BP
Mair Thomas : Life at Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park
Abbreviations
GC & CS Government Code and Cypher School GCHQ OSA RAF
Government Communication Headquarters Official Secrets Act Royal Air Force
Definitions
bombe . This machine used to discover the wheel settings for the Enigma keys , based on an earlier version of the Polish bomba ,
Enigma . A cipher machine used by German military and government from the 1920s until 1945 .
hut . A temporary building built around the Bletchley Park Estate grounds , which housed different teams and the primary workzones .
rotor . A wheel on an Enigma machine
Ultra . The British code-name for all signal intelligence from 1941 throughout the duration of World War II .
Even though so much has happened to me since leaving BP , those four years have probably influenced me more than the other ninetytwo .
— Mair Thomas Russell-Jones ( 1917 – 2013 ).
The fall of Western Europe to
Nazi forces was a devastating blow to the world . Britain found its people standing alone against a more advanced foe . Germany used cryptography to pass messages back and forth concerning movement , operations , and invasion plans . The German Enigma machine was a highly complicated machine that looked like a typewriter , consisting of wheels that changed the code to write unbreakable messages . Britain ’ s Foreign Office and MI6 opened an intelligence center at Bletchley Park ( BP ) dedicated to breaking the German Enigma Codes . Thousands of men and
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