Arkley View

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Arkley View in 1943
Sound sample of a secret Morse transmission
The HRO of the National Radio Company was the most widely used wireless receiver in the British Y stations

Arkley View is a former country house that stood in north London . During the Second World War , the data center was located here, in which the radio transmissions were collected, which were intercepted by amateur radio stations spread across the whole country . This served the British secret service as a valuable addition to the hostile radio messages intercepted by the military radio eavesdropping stations as part of the Y service . For deciphering and intelligence analysis, they were bundled from here to Bletchley Park forwarded. Arkley View also housed its own Y station .

history

Arkley View stood about 18 km north of central London in the village of Arkley near Barnet , a then independent community that is now part of London. Shortly after the start of the war , like many buildings in Arkley, it was requisitioned by the British military and served as a military base . From 1940 it housed the Radio Security Service (RSS) , i.e. the department of the British secret service responsible for radio intelligence ( Military Intelligence, Section 8 ) . Suspicious radio broadcasts of all kinds, especially encrypted German radio messages, were intercepted here.

In addition to the military listening posts, countless radio amateurs (English: "hams" ), often young people who were organized in the British Radio Amateurs Association (RSGB) , helped with the arduous work of listening to and recording enemy radio messages. As so-called “Voluntary Interceptors” (“VIs” for short; German for example: “Freiwillige Abhör”) they made a valuable contribution to the British war effort. The German ciphertexts , which were tapped in Morse code and mostly encrypted with the Enigma machine , were simply recorded by hand by the VIs and sent to the cover address "Box 25, Barnet" (Barnet, Postfach 25). Behind it was the Arkley View station. Here the tapping logs were collected and then bundled by dispatch rider ( motorcycle detector ) over the 50 km long route to Bletchley . There the British Codebreakers in Bletchley Park succeeded in deciphering and analyzing them for intelligence purposes . The German radio messages often contained important war information, which the British grouped under the code name Ultra and used for their own planning.

After the Second World War, the station in Arkley View was disbanded and the building demolished.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Arkley View and the Radio Security Service (English). Retrieved March 29, 2017.
  2. ^ Story of Arkley (English). Retrieved March 29, 2017.

Coordinates: 51 ° 39 ′ 1 ″  N , 0 ° 13 ′ 46 ″  W.