Women in Bletchley Park

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Women at work in Bletchley Park

Women in Bletchley Park made up most of the workforce at the British Secret Encoded Message Decryption Unit, located in the village of Bletchley, northwest of London , during World War II . Around 8,000 of the 10,000 people working there were women. Although they were underrepresented in high-ranking areas such as cryptanalysis , they were used in large numbers for the operation of cryptographic machines and communication devices, the translation of documents from the Axis powers , data traffic analysis and office work . Only since the 1990s has the role of women in Bletchley Park's success been increasingly recognized.

Bletchley Park

During the Second World War, Bletchley Park was a secret military agency used to decrypt encoded messages, especially those from Germans . It was considered the central location for British cryptanalysis. There was the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS, German for "Staatliche Code- und Chiffrenschule"), which regularly " cracked " secret communication between the Axis powers , especially German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers.

Bletchley Park is known for its impact on the course of the war and for the work done there by scientists such as Alan Turing and Dilly Knox . Although this work was classified until 1974, it had a significant impact on the history of science and technology, particularly the history of information technology . Little was known about the work of women in Bletchley Park for a long time, as all work was covered by the 30-year confidentiality requirement. It was only with the 1974 book The Ultra Secret by former RAF Colonel Frederick William Winterbotham that the role of Bletchley Park during the war began. Much of the work was also classified under the Official Secrets Act , so details of it only became known since the 1990s. Since then, archivists and historians have increasingly emphasized the role of women in deciphering messages.

Recruiting women

A Colossus Mark 2 computer used to break codes and operated by Dorothy Du Boisson (left) and Elsie Booker (right) (1943)

In 1937, as tensions became evident in Europe and Asia, the chief of MI6 , Admiral Hugh Sinclair , ordered the GC&CS to prepare for war and expand its staff. These were supposed to be "men of the professorial type", mainly from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge .

However, as cryptanalysis became increasingly mechanized, much more staff was required. In the beginning, women came to Bletchley Park who were approached in universities or through trusted family relationships. Newcomers were particularly popular because they were seen as the most trustworthy because of their upper-class background.

These debutantes did mainly administrative and office work. However, Bletchley Park's staffing needs continued to grow, so the next step was to find women linguists , mathematicians , and women who were good at crossword puzzles . In 1942, the Daily Telegraph held a competition aimed at solving a cryptic crossword (British crossword) in 12 minutes. The winners were approached by the military and some were recruited to Bletchley Park. Her skills in lateral thinking qualified her for “code breaking”. The majority of these women were from the middle class and some had degrees in math, physics, and engineering. Because of the shortage of men caused by the war, women were accepted into MINT programs.

By the end of 1944, more than 2500 women were employed by GC&CS from the Wrens (Women's Royal Naval Service) ; more than 1,500 women were seconded from the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and about 400 came from the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). Sixty percent of the women working at Bletchley Park served in the United Kingdom Armed Forces . Many of these women were more interested in working on planes and ships and never expected to work in a place like Bletchley Park.

Reconstruction of the Turing bomb in the Crypto Museum Bletchley Park

Women soon worked in numerous roles, from administrators, index card writers and motorcycle reporters to some as code breaking specialists . At first, many of the men in positions of responsibility were skeptical that women could operate the Turing bomb and the Colossus computer. In an area where women, including college graduates, were employed, the male head of the section said that "women do not want to do intellectual work". Gordon Preston convinced Max Newman , who believed that women would not mind the "intellectual effort" of approving discussions with the wrens to explain their work mathematically. These conversations were very popular; Max Newman's team later comprised 16 wrens. The women at Bletchley Park soon turned out to be qualified as they did a good job in whatever position they held.

Although the focus of recruiting was initially on male academics, especially in the last few years of the interwar period, a diverse staff of “boffins and debs” soon developed, whereupon the abbreviation GC&CS became teasing "Golf, Cheese and Chess Society" ("Golf, Cheese and Chess Society") was reinterpreted.

At the outbreak of World War II, Dillwyn 'Dilly' Knox was the chief cryptanalyst at GC&CS and as such took a leading role in working on the various Enigma networks. His team worked women ("Dilly's girls", "Dilly's girls"), including Margaret Rock and Mavis Lever , who were sometimes referred to as "Dilly's Fillies", "Dilly's fillies". During a morale-raising visit in September 1941, Winston Churchill allegedly remarked to GC&CS chief Alastair Denniston , “I told you not to leave a stone unturned in finding staff, but I had no idea that you were speaking to me so literally would take. "

During World War II, women worked in many areas that were previously mainly reserved for men, such as industry and the military. Bletchley Park was unusual because the women there were demanding intellectual work. One of the few directly comparable scenarios during the war was American women being recruited to do ballistics calculations on the artillery and program computers. These " human computers " used a differential analyzer in the basement of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering to speed up their calculations, although the machine required perfectly accurate mechanics and the women often checked the calculations by hand.

Well-known code breakers

  • Joan Clarke (later: Joan Murray) worked in Hut 8 from 1940 , together with Alan Turing and from 1941 with his deputy Hugh Alexander . In particular, they worked on the deciphering of radio messages from the German Navy , encrypted with Enigma-M3 and Enigma-M4 , especially to the German submarines operating in the Atlantic. In 1944, Clarke succeeded Alexander in the management of Hut 8 . Even after the war she stayed with the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) , the successor organization to the GC&CS .
  • From 1940, Jane Fawcett worked in Hut 6 , where only women worked on the decryption of radio messages encrypted by the army and air force with Enigma I. She was best known for her role in deciphering a message that led to the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck . Her work did not become known until the 1990s.
  • Mavis Lever (later: Mavis Batey) studied German and worked from 1940 as assistant to the chief cryptanalyst at GC&CS, Dillwyn Knox. Her analysis of an Italian radio message intercepted in 1941 subsequently contributed significantly to the victory of the Royal Navy over the Italian fleet in the sea ​​battle at Cape Matapan , one of the most important naval battles of World War II. Together with her colleague Margaret Rock, she also succeeded in 1941 in decrypting a message encrypted by the German Abwehr ( secret service ) using a special Enigma model (G) .
  • Margaret Rock also worked for Dillwyn Knox from 1940. In addition to her successes with Mavis Lever, she achieved another important success in 1943, when she managed to break into a radio line with which the Germans from weather ships near the Canary Islands transmitted weather reports that were encrypted with a special Enigma. She stayed with GC & C.S even after the war. or the successor organization, the GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) , until her retirement in July 1963.
  • Jean Valentine (later: Jean Rooke) worked in Hut 11 , where the Turing bomb was built and used, among other things, to decipher radio messages encrypted with the Enigma. She helped with the reconstruction of the "bomb" in Bletchley Park, which was completed in 2006 and gave guided tours there until shortly before her death in May 2019.

Commemoration Efforts

Much effort has been made to commemorate the contribution of women in Bletchley Park. Since around 2010, there have been an increasing number of articles dealing with the role of women in Bletchley Park. Due to the general secrecy of Bletchley Park and the 30-year UK secrecy regime, the role of Bletchley Park in wartime has not been discussed for a long time. That only changed with the publication of The Ultra Secrets by former RAF Colonel Frederick William Winterbotham, who oversaw the distribution of Ultra in the military intelligence service . It was only in 2009 that the British government began to honor the people of Bletchley Park for their achievements . As a result, efforts were made to arrange meetings between the women who had worked together in Bletchley Park. Most of them had not seen each other for about 70 years, as they had seldom been in contact with their colleagues after the war due to the secrecy. Often times, the women didn't even know the names of the machines they had been working on until they read books on Bletchley Park published decades after World War II. Families and friends usually had no idea what these women had been working on during the war.

In interviews, women who worked at Bletchley Park said they enjoyed their time there because they were with interesting people and did interesting and important work - although most of them never knew how important their job was, that Shortened the Second World War by up to two years and saved millions of lives. Most women gave up careers after leaving Bletchley Park and getting married; however, many of the full-fledged code breakers (such as Joan Clarke ) continued to have successful careers as cryptanalysts, based on their good work at Bletchley Park. On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of D-Day 2019, the 96-year-old Rena Steward, who had deciphered the German radio traffic, said it was a relief to be able to talk about it after decades of secrecy, and she was a little proud that the public had heard of the Women's Contribution to Bletchley Park Success.

Archiving efforts

An Honor Roll website has been established listing all those suspected of having been involved in communications and electronic reconnaissance during World War II , both in Bletchley Park and elsewhere. The list was compiled from official sources and statements from veterans, friends and families. A complete list of everyone who worked at Bletchley Park has never been made, so new information is continually added to the list. In June 2017, almost 8,000 women were listed on the roll of honor.

Pop Culture

  • The Imitation Game is a 2014 film about Alan Turing's life in Bletchley Park. One issue is his relationship with Joan Clarke, one of the few women to have worked as a full-fledged code breaker in Bletchley Park. However, it has been criticized that the film portrays code breaking as a purely men's business and does not show the role of women in code breaking.
  • The television game The Imitation Game, based on the script by Ian McEwan , first broadcast in 1980 by the BBC , focuses on the protagonist's successes and frustrations at work in Bletchley Park.
  • The British crime series The Bletchley Circle , which was broadcast by ITV between 2012 and 2014 , takes place in 1952 and 1953. The protagonists are four former code breakers from Bletchley who use their skills to solve crimes. The opening scene of the pilot was filmed on location in Bletchley Park.
  • The 2001 film Enigma is a fictional story about the Enigma code breakers in Bletchley Park, in which a love affair between coworkers is a main theme.
  • The 2007-2009 BBC sitcom Hut 33 is set in 1941. The focus is on everyday life in Bletchley Park, and this is how the everyday life of women in Bletchley Park is depicted.
  • In 1968 the history of Bletchley Park was still kept secret, but the agent comedy The Mysterious Mr. Sebastian used the theme and relocated it to the present.

literature

Web links

Commons : Bletchley Park  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Kerry Howard: Women Codebreakers. In: Bletchley Park Research. Retrieved August 26, 2019 .
  2. ^ A b c Christopher Smith: The Hidden History of Bletchley Park: A Social and Organizational History, 1939-1945 . Palgrave, London 2015, ISBN 978-1-137-48493-2 , pp. 57-69 .
  3. ^ Massimo Guarnieri: Trailblazers in Electromechanical Computing . In: IEEE Industrial Electronics Magazine . tape 11 , no. 2 , June 2017, p. 58–62 , doi : 10.1109 / MIE.2017.2694578 ( ieee.org [accessed September 26, 2019]).
  4. ↑ Michael Smith: The Debs of Bletchley Park . Aurum Press, London 2015, ISBN 978-1-78131-191-2 , pp. 288.289 .
  5. ^ Tessa Dunlop: The Bletchley Girls: War, secrecy, love and loss: the women of Bletchley Park tell their story . Hodder & Stoughton, London 2015, ISBN 978-1-4447-9572-1 .
  6. ^ Alastair Denniston: The government code and cypher school between the wars . In: Intelligence and National Security . tape 1 , no. 1 , 1986, pp. 48-70 , doi : 10.1080 / 02684528608431841 .
  7. ^ Marion Hill: Bletchley Park People: Churchill's Geese that Never Cackled . The History Press, Sutton Publishing, 2004, ISBN 0-7509-3362-3 , pp. 13-23 .
  8. ↑ Bryony Norburn: The female enigmas of Bletchley Park in the 1940s shoulderstand encourage Those of tomorrow. In: The Conversation. January 26, 2015, accessed September 26, 2019 .
  9. ↑ Jennifer Harrison: Women in tech history: Bletchley Park. In: Gadgette. April 15, 2016, accessed September 26, 2019 .
  10. ↑ a b c d e Sarah Rainey: The extraordinary female codebreakers of Bletchley Park. In: The Telegraph. January 4, 2015, accessed September 26, 2019 .
  11. ↑ Jennifer S. Light: When Computers Were Women . In: Technology and culture . Project MUSE. tape 40 , no. 3 . Johns Hopkins University Press, July 1999, pp. 455-483 ( jhu.edu [accessed September 26, 2019]).
  12. ↑ Kerry Johnson, John Gallehawk: Figuring It Out at Bletchley Park . BookTowerPublishing, 2007, ISBN 978-0-9557164-0-9 .
  13. ^ A b Iain Hollingshead: What happened to the women of Bletchley Park? In: The Telegraph. September 4, 2012, accessed September 26, 2019 .
  14. ↑ Who were the Codebreakers? In: Bletchley Park. Retrieved September 26, 2019 .
  15. ↑ Christopher Gray: The Inspiring Women of Bletchley Park. ( Memento of August 3, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) In: Royal Holloway, University of London. November 3, 2015, accessed on September 26, 2019: "Women wouldn't like to do any intellectual work".
  16. ↑ Marissa Fessenden: Women Were Key to WWII Code-Breaking at Bletchley Park. In: Smithsonian. January 27, 2015, accessed September 26, 2019 .
  17. ^ Marion Hill: Bletchley Park People: Churchill's Geese that Never Cackled . The History Press, Sutton Publishing, 2004, ISBN 0-7509-3362-3 , pp. 62-71 .
  18. ↑ BBC News UK: Saving Bletchley for the nation. June 2, 1999, accessed September 26, 2019 .
  19. ^ Sinclair McKay: Secret Life of Bletchley Park: In the Words of the Men and Women Who Worked There . Aurum Press, London 2010, ISBN 978-1-84513-539-3 , pp. 14 .
  20. ^ Christopher Gray: Decoding Organization: Bletchley Park, Codebreaking and Organization Studies . Cambridge University Press, 2012, ISBN 978-1-107-67675-6 , pp. 132-133 .
  21. ↑ David Kahn: Seizing the Enigma: The Race to Break the German U-Boats codes 1939-1943 . Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1991, ISBN 0-395-42739-8 , pp. 185 : "I told you to leave no stone unturned to get staff, but I had no idea you had taken me so literally"
  22. ^ Jamie Gumbrecht: Rediscovering WWII's female 'computers'. In: CNN. February 8, 2011, accessed September 26, 2019 .
  23. ↑ Bruce Weber: Jane Fawcett, British Decoder Who Helped Doom the Bismarck, Dies at 95. In: The New York Times . May 28, 2016, accessed September 26, 2019 .
  24. ↑ Friedrich L. Bauer: Deciphered secrets. Methods and maxims of cryptology. 3. Edition. Springer, Berlin a. a. 2000, ISBN 3-540-67931-6 , pp. 457 .
  25. ^ A b Hugh Sebag-Montefiore: Enigma - The battle for the code . Cassell Military Paperbacks, London 2004, ISBN 0-304-36662-5 , pp. 129-130 .
  26. ^ Mavis Batey: Dilly: The Man Who Broke Enigmas . Dialogue, London 2011, ISBN 1-906447-15-2 , pp. 211 .
  27. ↑ Tony Sale: A Virtual Tour of Bletchley Park: Hut 3, Hut 6 and the Bombe Room. Retrieved September 26, 2019 .
  28. ↑ Maev Kennedy: Bletchley Park 'girls' break the code of secrecy for book launch. In: The Guardian. January 21, 2015, accessed September 26, 2019 .
  29. ↑ Harry Hinsley: The Enigma of Ultra . In: History Today . tape 43 , no. September 9 , 1993 ( historytoday.com ).
  30. ↑ Jens-Peter Marquardt: 75th anniversary of the D-Day. The heroines of Bletchley Park , Tagesschau.de, June 6, 2019
  31. ↑ Bletchley Park: Roll of Honor. Retrieved September 26, 2019 .
  32. ^ About the Roll of Honor. In: Bletchley Park. Retrieved September 26, 2019 .
  33. ↑ Imitation Game, The. In: TV Cream. June 23, 2009, accessed September 26, 2019 .
  34. ↑ Malcolm Shaw: Bletchley Park drama to air on television. In: ITV. September 6, 2012, accessed on September 26, 2019 .
  35. ↑ Alessandra Stanley: 'The Bletchley Circle' on PBS. In: The New York Times. April 19, 2013, accessed September 26, 2019 .
  36. ^ Plot Summary: "Enigma" (2001). In: Internet Movie Database. Retrieved September 26, 2019 .
  37. ↑ Overview: Hut 33. In: British Comedy Guide. Retrieved September 26, 2019 .