Fort Bridgewoods

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fort Bridgewoods was strategically located just a few kilometers south of the Thames estuary .
The HRO of the National Radio Company was the most widely used wireless receiver in the British Y stations .
Today the Sterling Center , a multi-purpose sports hall , is located next to a British Royal Mail parcel center near the former Fort Bridgewoods site.

Fort Bridgewoods was a British military base from 1892 to about 1970 . The fort was located in southeast England about three kilometers southwest of the cities of Rochester and Chatham in the Borough of Medway near the River Medway, which flows into the North Sea just south of the Thames (see also location map under web links ). Historically, it served as part of a ring of fortifications protecting nearby Chatham Dockyard , a shipbuilding site used from 1586 to 1984 . During the Second World War , Fort Bridgewoods was home to an important radio eavesdropping point for British intelligence , called Chatham Y Station .

history

Construction of the fortification began in 1879 and, after an interruption around 1884, was not largely completed until 1892. Around 1935 one of the British War Office Y Groups (WOYG) (radio eavesdropping groups of the War Office War Office ) was stationed here, whose task it was to intercept and record the enemy, especially German radio traffic. At the beginning of the Second World War, in 1939, the Chatham Y station in Fort Bridgewoods was an important radio eavesdropping station ( Y station ) of the British Government Code and Cypher School (GC & CS) ( German about "Staatliche Code- und Chiffrenschule"). The ciphertexts , mostly encrypted with the German Enigma machine and sent in Morse code , were transcribed here and forwarded to Bletchley Park . There, the British Codebreakers succeeded in deciphering and evaluating the intelligence service . The German radio messages often contained important war information, which the British grouped under the code name Ultra and used for their own planning.

The British historian Hugh Sebag-Montefiore paid tribute to the special achievements of the listening station, emphasizing the professional competence of the staff and their careful work, because it was very important to note the radio transmissions, which often only heard with poor quality, as accurately as possible. Even a single mutilated letter could cause decipherment to fail.

"... without Chatham's expertise, Enigma could not be broken."

"... without the competence of Chatham the Enigma could not have been broken ."

In October 1940, during the Battle of Britain , the fort suffered a massive bombing by the German Air Force . After the war, from 1953 to 1957, it housed a control center for the anti-aircraft guns around the Thames estuary . Afterwards, during the Cold War , it was expanded under the code name SRC 5.2 (for Sub Regional Control Center ) as a situation center for a feared nuclear strike before the decision was made in 1968 to abandon it. The facility was sold and finally demolished in 1988. Today there are various industrial settlements there, including a parcel delivery center for the British Post and a sports hall.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hugh Sebag-Montefiore: Enigma - The battle for the code . Cassell Military Paperbacks, London 2004, p. 103. ISBN 0-304-36662-5 .
  2. ↑ Fort Bridgewoods (English). Retrieved March 24, 2017.
  3. ^ Castles and Fortifications of England and Wales (English). Retrieved March 24, 2017.

Coordinates: 51 ° 21 ′ 35 "  N , 0 ° 29 ′ 40"  E