Some talk of Winston Churchill, and some of Montgomery. But of all the great heroes of the 1939-45 war that saved the United Kingdom and Europe from the Nazi night, the least spectacular is celebrating its 70th anniversary.
This is a very English story. It is set in a rambling country house in Agatha Christie country. The organisation was ramshackle improvisation, with wooden huts erected higgledy-piggledy over the grounds, and wires snaking everywhere. The players were motley British eccentrics, mathematicians, chess champions, cryptic cruciverbalists and other such intellectual characters. Seventy years ago the first wave of the Government Code and Cypher School moved into Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. For Spook reasons it was also known as Station X. Ciphers and codes of the Axis countries were decrypted there, most importantly ciphers generated by the German Enigma and Lorenz machines.
The intelligence produced from decrypts at Bletchley was code-named Ultra. It contributed greatly to Allied success in defeating the U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic and to the British naval victories of the Battle of Cape Matapan and the Battle of North Cape. When the United States joined the war, American cryptographers joined Bletchley to decipher Japanese codes.
After the war, Churchill referred to his improbable country shooting party as “My geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled.” Ultra shortened and helped to win the war. The 10,000 heroes who worked at Bletchley would find military salutes inappropriate. But they deserve a shambling civilian wave and the gratitude of the free world, on this their anniversary.