Harry Hinsley

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From left: British cryptanalysts Harry Hinsley, Sir Edward Travis , John Tiltman , Washington 1945

Sir Francis Harry Hinsley (born  November 26, 1918 in Walsall , Staffordshire , †  February 16, 1998 in Cambridge ) was a British historian and cryptanalyst . During the Second World War he contributed significantly to the deciphering of the German rotor key machine Enigma .

Life

In "Hut 4" (photo from 2005) the decipherments from "Hut 8" were evaluated militarily and tactically. Today the Bletchley Park Museum restaurant is located there.

Hinsley attended Queen Mary's Grammar School in the English city of Walsall as a school child . In 1937 he received a scholarship to St. John's College , Cambridge, and began studying history there . While still a student, in October 1939, he was taught by Alastair Denniston , the head of the Government Code and Cypher School (abbreviation: GC&CS , German: "Staatliche Code- und Chiffrenschule"), the military service that deals with deciphering of the secret communications of the German Wehrmacht , invited to an interview . Hinsley joined the organization based in Bletchley Park and was assigned to Hut Four (German: "Baracke 4"). While the neighboring department Hut Eight (German: "Baracke 8"), under the direction of Alan Turing and his deputy Stuart Milner-Barry , dealt with the actual deciphering of the radio messages of the German Navy , it was the task of Hut 4 to do this after the To evaluate and classify deciphering tactically and militarily.

Hinsley's task was specifically the " traffic analysis " of the German naval communications, i.e. the examination and evaluation of call signs, identification groups, transmission frequencies and transmission times of the intercepted German radio messages. From this alone, important militarily usable information about the structure of the German naval radio networks and even about the German navy itself could be obtained.

Hinsley also contributed personally to the fact that German Enigma code machine and related code books as short signal booklets and weather short-key , by German weather ships were captured, the British code breakers (ger .: codebreakers were) at Bletchley Park of great use in their difficult decipherment. In doing so, he made a significant contribution to the breakage of the Enigma-M4 used by the Navy .

In the second half of 1943 Hinsley was sent to Washington in the United States as a liaison officer to the US Navy . In January 1944, the British and Americans agreed to work even more closely together and also to exchange their cryptanalytic knowledge about Japanese encryption methods. Towards the end of the war, Hinsley was a key adviser to the head of Bletchley Park, Edward Travis , who had succeeded Alastair Denniston in February 1942.

After the war he returned to St. John's College in Cambridge. In April 1946 he married Harry Hinsley and his fiancée Hilary Brett Brett-Smith, who like him had worked in Bletchley Park in his neighboring hut, Hut 8 .

He was a lecturer in Cambridge and from 1969 professor for the history of diplomacy (History of International Affairs). From 1979 to 1989 he was a Masters at St. John's College and from 1981 to 1983 Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University. In 1981 he was elected a member ( Fellow ) of the British Academy .

From 1979 he published a multi-volume official account of the work in Bletchley Park, where he came to the conclusion that the work there shortened the war by one to four years, but did not significantly influence its outcome. Details of his presentation of technical aspects of cryptanalysis in the first volumes were criticized by Marian Rejewski and Gordon Welchman . This particularly affected the Polish and French contributions, which is why a correction appeared in Part 2 of Volume 3.

Works (excerpt)

  • Hitler's strategy , Cambridge University Press 1951
  • Command of the sea; the naval side of British history from 1918 to the end of the Second World War , London 1950
  • Editors: Material Progress and World Wide Problems, 1870-1898 , The New Cambridge Modern History , Volume 11, 1962
  • Published in: British Foreign Policy under Sir Edward Gray , Cambridge UP 1977
  • with EE Thomas, CFG Ransom, RC Knight: British Intelligence in the Second World War , 4 volumes (Volume 3 in two parts), Volume 1–3: Its influence on strategy and operations , Volume 4 with CAG Simkins Security and Counter-Intelligence , Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1979-1988 and the abridged version at Cambridge University Press, 1993
  • Francis Harry Hinsley, Alan Stripp: Codebreakers - The inside story of Bletchley Park . Oxford University Press, Reading, Berkshire 1993. ISBN 0-19-280132-5

literature

  • Richard Longhorne: Hinsley, Sir (Francis) Harry (1918-1998) . In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , 2004.
  • Richard Langhorne: Francis Harry Hinsley, 1918–1998 . In: Proceedings of the British Academy . tape 120 , 2003, p. 263-274 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).
  • David Kahn : Seizing the Enigma . 1991, ISBN 0-395-42739-8 .
  • David Kahn: The Code Breakers - The Story of Secret Writing . Macmillan USA, Reissue 1974. ISBN 0-0256-0460-0

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed June 10, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Marian Rejewski, Remarks on Appendix 1 to “British Intelligence in the Second World War” by FH Hinsley, Cryptologia , Volume 6, January 1982, pp. 75-83.
  3. ^ Gordon Welchman, From Polish Bomba to British Bombe: the Birth of Ultra ,, in Intelligence and National Security , Volume 1, 1986, pp. 71-110.
personal data
SURNAME Hinsley, Harry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hinsley, Sir Francis Harry (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English historian and cryptanalyst
DATE OF BIRTH November 26, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Walsall
DATE OF DEATH February 16, 1998
Place of death Cambridge