public corridors are red and the rooms are grey so if you came out of your grey room you could carry on on the red but you couldn't go into another grey room if it's grey don't go in if it's red you're all right if you're going to get a cup of tea or whatever you stay on the red so the rooms are quite small and is that because there would have been jobs? Open plan was not an option. Open plan was not an option. It was a very compartmentalised organisation.

And these buildings are designed in a certain way that they come in kind of units. And so some of the spaces are really small. These rooms have been choked with cigarette and pipe smoke. Oh, absolutely, yes. And what are we talking about in this building? A mixture of and women for example what's the ratio? Yes when this building opened the ratio was probably about 50-50 but by the time you get to the spring of 1945 it's 75% women so the latter half of the war is a period of significant recruitment of women and they are not only civilians but also from all three armed services so what we talk about in this space is you can't expand to 9 000 people without recruiting a lot of people and this room explores just how

those people found their way in because there was no particular one way that people recruited i mean people are familiar with the sort of the old boy network at oxbridge but it was also people came in through the services people were recruited through the local labour exchange. At one point, Hugh Alexander used to work at John Lewis, so he gets in touch with John Lewis and recruits a load of the ladies from there. What did those women find when they arrived here? What was it like to work as a young woman in 1942 in this building? The overriding impression seems to be of not really knowing what was going on, as I was saying to you before. of not really knowing what was going on, as I was saying to you before. And it's a mixture. The joy of this really is that we have a whole range of different people in here because it's very hard to say this was the Bletchley experience

because you get so many different backgrounds of people working here. Some were, they'd been to Cheltenham Ladies' College and Swiss Finishing School and all of that. Others came from the Bletchley Labour Exchange and nevertheless Bletchley. So you get a real contrast in types of people. And so there's a whole gamut of it. Some had a brilliant time, some loved the food, some hated it. The diversity of it in terms of people's experience, I think is part of the richness of it. And that's what we're really trying to bring out here, that it's almost anybody could have worked here because people like them would have worked here.

All the veterans you've put me in touch with over the years have said the thing that was so striking is that you just did not make friends with the person next door. You were doing your tiny piece of the computer process and that was it. Yeah, or you were billeted in a house with someone and you separated when you got off the bus and you never knew what they did during the day, but you went to the pub in the evening or you had dinner together or whatever. What was food like? Did they get special rations? Because they were doing all that brain work?

Not in particular. I mean, they do get additional meals, because if you were billeted in someone's house, you gave your ration book to the people in the house, and they would give you your breakfast and evening meal, for example. But you would get lunch at work, so you are getting a bit of extra food. And the other thing that's notable is

once the organization starts to expand code breaking is all very well but you don't just need code breakers you need transport people you need chefs you need stokers to keep the boilers going just keeping 9 000 people fed and housed and occupied is an enormous administrative task in its own right and some of the real unsung heroes of Bletchley like Alan Bradshaw who was head of administration a very serious paymaster commander from the navy and he kept a metaphorical ship afloat by making sure that everybody got three meals a day and could get to work and had somewhere to sleep and it was a truly thankless job because every time he thought he got on top of it another 100 people would turn up miserable because no one lived on site and some of the service people lived in camps and the navy put them in local country houses but also civilians lived in private houses in

bletchley what was the most fun was it being in somewhere like woburn abbey the local massive stately home with a sort of big gang of people or was it quite nice to go back to a local family i get the impression that the the conditions were probably better if you were in a local family but the camaraderie was probably stronger. What you learn about the Wrens is that living in Woburn was pretty miserable but nothing unites people like misery. That's right, that's right. So Dave this room is making me very happy indeed because there are at least six floor-to-ceiling maps and charts here showing, well, the Indian Ocean but also the Atlantic, in fact the Pacific, the Mediterranean, all of it. Okay, I see what we're doing here. We've got the world's oceans.

We've got the world's oceans and actually in this room, this was known as the plotting room during the war, and when they were breaking these messages, it was important to know the context of the message. So quite often, this kind of plotting was done in the Admiralty, and if you watch Sink the Bismarck, they've got their big charts with the pins, and you see the same in the cabinet war rooms in London. But Bletchley was doing it as well, for their own purposes, and the reason they were doing this

was because it greatly assisted their own intelligence analysts and cryptographers to be able to come in and see the situation at sea, and they would get a phone call every morning from the Admiralty which would tell them where our vessels were, where Allied vessels were. These maps were maintained by RENs, by members of the Women's Royal Naval Service. And they would get a message indicating where a U-boat might be or something like that. And so they would take a pin and put it in the map in the right location.

And then if they knew the sequential locations of a particular vessel they would then connect those pins with string and what you can see here is convoys going in various directions and escort groups and u-boats and everything else so this room here you could have come in here 80 years ago in the middle of 1942 and gazed around these walls and had a real-time picture of every allied and enemy naval asset on all the oceans of the world? As far as it was revealed by signals intelligence, yes. As much as the Allies knew would have been on these walls. And it allows the guys from the section here, when they get a message about a U-boat, they need to decide whether that message

needs to be urgently sent to the Admiralty. And they can immediately look at the plot and go, oh, it's right next to a convoy, obviously it's urgent, or it's in the middle of nowhere, not so urgent. I mean, that's a gross simplification, but that's basically why they need a plotting room. And we have Red veterans who worked in this room who we've got audio recordings of, and they talk about exactly this process of coming in and putting pins in. And they were some of the closest people at Bletchley to the war at sea because they could see it unfolding in front of their eyes, which so many of the people in this building were doing incredibly dull,

code-breaking tasks that they didn't really understand. But the ladies in here were front and centre with the war. And so there would have been situations where the Indian Ocean folks would have been just lounging about doing not much and standing right next to some people doing the gigantic convoy battle in North Atlantic, running in and out, frenzied, like almost in the heat of battle.

Very much so, yes. And in that, or in the watch room, you have the Italian team, the German team, and the Japanese team all in that room. So they would be, at different times, they would have bursts of activity and they're all sort of coming in here and checking the plot and going back out again and then updating the picture

and then the Admiralty would phone through with small positions of our own ships and it must have been an incredibly powerful space to be in because you remember these people aren't making any decisions about the war their only function is to provide information, intelligence to the Admiralty this is a slight subtlety about this room. No one in here is making a decision about what happens at sea. There's a famous scene in a movie where they decide what to do with a ship. Never happened at Bletchley Park.

This is only to inform the intelligence they pass on. But that must have made it quite difficult for some of the people who worked here because they're kind of powerless. You know, they can see a wolf pack forming in the path of a convoy. There's nothing they can do except pray, really. From what everything you're saying, it's true, it's near Berkshire Park, was very siloed. You could have people next door to each other, rubbing shoulders with people who were dealing with different parts of the world and might be going through some gigantic crisis and

the person inches away from them wouldn't even really know. Exactly. Very much so, yeah. Right, Dave, we've come to the end of... Well, we've been through the internecine corridors of that building. That was extraordinary. It's the old boring question, man. How much do you think the work in here... Did it shorten the war?

What impact can we say that it had? I think it has a huge impact. And it's difficult to express it because obviously intelligence alone doesn't win wars. Soldiers have to go out and fight, sailors have to sell ships but if those people can be given the greatest possible advantage in terms of information before they fight or while they're fighting it makes an enormous amount of difference and so Bletchley Park is one of the factors that leads to Allied

success. And when we look at when this building was first built in 1942, that success was by no means guaranteed. We look back on World War Two, it was kind of a fait accompli that it was always going to turn out how it did. And that isn't necessarily the case. Even the Normandy invasion could have failed potentially. So any help that the forces on the ground and on the sea can get is crucially important. And Bletchley does that, and it does it because it's a factory, because of what we've seen here, the fact that they are able to recruit and train and feed and exploit nearly 10,000 people on this site alone, let alone all the people in the intercept stations, the people in the intercept stations

people in the overseas sort of outstations of bletchley in the far east and everywhere else it's a huge effort and the information it produces is not war winning in its own right but part of the war winning mixture well thank you very much for having me back to him it's been great to get back here after covid and a few years away well, it's been a while since you've been around. It's good to see you again. And, you know, don't be a stranger. Do come back. I'm sure we'll have plenty more to show you.

Certainly will. Thank you. I feel we have the history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all work out. And finish. Thanks, folks. You've reached the end of another episode. Hope you're still awake.

Appreciate your loyalty. Sticking through to the end. If you fancied doing us a favour here at History Hit, I would be incredibly grateful if you would go and wherever you get these pods, give it a rating, five stars or its equivalent. A review would be great. Please head over there and do that.

It really does make a huge difference. It's one of the funny things the algorithm loves to take into account. So please head over there and do that. Really, really appreciate it.