Since the restrictions have been lifted I have been so thrilled to think that I was there – I didn’t dare think about it before that in case I said something I shouldn’t have! I never even told my husband what I was doing at B.P. Now I watch anything connected with it on television and listen to anything on radio.i.
Station X (Bletchley Park) was known to outstations as the ‘Nut House.’ii.
When its owner died in 1937 Bletchley Park, set in the Buckinghamshire countryside about 50 miles north-west of London, was an unremarkable Victorian country house. Situated at the end of a drive and surrounded by lawns that sloped gently to an ornamental lake, it had been largely rebuilt after 1883 when it had been bought by the financier Sir Herbert Leon. Its red-brick façade boasted neither symmetry nor beauty: it was an eclectic assemblage of gables, crenellations, chimney-stacks and bay windows – perhaps a suitably eccentric setting for the role it was destined soon to play. Tucked behind it were the usual outbuildings: stables, garages, laundry and dairy facilities, and servants’ living quarters. Of no historic or architectural importance, it was bought by a local builder for demolition and redevelopment.
Within a year, however, the house had changed hands again. Its new occupant appeared to be a naval or military gentleman, and he was accompanied by a group described as ‘Captain Ridley’s shooting party’. This term suggested a group of sporting upper-class men in pursuit of local wildlife, yet no gunshots were heard from the grounds. Instead, in the years that followed there would be the sounds of almost constant construction. The mysterious gentlemen were to remain in occupation for almost ten years, their numbers swelled by over 10,000 more men and women, both military and civilian, and it would be several more decades before local people discovered what they had been doing there.
The house had indeed been bought, for £7,500, by a naval gentleman, though he was not in fact Captain Ridley (who was a real naval officer) but an admiral. Sir Hugh Sinclair was the head of both MI6 and the Government Code and Cipher School. Both had their headquarters in London, and with war looming Sinclair was concerned to find a home for them that would be out of the way of German bombers and Axis spies. He had naturally expected the government to provide the funds for this purchase. In the event, every department he had approached, from the War Office to the Foreign Office, had refused on the grounds that his purposes and organizations came within the jurisdiction of some other body. He therefore paid for Bletchley Park himself. It was to acquire the cloak-and-dagger name ‘Station X’. This was not whimsy; the ‘X’ was in fact the Roman numeral 10, and referred to the fact that nine other sites had also been acquired by MI6 for its wartime needs.
The ‘shooting party’ arrived in the year that Hitler annexed Austria and seized the Sudetenland. They were the small advance guard of an army that would arrive in increasing numbers from the following summer. They had a vital mission with regard to the inevitable, imminent European war. Their job would be to break the secret codes of the enemy, read its transmissions and pass on its plans to the Allied governments and military commanders. This was a massive and daunting task. It required the mobilization of many of the finest minds to be found in Britain and among its allies, so that as well as creating an effective physical environment for their work, there had to be a search the length and breadth of the country for suitable men and women to carry it out. The ‘boffins’ – the people of near genius who would be able to work out the nature and content of enemy codes – could be found, without great difficulty, in their natural environment: in learned societies or in university laboratories and common rooms. Those whose age made them liable for military service would have been wasted in the armed forces, and the government was aware of this. Quietly, in the years preceding hostilities, the details had therefore been accumulated of people whose analytical talent could be put to specific use in the intelligence war.
IJ Good was one of these. He suggested that the War Office had learned a lesson from the 1914–18 conflict:
A number of scientists and mathematicians were on the so-called Reserve List and were not called up for military service. Perhaps the authorities remembered the poet Rupert Brooke and the physicist Henry Morley, who were both killed in World War I. I believe the military mind in World War II was more enlightened about the use of trained minds.
On another level, it was also necessary to find, interview and train the many members of staff whose work would support the codebreakers. Good described the makeup of his own department, providing an example of the numbers of subordinate staff needed to process the work of a single specialist unit:
The section or department contained about twelve mathematicians, four linguists and a hundred women for mechanical clerical work.
Of these clerical workers much would be expected. They must, whether they were military or civilian personnel, be willing to ‘disappear’ from the war effort, unable either then or in the future to tell their families and friends what they were doing, and foregoing any public recognition for the vital part they played. Because of this, they were to develop a tremendous esprit de corps. Some came, in any case, from similar backgrounds and had experiences in common, often sharing a lack of practical education. As Felicity Ashbee recalled:
We clerks ‘S/D’ [Special Duties] had at least all had some kind of ‘further’ education (i.e. we had stayed on at some kind of school till 16 or 17), though few if any of us had degrees, or for that matter much in the way of maths or science training. Such refinements were not thought essential for girls of any class; a little biology, or more likely only botany being all that was offered in most girls’ schools.
Many of that first intake had been in boarding schools of the ‘gentlemen’s daughters’ kind, so to be back in the ‘dorm’ at least presented no unaccustomed horrors!
In fact, the ‘girls’ at Bletchley came from disparate homes and regions, and not everyone fitted this pattern. Those who did not hail from comfortable homes or have a public school education did not share the sense of cosy familiarity. Mrs FE Clark later described her own previous employment:
I was ‘called up’ in 1943 having been in a reserved occupation – local borough library assistant. As a young woman from Bow it was quite an eye-opener. I’ve often wondered how I came to be in the place.
And she was struck not by the similarity in her fellow workers’ backgrounds but by the differences:
We were a very mixed assembly – in the same corridor as me there was a debutante – a titled lady – and two of us from the East End of London.
One of her colleagues, Mrs Ann Harding (née Ann Bruce Low), who came from the less affluent north, was more critical regarding those with whom she was expected to work:
We worked our first day in Hut 6 and were not happy. It seemed a madhouse, and we were not used to the type of girls from the south of England. Many of the girls recruited early were debs and relations of people in the Foreign Office, War Office and Admiralty etcetera, and all usually by word of mouth and friends of friends. Some were very grand and not at all friendly. Also, they smoked endlessly and often blew it at us. This last is in all my letters home. [I was] horrified by the bright red nails and thick lipstick and the fact that they did not always work but read magazines.
The type of work done by these women was widely varied. They became clerks, typists, secretaries and telephonists. They operated teleprinters and the various mysterious cipher machines. If they had the relevant language skills, they acted as interpreters and cryptanalysts and record officers. The pressure under which they worked was relentless for, in a fast-moving war that involved several major theatres of operations, information had to be decoded, translated, collated and sent onward as fast as possible. They laboured in shifts that covered the whole of the 24 hours.
Though the Park was an uplifting environment in which to work – in good weather its grounds and lake and tennis courts (restored at the direct instigation of Churchill for the benefit of the staff) were a pleasing counterpoint to the gruelling shifts and spartan offices that otherwise filled their horizons – their work required not gracious architecture and spreading lawns but privacy and space for expansion. Within the estate walls, and over a large proportion of the immaculate Victorian gardens, would be built the equivalent of a small town of wooden huts, to provide office and storage space not only for the armies of clerks, cryptanalysts, couriers, telephone operators, catering and security staff but also to accommodate the machinery they would use.
Once a ‘key’ had been found for a particular code, it might well open others, causing a flood of information. Looking ahead to a time when ‘breaks’ in enemy codes would be happening frequently, Alan Turing had thought about the settings, staff and equipment that would be needed for the vital work being performed. He saw the necessity of having a decoding room equipped with British cipher machines that would have been adapted to operate as if they were German Enigmas. There must also be a sufficiently large pool of trained decoders that staff could be on duty day and night and at whatever time a breakthrough was made, it could be decrypted, translated, evaluated and passed on to Military Intelligence as soon as possible.
Bletchley was not the only place in the area that took on a new identity as the war began. The Foreign Office bought a nearby country house, Hanslope Park, for use as a radio station; and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) took over yet another, Whaddon Hall, to accommodate staff and communications equipment. The neighbourhood was easily reached from London by road and rail, yet was far enough from the capital to allow a degree of privacy. It also lay astride the main GPO telephone cable linking London with the Midlands and the North. As a result, it saw a concentration of secrecy, technology and brain-power that must have been deeply bewildering for the local population. The most conspicuous physical evidence of this – the clutter of radio masts that began to appear around the landscape – came to the notice of Lord Haw-Haw, the voice behind German radio propaganda. He speculated that Bletchley might be the scene of clandestine intelligence activity, and the BBC was obliged to respond by spreading a story that the site was being used for local radio broadcasts.
Most of the staff did not live within the gates of Bletchley Park, but were scattered throughout the surrounding communities. Some lived, en masse, in hostels or country houses, such as Woburn Abbey, that were older and considerably more grand than Bletchley (those occupied by members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service were known as ‘Wrenneries’). Though these might be highly impressive, the parts of them in which the servicewomen were billeted were often a disappointment. Cynthia Waterhouse recalled her introduction to the area:
I joined the Wrens and spent a strenuous fortnight learning naval etiquette, squad drill and scrubbing floors. I was then drafted to Stanmore where I was trained for Special Duties X, a category known as P.5 (Pembroke V). Then I went to Wavedon House, near Woburn Sands. The stables had been converted into Wrens’ quarters – four Wrens to each stable, meant for one horse!
The majority, however, were billeted with ordinary families, staying in spare bedrooms as compulsory lodgers with hosts who were not allowed to know anything of their day-to-day lives. As well as multitudes of service people, dressed in a range of different uniforms, there were drawling, preoccupied, tweed-clad intellectuals. With all of these, the locals had to share pubs, cafés, cinemas and public transport, but there was little likelihood of satisfying any natural curiosity about them. Such was the all-pervading sense of secrecy at Bletchley that most of the young men and women would have had little to tell, for they knew nothing of what went on outside their own building or department. Good remembered that:
Owing to the rule of secrecy known as the ‘need to know,’ which was applied fairly rigorously during the war, there is probably no one person who could give a reasonably comprehensive account of any large project at Bletchley. People who were not at the top did not know much about matters that were not directly of their concern, and the people who were at the top were not fully aware of what was going on because of the complexity of the work, the advanced technology, the ingenuity, the mathematical ideas, and the variety of cliquish technical jargon.
And a young woman who worked as a clerk was later to comment:
There was so much I never knew about the place in which I spent three years. We were cocooned in our own particular section. The amazing thing was we were handling messages from all over the world, day and night, year in year out and never knew the context of them.
The recruiting of such remarkable people, in the numbers required, was far from being a simple matter. Competence in clerical work, ability to manage complex electronic equipment, skill in the languages of the enemy nations and a gift for quickly solving mental problems of the ‘brain-teaser’ variety were, naturally, an advantage for those expected to work on enemy codes. The others could be taught the skills they needed, and from them the utmost discretion was all that was initially required.
In the first instance, many were already members of the services as a result of the call-up (men were subject to this from 1939, women from 1941). This was especially true of the women, who formed the bulk – three-quarters, in fact – of the clerical staff. They might be either WRNS (naval) or WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force), though there were also members of the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service). In addition there were civil servants, many of them officially employees of the Foreign Office (a total of one-third of the staff were civilians). These bodies, however, could not provide enough staff, and other avenues had to be explored. Banks were trawled, and so were personnel departments. One organization included in the search, through a personal connection with someone at ‘BP’, was the John Lewis Partnership. In the unrelenting search for brainpower, as well as recommending their own pupils or colleagues – a source that was exhausted fairly quickly – those already working at Bletchley might suggest targeting anyone with the appropriate potential from a particular school, college or university, as happened with, among others, the universities of London, Reading and Manchester. Bletchley was situated roughly halfway between Oxford and Cambridge, which had naturally been seen from the beginning as a fruitful source of recruits with the requisite abilities. Cambridge, which had a reputation for being more science-oriented than its rival institution, was to provide far more mathematicians and cryptanalysts than Oxford, though by no means all the academics dealt in figures; there were ‘boffins’ at Bletchley who specialized in Egyptian hieroglyphs or ancient Greek. Ronald Lewin was among this intellectual intake. Referring to the rivers that ran through the two university towns, he wrote:
It was from the Cam, rather than from the Isis, the men were soon to be drafted, who like that earlier analyst, Daniel, in the end proved able to dissolve doubts, read the writing, and make known the interpretations.
Another possibility was to seek out chess players and those who made a hobby of solving crosswords. The Daily Telegraph crossword was famous for attracting regular devotees, and a deliberate attempt to ‘trap’ recruits was made on 15 January 1942, when a competition was staged in which they were asked to finish the puzzle within 12 minutes. Those who did well were subsequently invited for interview. IJ Good’s wartime career began as the result of an interest in chess – and an acquaintance with others who were already involved. He obviously had, unlike most of those who ended up at ‘BP’, some prior knowledge of what went on there. As he recalled:
About two weeks before I went to Bletchley I met Milner-Barry at a chess match in London and asked him whether he was at Bletchley Park working on German ciphers. His reply was ‘No, my address is Room 47, Foreign Office, Whitehall.’ Two weeks later, when I joined Bletchley, I found he was head of a department called Hut 6, sure enough working on German ciphers. At first the official address at Bletchley was indeed Room 47, Foreign Office, Whitehall, London, but it soon became admissible to give one’s private Bletchley address.
When I arrived at Bletchley I was met at the station by Hugh Alexander, the British chess champion. On the walk to the office Hugh revealed to me a number of secrets about the Enigma. Of course, we were not really supposed to talk about such things outside the precincts of the office. I shall never forget that sensational conversation.
As occurred throughout the war, recruiting of friends-of-friends was the key to building the specialist teams at Bletchley. Gordon Welchman remembered that a colleague of his introduced a suitable candidate:
Travis produced a scientist, John Colman, to take charge of the Intercept Control Room, which was to maintain close contact with the intercept stations. Colman was soon joined by another scientist, George Crawford, a former schoolmate of mine at Marlborough College. Travis also persuaded London banks to send us some of their brightest young men to handle the continuous interchange of information with intercept stations. Thus, very soon, we had an intercept control team large enough to operate round the clock.
Not all the men interviewed for this type of work were established academics or even undergraduates. Leo Marks had only just left St Paul’s School when he was sent to learn cryptography. He described, with a great deal of wit and humour, the process of selecting codebreakers:
I had been accepted as a pupil at a school for cryptographers. My audition took place at a large country house which tried to ramble but hadn’t the vitality. Major Masters, the headmaster of the code-breaking school, began the interview by asking what my hobbies were.
‘Incunabula and intercourse, sir.’
It slipped out and wasn’t even accurate; I’d had little experience of one and couldn’t afford the other. I suspected he didn’t know what incunabula was and added: ‘And chess too, sir – when there’s time,’ which proved a better gambit. Three weeks later I received his letter of acceptance.
The school for code-breakers was the only one of its kind in England. The course was due to last for eight weeks, at the end of which the students would be graded and sent to Bletchley Park, which was the headquarters of the cryptographic department, known in the trade as MI8.
Fifteen new pupils, including two young women, had been selected for the course and we sat at separate desks in a large, bright room, studying the mating habits of the alphabet, counting the frequency of letters and working our way through exercises which gradually became more difficult until we were ready to tackle codes of military and diplomatic level.
Unfortunately he failed the course, though this was not through lack of ability. He went instead to work for the clandestine organization SOE (Special Operations Executive) and played a significant role in the war, making codes rather than breaking them.
Another ‘boffin’, Harry Hinsley, had to wait until he was inside before being let in on the secret of his prospective work in ‘Hut 3’:
The Security Officer on the gate used his telephone and summoned up a WAAF officer.
She led me across a noble lawn, with on the left a Tudorbethan mansion, on the right a large lake; in front a small office. (It should be noted that the hut numbers not only designated the huts themselves but were also used as cover-names for the work going on in them. When, towards the end of the war, the Hut 3 work was transferred to a brick building, it was still called Hut 3.)
In my initiation stress was laid on the value of work going out from Hut 3. It was ‘the heart of the matter’ and of immense importance. The Enigma had been mastered. The process up to the production of raw decrypts was carried out in Hut 6 next door. It was the task of Hut 3 to evaluate them and put the intelligence they contained into a form suitable for passing to the competent authorities, be they Ministries or Commands.
For outsiders, even if they belonged to the intelligence world, BP had already acquired a reputation as a place of mystery. It had also gained a certain fame for its eccentric civilian staff some servicemen saw it as a sort of zoo for boffins. Jack Poole, a Flight Sergeant in the RAF, remembered being told what to expect, and suggests how ‘top secret’ the establishment really was:
With a number of other RAF sergeants who had been on the cipher course with me I was sent out of town to Bletchley Park. We were accompanied by a British Army Officer who said little except to remark on our arrival, ‘Don’t be surprised to see people here walking around with beards and red, white and blue umbrellas.’ We were billeted in an RAF camp that had plenty of mud and no Sergeants’ Mess, because it had just been opened. Every day we walked through a churchyard to the outbuildings of a vicarage where we learned about ‘Ultra’ and the operation of Typex coding machines. The church stood between our classrooms and what immediately became to us the ‘mysterious’ Park. Every time I walked alongside the ivy-covered wall that hid the Park from the pathway to the camp I could not refrain from wondering what was behind it. One night in the Sergeants’ Mess one of my companions confided, ‘They call this place Station X’ and to us, studying on the fringe, that’s what the place remained. It was not until I read Group Captain Winterbotham’s book ‘The Ultra Secret’ that I discovered what did, in fact, go on in the Park.
Even those who found themselves working inside the walls shared this sense of mystery. Once assigned to duty there they had first of all to find out where they were going. ‘Bletchley’ meant nothing to most of them, and only the name of the London terminus from which it was reached offered a clue to its whereabouts. Mrs Clark, the young library assistant from Bow, remembered that:
Some time after the original interview I was sent a ticket to Bletchley, from Euston, and told to send my luggage ‘in advance’. Also to take an overnight bag for a couple of days, until said luggage arrived.
The great majority of clerical staff were unaware, on arrival, of the type of work in which they were to be involved, though they were left in no doubt as to its sensitive nature. Their ‘joining instructions’ often sounded like something out of a spy film. For example:
On arrival at Bletchley [station] you will find a telephone kiosk. Ring this number and await instructions.
Or, equally cryptically:
Take the exit from the arrival platform, go to the station forecourt and report to a hut on the far right hand side marked RTO (Railway Transport Officer) and show him but DO NOT GIVE him your envelope. He will direct you.
When the new recruits reached the Park itself they signed the Official Secrets Act at once. They were then told something of the role they were to play in the defeat of Hitler. For those who had just completed basic training and become used to the structured and smartly uniformed world of a military camp, Bletchley would have been utterly bewildering. Not only were there men and women from all three services, but civilians – often scruffy and dishevelled ones at that – who obviously held positions of authority. Wren Cynthia Waterhouse recalled that:
The pay was 30 shillings (£1.50) a week and it was never clear who was in charge of us as we were detached from the Navy, working under the Foreign Office.
Many of the skills necessary for the clerical staff could be learned, if they did not already possess them, by quick and concentrated effort. An essential part of the ‘Bletchley experience’ for many young women was a series of crash courses lasting days or weeks and held in London, Bedford or elsewhere, that taught them the elements of such subjects as speed-typing, telephone operating or Japanese. A background in clerical work, teaching or (since many came direct from school or university) merely a sound education quickly came to be considered sufficient preparation. Many recruits were obtained by word of mouth, summoned to interview because they were friends, relatives, pupils or colleagues of those already involved in the work, who recommended them because they appeared to have the necessary qualities, or simply because their backgrounds could be vouched for. Typical of this intake was Margaret Ward:
I joined Bletchley Park by chance. I was staying with my godmother in Woburn Sands for a brief rest following the London Blitz, and the question of my ‘call up’ was mentioned. She mentioned that there was a ‘Government department’ at Bletchley Park and suggested seeing a friend of hers whose son was ‘high up’ in the Civil Service, and was working there. I therefore applied and duly received and completed a detailed questionnaire. Shortly afterwards I was summoned to an interview, which took place in what looked like a railway carriage tucked away behind some bushes near Bletchley railway station. The interview was conducted by two gentlemen – one a retired army colonel, the other a civilian who – I learned later – was a brilliant linguist speaking 16 languages fluently!
Soon after this I received a letter asking me to report at the front gate of B.P. There I was met by the said retired colonel and, following some formalities including receiving an official pass, was then taken to a small room and interviewed by a Don from King’s College, Cambridge. Also by a naturalised Russian/German gentleman. Despite the fact that the work they did was completely incomprehensible to me at that time I enjoyed my few weeks with them – such splendid characters, absolutely charming!
Felicity Ashbee set out to find war work that would make use of her flair for languages:
Because I had good German, pretty fair French and a little Russian, the censorship seemed a suitable place to offer my services to. So, I found out where the language exams were being held, chewed the end of my fountain pen over strange texts, and went back home again to Kent to kick my heels impatiently waiting for a verdict.
With these rites of passage behind her, she was mustered into the WAAF. Examining her orders, she was irritated to find she had been assigned a job that seemed to offer no scope for her abilities, and perplexed by a lack of further explanation:
A glance at my curious credentials and I was labelled Clerk.
‘Clerk!’ I said, chagrined.
‘S/D’ he added, ‘Special Duties.’
Obviously that was the only information we were to get for the time being.
She was to work for RAF Fighter Command, for the radar defences of Britain also required this type of clerk, but she would in due course arrive at BP and find that her skills were not wasted. In the meantime, she and her fellow recruits had to be put at least partly in the picture:
Soon we were summoned to ‘report to’ a large, shabby house in Leighton Buzzard, whose neglected garden was knee high with uncut grass. We were assembled into what must once have been an impressive drawing room to be given a talk on the elements of Radar (so that was what Special Duties was going to be about!) and a smattering of information, much of it as incomprehensible as it seemed irrelevant, from a fat volume called Air Force Law.
Ann Harding, who clearly possessed a sense of adventure, was looking for an unusual form of war service. She found one:
I thought about going into the WRNS, also the FANYs (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry), which was mostly driving, but also secretly provided suitable girls for dropping into France – not my possibility as they had to be perfect French speakers, bilingual. Then one day a letter came from [my sister] Nancy, at the Foreign Office in London. She asked if [my friend] Jean would like to work in a department of the FO that was badly in need of people, especially German speakers. Jean had just been to Bonn University so spoke very good German. She did not want to go, so I asked if they would see if they would have me. I had had a year’s German at school and as Nancy had said this place was not in London, but out in the country, I was allowed to apply, having asked my friend Bunty if she would come with me.
We went off to the Foreign Office in London and were interviewed by a rather terrifying woman, but were both accepted. We were to start at the beginning of May, for which we would get instructions. We were to go to Bletchley in Buckinghamshire. It was a train junction, but that was all we knew.
We were met by a WAAF who took us to a brake with War Department written on it, driven by a very smart chauffeur. Bunty was dropped first, then I was taken to a house by the railway. My landlady was very kind, but her house was not nice with the street on one side and the railway on the other. There was no garden. My room was very small with an iron bedstead, feather mattress and two very thin blankets. There was no bathroom, just a washbowl and cold water on a washstand. The loo was downstairs, through the kitchen (where all the family lived) and outside in the yard.
Miss SM Carman’s journey to Bletchley was the result of a quirk of fate – or a disinclination to be stuck at a kitchen sink:
In November 1943 I joined the WRNS. We had to be slotted into a category and at that time the only ones open were the kitchens or SDX, Special Duties X, which was so secret no-one would tell us what it was. So most of us agreed to the latter, signed the (Official) Secrets Act, and were posted to our various stations for training in our duties.
Doreen Spencer was actively seeking useful war work and already possessed a qualification of interest to recruiters for Bletchley:
My seventeenth birthday came in January 1941. Many of my friends were joining the Forces as their age groups came up. I was becoming very restless and feeling that, as there was no one else in the family of an age to join the Forces it was up to me to go. In any case I would soon have been called at the age of eighteen to go into a factory or other vital war work and that didn’t appeal to me. I was more adventurous than that!
My father was a Signals Officer in the Home Guard and here started my road to Bletchley Park. He was told to learn Morse as part of his duties, and so be totally efficient in any emergency. Pop and I had lots of fun learning Morse together and becoming proficient in handling a Morse key.
As soon as I was seventeen and a half years old, I applied to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, the WAAFs. I was told I would be notified in due course. It was an anxious time, waiting for that buff envelope on the doormat.
The tests consisted of general intelligence. We were given various papers containing questions, simple mathematics, relative pictures, drawings and graphs. We had tests for colour blindness. We also had hearing tests. Happily I passed the lot and was told that I would undergo training to become a wireless operator.
Having learned Morse code I now had to build up a speed and send and receive correctly and read what was sent with ease and at an acceptable speed. Most important, how to handle a Morse key with ease and accuracy. I worked hard to be really efficient. Every word I used, I translated into Morse symbols. Before long Morse is no longer a series of dashes and dots but a rhythmic language. The more experienced one becomes, whole words have a sound of their own, the operator recognises in plain language as opposed to code words like ‘and’ and ‘are’, which are in regular use.
She, and others who had been selected, had to acquire further skill before they could begin their work. Their next task:
… was to learn touch typing at speed and with great accuracy. The next stage was where our knowledge of Morse was to play an essential part. We were trained to read a Morse slip and type the symbols, translate in other words, the symbols into letters by typing them. All the time the Morse slip would be moving at a reasonable speed.
Having worked up the necessary swiftness and accuracy, they could be posted to their destination:
We were driven to a stately home and were shown to a series of wooden huts situated under big old broad-leafed trees.
We were housed in a very nice house at a village called Shenley while a camp was being built next to the Park. When we finally moved into new huts on the camp, Shenley was turned into a rest house for us. We could spend our time off there, staying overnight if we wanted. The camp became RAF Church Green and that became our address, no mention of Bletchley Park.
She recorded her early impressions of the place and of the few parts of the complex that she came to know. Some of her colleagues would not encounter even the small number of other departments that she did:
Bletchley Park was a series of buildings, as I learned years later, but at the time we were there we only knew of our Block – the Auto Room. I knew of the teleprinter section because I was sent there to work for a couple of days to give me experience.
I also knew the Cipher Section because that was where all our messages were sent to be decoded, and supposedly that was where messages came from to be transmitted by us. These were never carried by hand from our department to another but conveyed automatically through a container.
I didn’t realise when I first stepped into the Auto Room that I was going to be an integral part of a very secret establishment. In fact I didn’t know that until fifty years after the war. My parents were never told of Bletchley Park. My address was Hut Number ? (I can’t remember the number), RAF Church Green, Bletchley, Buckinghamshire.
My impressions the first time I went in through those guarded gates were of a grand red brick mansion with a lake in front of it, and a few buildings inside the main gate and the building we worked in.
Having taken in their surroundings, the women began to get used to the various premises that would become their homes. A number of them were accommodated in a hostel, as Mrs FE Clark remembered:
Several of us arrived at this time – none of us had ever worked or lived in the same hostel with others. We were met by an estate car – and taken direct to the Park. The driver must have had a pass for us all – otherwise we would never have been allowed past the guard. We went straight to the mansion, for the ‘oath of secrecy’ and were issued with passes. Thence to the hostel and were allocated a room. One could sit on the bed and touch everything!, but we each had a key, and it was private. Our ration books were handed in and it was some time later when we were allocated a part [of our coupons] to take home on weekend leaves. I think it was every third weekend. I worked 21 days straight off then 2 days off to go home.
There was a bathroom wing, well equipped, with hand basins, WCs and baths. The other two wings were bedrooms – a long corridor with rooms on both sides. There was also a laundry room for our personal washing and ironing, and we were allowed to use the boiler for drying purposes. It all worked very well, later someone acquired a sewing-machine for us – it was kept in the lounge – and was a boon to those of us who made our own clothes (when we could get the material). Also, there was a mini-kitchen with a ‘Baby Belling’ grill and plate used to make drinks and snacks. This was off the lounge.
We ate in the canteen just inside the gates of the Park, all meals including breakfast. Also we went over later in the evenings for a hot ‘night’ drink. In our free time we did a lot of walking in the surrounding countryside – or the cinema at Bletchley or Fenny Stratford, or to the little café in the town – usually very crowded.
Mrs LP Holliday recalled that she had been fortunate enough to find convivial lodgings in the nearby town:
I lived in the hostel, outside the main gates, but later was billeted in Bletchley town, with a pleasant homely family consisting of husband and wife and married daughter with husband in the Forces. They were very good to me and I was very happy there.
The commandeering by the authorities of spare bedrooms throughout entire districts sometimes had unexpected results. Ann Harding found that, no matter how distant she might be from where she had formerly lived, she was not, after all, so far from home:
My sister Nancy was sent out to Bletchley from the Foreign Office. She turned up next door to us, the other half of our semi-detached house, No 82, with Mr and Mrs Elson. Mr Elson was an engine driver and Nancy stayed with them for the rest of the war. Her bedroom and our bedroom were next door to each other.
But not all were this fortunate. Felicity Ashbee was to find herself sharing cramped quarters with a larger-than-life room mate:
It transpired that, in the frantic rush on the outbreak of hostilities, the billeting officers had done their fact-finding at the double, and had only asked how many ‘bodies’ each of the small semi-detached houses along the Elstree Road could take, not how many beds were available to put the bodies into! This meant that I found myself, to the horror of another of my new and rather more clued-up friends, sharing a double bed with a 6-foot lesbian ballet-photographer, who, since her measurements were larger than anything the manufacturers of WAAF uniforms had allowed for, continued for some time to wear her long black cloak and black sombrero.
As it turned out I soon had the bed to myself, for she summoned a lilo from home and inflated it to fill the narrow space between the bed and the wall.
Before they settled into their work, all members of the Bletchley Park community, whether Oxford don or schoolgirl, who worked with ciphers and intelligence had to learn and abide by a series of strict regulations. Though obviously these rules were formulated before the threat of German invasion receded, the need for security did not change in the least degree throughout the war:
No mention whatsoever may be made either in conversation or correspondence regarding the nature of your work. It is expressly forbidden to bring cameras etc. within the precincts of Bletchley Park (Official Secrets Act).
DO NOT TALK AT MEALS. There are the waitresses and others who may not be in the know regarding your own particular work.
DO NOT TALK TO THE TRANSPORT. There are the drivers who should not be in the know.
DO NOT TALK TRAVELLING. Indiscretions have been overheard on Bletchley platform. They do not grow less serious further off.
DO NOT TALK IN THE BILLET. Why expect your hosts who are not pledged to secrecy to be more discreet than you, who are?
DO NOT TALK BY YOUR OWN FIRESIDE, whether here or on leave. If you are indiscreet and tell your own folks, they may see no reason why they should not do likewise. They are not in a position to know the consequences and have received no guidance. Moreover, if one day invasion came, as it perfectly well may, Nazi brutality might stop at nothing to wring from those that you care for, secrets that you would give anything, then, to have saved them from knowing. Their only safety will lie in utter ignorance of your work.
BE CAREFUL EVEN IN YOUR HUT. Cleaners and maintenance staff have ears, and are human.
These huts were to dominate the memories of those who were stationed at ‘BP’. Though they were occupied for the war’s whole duration, and underwent a certain amount of modification, they remained as uncomfortable to inhabit as they were unattractive to look at. During the first, stifling summer of the conflict, the staff worked in huts built of pine planks. As construction speeded up under the pressure of events, and more buildings had to be erected, wood increasingly gave way to plasterboard and structures became more draughty and flimsy. Only with the arrival of heavy machinery – the bombe and then the Colossus – was it seen as necessary to create sturdier strcutures of steel and concrete.
Harry Hinsley described the layout of the building in which he worked on naval codes:
Hut 3 was set up like a miniature factory. At its centre was the Watch Room – in the middle a circular or horseshoe-shaped table, to one side a rectangular table. On the outer rim of the circular table sat the Watch, some half-dozen people. The man in charge, the head of the Watch or Number 1, sat in an obvious directing position at the top of the table. The watchkeepers were a mixture of civilians and serving officers, Army and RAF. At the rectangular table sat serving officers, Army and RAF, one or two of each. These were the Advisers. Behind the head of the Watch was a door communicating with a small room where the Duty Officer sat. Elsewhere in the Hut were one large room housing the Index and a number of small rooms for the various supporting parties, the back rooms.
The processes to which the decrypts were submitted were, consecutively, emendation, translation, evaluation, commenting, and signal drafting. The first two were the responsibility of the Watch, the remainder of the appropriate Adviser.
IJ Good explained how the result of their work might be passed onward, all the way to Downing Street:
When we cryptanalysts broke a message we would not usually read it ourselves, although we would sometimes read the first few letters to make sure there was no mistake. Instead, the keys to the message would be sent to the Intelligence Department, where the message would be deciphered and sometimes translated and where a selection would be made from the various decipherments for transmitting information to Churchill and to the armed forces.
The hours worked by the teams were, in theory, not onerous – though in moments of stress or when a major backlog had developed they might well work whatever hours were necessary. The combination of secrecy, dedication and exhilaration that characterized the better moments at Bletchley is suggested by this account by Ann Harding:
We started off on the 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. shift with a break from 1.00 to 2.30 for lunch in the House after which we used to sit by the lake and often write home. Once inside the hut we were locked in from our side and always had to go and unlock the door if anyone came. We loved our work, but found it very intensive and tiring. We were supposed to have one day off a week, but if we were very busy we often did not take it, but could, with luck, have perhaps two days later. In some cases we were so busy that we could be due six days. Often, we were so fascinated by the work that we didn’t want a day off. The town’s people were always dying to know what we were doing and called the place the Lunatic Asylum.
A number of the clerks were to learn the mysteries of the ‘Bombe’, a machine designed by Alan Turing and built by a local company. A version of this had been used by Polish cryptanalysts the year before the war began, and there were several explanations for its unusual name. One was the loud ticking sound it gave off; another was that the ice cream of that name was being eaten when it was invented. Housed in a bronze cabinet six-and-a-half feet high and seven feet wide, it was an electromechanical device whose rotating wheels ran with a deafening clatter and with the speed of an express train. It could read and analyse vast numbers of Enigma settings, looking for repetitions. It had 30 drums, or wheels, and each was equivalent to the wheels of ten Enigma machines. To set it to work, the codebreakers first came up with a list, or ‘menu’, of possible matches between clear and enciphered letters. This was fed into the machine. Once the Bombe had found a connection, an operator using a replica of the Enigma would test it.
The first Bombe, named ‘Victory’, was ready for use by March 1940. Group Captain Winterbotham went to see it in operation. He remembered the moment that, at a time when German air force traffic had greatly increased, the machine made the vital breakthrough into the code:
It is no longer a secret that the backroom boys at Bletchley used the science of electronics to help them solve the puzzle of Enigma. I am not of the computer age nor do I attempt to understand them, but early in 1940 I was ushered with great solemnity into the shrine where stood a bronze-coloured column surmounted by a larger circular bronze-coloured face, like some Eastern goddess who was destined to become the oracle of Bletchley, at least when she felt like it. She was an awesome piece of magic.
It must have been about the end of February 1940 that the Luftwaffe had evidently received enough Enigma machines to train their operators sufficiently well for them to start putting some practice messages on the air. The signals were quite short but must have contained the ingredients the bronze goddess had been waiting for. [General Stewart] Menzies had given instructions that any successful results were to be sent immediately to him, and it was just as the bitter cold days of that frozen winter were giving way to the first days of April sunshine that the oracle of Bletchley spoke and Menzies handed me four little slips of paper, each with a Luftwaffe message dealing with personnel postings to units. From the Intelligence point of view they were of little value, except as a small bit of administrative inventory, but to the backroom boys at Bletchley Park and to Menzies, and indeed to me, they were like the magic in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The miracle had arrived.
By August another Bombe was completed, and the number rapidly increased. Teams of Wrens were assigned to operate them, a task that required not only physical stamina but a certain stature, as Cynthia Waterhouse, working at one of Bletchley’s outstations, explained:
The intricate deciphering machines were known as ‘bombes.’ These unravelled the wheel settings for the Enigma ciphers thought by the Germans to be unbreakable. They were cabinets about eight feet tall and seven feet wide. The front housed rows of coloured circular drums each about five inches in diameter and three inches deep. Inside each was a mass of wire brushes, every one of which had to be meticulously adjusted with tweezers to ensure that the circuits did not short. The letters of the alphabet were painted round the outside of each drum. The back of the machine almost defies description – a mass of dangling plugs on rows of letters and numbers.
We were given a menu which was a complicated drawing of numbers and letters from which we plugged up the back of the machine and set the drums on the front. The menus had a variety of cover names – e.g. silver drums were used for shark and porpoise menus for naval traffic, and phoenix, an army key associated with tank battles at the time of El Alamein.
We only knew the subject of the key and never the contents of the messages. It was quite heavy work and now we understood why we were all of good height and eyesight, as the work had to be done at top speed and 100% accuracy was essential. The ‘bombes’ made a considerable noise as the drums revolved, and would suddenly stop, and a reading was taken. If the letters matched the menus, the Enigma wheel-setting had been found for that particular key. To make it more difficult the Germans changed the setting every day. The reading was phoned through to the Controller at Bletchley Park where the complete messages were deciphered and translated. The good news would be a call back to say ‘Job up, strip machine.’
She also explained the system of shift-work:
We worked on the ‘bombes’ in a hut in the grounds and were connected direct to Bletchley Park. The watches were of four weeks’ duration, 8–4 first week, 4–12 second week and midnight to 8 a.m. third, then a hectic 3 days of 8 hours on, 8 hours off, ending with a much-needed 4 days’ leave.
The teams laboured day and night to keep up with the flow of traffic. Another Wren, Mrs HB Rance (née Thomson), described their working arrangements, which could involve a certain amount of domestic drudgery as well as the challenge of high technology:
I think there were 16 bombes at Gayhurst Mannor – 8 in each room. They were named after various scientists: Ampere, Coulombe, Henri, Faraday, Volta, Evershed etc.
There must have been about 34 of us on each Watch as two were Duty Wrens (taken in turns) and they had to clean the cloakrooms as no Wren stewards were allowed in the hut. They also had to make tea twice during the Watch and if it was Night Watch they made the supper – usually bread and cheese I think.
There was a Petty officer in charge of the Watch and she sat in the office and was in touch with B.P. by teleprinter and phone. She issued Menus and settings and would tell us if a job was ‘up,’ e.g. Successfully completed.
The process began when the women were issued with menus by the non-commissioned officer in charge of their group:
A Leading Wren sat in each room and issued wheel orders (or woes as we called them).
When you were given a Menu you asked your checker to help you set up. The different coloured drums were on shelves. Each colour represented a number – the naval colours were dark blue, black and silver and were at the bottom of the racks. The drums had 26 wire contacts on their faces and you had to make sure these were all straight. Tweezers were provided. The drums were put on the machines with clips which were quite stiff and we got sore fingers unclipping them.
Menus had a name like Avocet or Jaguar or Leopard for the army and Shark, Dolphin etc. for naval ones. There were three banks on the bombes so we usually ran three wheel orders at a time. At the back of the bombes were three lots of plugs and leads to correspond with the front settings. We had coupling jacks to join two plugs and there was something called a female. You had to make sure plugs were in properly and not splayed out.
When you had put on the drums and plugged the back you set the drums with the settings given on the Menu. When all were checked you started the bombe. If your bombe stopped quickly your heart sank as it probably meant a wrong stop. You gave the stop to your checker on a small piece of paper. It looked like this:
Ampere (1)
231
NBG/S
The three letters were read from the three master drums on the front and the single letter was read from the input at the side which had three separate banks so you knew which wheel order it was. You couldn’t wait for your checker so you continued with the run. If she called out ‘wrong stop’ you had to see if any of the drums were loose or wrongly set. If you couldn’t find any fault you called one of the I/c Watch who were RAF electricians. They usually found out the fault quite quickly although sometimes a bombe would be u/s [unserviceable].
However, if the stop was alright you continued running through the wheel orders. If the stop had some self-steckers e.g. S = S or A = A and some confirmations e.g. E = B and B = E you knew you had probably cracked it so you rushed into the P.O. and she rang through to B.P. Meanwhile you continued in case it wasn’t the right one. If it was ‘Job up Ampere’ or whatever, you stripped the bombe and waited for the next one.
The checking machines were quite small and you could sit down so it was a much less tiring job. Quite often you helped your operator change wheel orders.
It was in 1943 that Max Newman, one of the Bletchley mathematicians, decided to develop a machine that would bring to life the ideas proposed by Turing some years earlier. He set out to automate, and thus considerably speed up, the search for Enigma wheel-settings. The device built under his guidance by telecommunications engineers came to be known as the ‘Robinson’, a reference to the cartoon machinery drawn by the artist William Heath Robinson and thus shorthand for any bewilderingly complicated technology. The Robinson could read a thousand characters per second, but information was fed into it on paper tape and read by another tape. At the necessary speed, the tapes were often torn by the sprockets on the wheels and it was necessary to keep stopping the machine for repairs. Tommy Flowers, a young telephone engineer, became involved in the project at Turing’s invitation. He realized that a version built with valves could work even faster, that the cipher text could be read photo-electrically and that it could have smooth instead of sprocketed wheels, which would therefore not tear the tape. It was named ‘Colossus’. Flowers explained its object:
The purpose was to find out what the positions of the code wheels were at the beginning of the message and it did that by trying all the possible combinations and there were billions of them. It tried all the combinations, which processing at 5,000 characters a second could be done in about half an hour. So then having found the starting positions of the cipher wheels you could decode the message.
IJ Good provided a description of its features:
The machine was programmed largely by plugboards. It read the tape at 5,000 characters per second and, at least in Mark II, the circuits were in quintuplicate so that in a sense the reading speed was 25,000 bits per second. This compares well with the speed of the electronic computers of the early 1950s. The first Colossus had 1,500 valves, which was probably far more than for any electronic machine previously used for any purpose. This was one reason why many people did not expect Colossus to work. But it was installed in December 1943 and began producing results almost immediately. Most of the failures of valves were caused by switching the machine on and off.
With Colossus, Flowers had brought to fruition Turing’s concept of a programmable computer, and thus begun a new era in science.
Complex though the equipment was, the technicalities of operating it were quickly mastered, and a sense of downright boredom could assail women who had to stand for hours in front of the wheels and wires, performing a series of deft and automatic movements to keep the machines running and the tapes flowing through. Monotony was made worse by failure to appreciate how this work was helping the war effort, and periodic pep talks were arranged to bolster morale. Cynthia Waterhouse remembered:
To keep up our morale, we were told that Winston Churchill was constantly on the line ‘to his most secret source’, and that our work was absolutely vital. We sometimes had news of our involvement in a past achievement such as the hunting and subsequent sinking of the battleship Tirpitz.
As the war continued these triumphs were to multiply, and within the walls of Bletchley there could be private celebrations. The Park received visits from some of those who were directing the war, and who were among the very few people to know the value of what the codebreakers were doing.
IJ Good remembered that:
For the good of our morale, we were given a number of titbits about the results of our work. For example, we were told it had led directly to the sinking of the Bismarck. Also, there were times when Rommel did not receive any supplies in North Africa because all his supply ships were being sunk in consequence of our reading the Mediterranean Enigma. And obviously the reading of the U-boat traffic was tremendously valuable. Also, for the sake of our morale, we were once visited by Churchill, who delivered a pep talk to a little crowd of us gathered around him on the grass. Much later another pep talk was given by Field Marshal Alexander in a hall with an audience of about a thousand. At one point he obtained a laugh by mimicking one of Montgomery’s gestures.
And the atmosphere of austerity and purpose in the huts was occasionally lightened by a touch of humour:
I remember towards the end of my time at Gayhurst a new Menu called a Daisy Chain came in and I was given one to do and couldn’t understand it. It turned out to be an April Fool!
The eccentricity of the codebreakers became, and has remained, legendary. One common memory was of the regular searches that were necessary through dustbins and waste-paper baskets, because so often a ‘boffin’ would have absent-mindedly thrown away highly sensitive materials. As Gwen Davies, who worked at BP, remarked:
At least half of the people there were absolutely mad. They were geniuses, no doubt many of them were extremely, extremely clever, but my goodness they were strange in ordinary life.
Another (anonymous) clerk agreed and made an incisive comment on the difficulties of gathering so much genius in one place, dispelling the notion that these exceptional characters invariably worked in harmony:
Their brains were developed to the detriment of their bodies. This led to an atmosphere of egotism, not to mention spitefulness and backbiting. The precept of public service was unknown to them though they would do what they were paid to do, the thought of doing a bit more did not occur to them.
Alan Turing, undoubtedly a hero of the intelligence war, was the outstanding example of this. Though only in his twenties, his nickname, ‘Prof’, suggested a gravitas and eminence beyond his years, and his role in the development of the computer has gained him admission to the scientific pantheon. Nevertheless he became just as celebrated for his habit of wearing a gas mask when cycling, or for chaining his coffee-mug to a radiator. His colleague IJ Good remembered these peculiarities:
In the first week of June each year he would get a bad attack of hay fever, and he would cycle to the office wearing a service gas mask to keep the pollen off. His bicycle had a fault; the chain would come off at regular intervals. Instead of having it mended he would count the number of times the pedals went round and would get off the bicycle in time to adjust the chain by hand. Another of his eccentricities was that he chained his mug to the radiator pipes to prevent its being stolen. It was only after the war that we learned he was a homosexual. It was lucky we didn’t know about it early on, because if they had known, he might not have obtained clearance and we might have lost the war.
Turing also had his savings converted into silver bars, believing that these would more easily survive postwar economic fluctuations. He buried the bars in a meticulously chosen spot – and was never again able to find it. An incident that is perhaps more illuminating about the nature of genius was recounted by Ann Harding, who found herself one of the staff in his hut:
One morning I had a bad moment. Prof called me over to his table and handed me a sheet of figures. ‘Please could you work these out for me, Ann?’ I was appalled. He was so obviously a very brilliant person, a lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge, and maths was not my strong subject. I had a good look and found it was all long division, plenty of it but simple. So I did it all and took it back to him. I said I couldn’t understand why he wanted me to do it as I would have thought he would have done it in a flash. He looked rather embarrassed and said, ‘Well, you see, I never did simple arithmetic.’ At school his maths master realised very quickly that he had a brilliant brain and put him straight onto advanced maths.
It is natural to assume that people of such immense, specialized brainpower have no time or inclination to cultivate other interests, but for all Turing’s air of preoccupation, he had a parallel ability that in more favourable circumstances might have brought him renown in a different field. Good remembered that:
Turing became a first class marathon runner. Unfortunately he developed some leg complaint that prevented his getting into the Olympic Games.
Good considered another boffin to have an even more impressive range of talents:
Shaun Wylie had a very exact logical mind. He was also president of the Bletchley Park Dramatic Club, an international hockey player, a first class teacher and a winner of the unarmed combat competition of the local battalion of the Home Guard. He was a perfect gentleman who never lost his temper except on purpose, and he was an extremely good listener. I used to believe that he wouldn’t interrupt a conversation even to mention that the war was over.
In spite of the pressure, and the burden of secrecy, under which the staff worked, there was a lighter side to life at the Park. The tennis courts were much in demand when the weather permitted, and highly competitive games of rounders were played on the lawn between the house and the lake. The mere possibility of strolling in what were, despite wartime development, beautiful gardens gave some a refreshing sense of escape from stern realities:
After lunch in the summer we used to take our cups of tea or coffee down by the lake in the grounds – the war seemed far away.
In fact, there were most of the makings of a highly successful social environment – a good mix of the sexes, a strong sense of community based on common purpose, and a number of people with a great deal to offer in terms of talent and ability, whether as instructors, designers or performers. To one young woman, the convivial delights that these produced rated almost as highly as the enjoyment of traditional English cuisine:
Social life at BP was very full – an excellent dramatic society with many professional actors and actresses employed at the Park. There were many concerts and recitals, poetry readings, country dances and language courses. The huge canteen was a meeting place both for meals and functions. The food was really quite good. On Fridays a whole crowd of us used to go to a delightful pub just outside the perimeter of the Park where the publican’s wife would use up her weekly jam ration to make a baked jam roll – simply delicious!
There were also ways of striking up friendships in the town without compromising the discretion required by their work. Another young woman recalled that:
I had several friends among the local people mostly from the Methodist church.
As famous as the rounders matches by the lake was another abiding Bletchley Park passion – Scottish country dancing. This is difficult to do well without a good deal of practice, and the number of sessions engaged in every week by Doreen Spencer suggests how seriously it was taken by the Bletchley staff:
I learned Scottish dancing – mostly at lunch times – twice a week plus a Friday evening, in the Assembly Hall, with a full-dress dance on St Andrew’s nights (30th November). We wore out (Angus) Foss’s record of Circassian Circle, and had a collection to buy him a new one. I also went to all performances by the operatic and dramatic groups.
And there were other possibilities beyond the confines of the town of Bletchley. Stratford-on-Avon was a short journey away:
In the town of Bletchley we had two cinemas, both of which showed good films, so we went when we could. Also visits to Stratford were arranged and we went several times, saw Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, but could not afford to go every time, and often we were in the wrong shift to be able to go. To go to Stratford – coach and play – cost 6s 6d (32.5 pence).
Not everyone shared this view. The hours worked by staff could present considerable problems with regard to organizing or participating in activities. A young clerk lamented that:
It was difficult to have much of a social life, when working a three-shift system all the time.
As for entertainment – there was very little, really, mostly dances – put on specially for us – visits to the cinema, and eating out occasionally, plus the odd game of tennis.
She concluded, rather pathetically:
We often went to Bletchley station buffet, just to get a break.
These were the conditions under which the codebreakers waged their war. The combination of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the mundane and the exciting, the regimented and the eccentric was to give them an experience unique in the history of warfare, and one which none of them would ever forget.