Y service

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Beeston Hill Y Station near the English town of Sheringham (lying tothe east on the North Sea coast of Norfolk , around 1940)

The Y service , in the English original Y Service , also written Y-Service , Y service or Y-service and also referred to as Y Stations , Y Groups or Y Units and also summarized under the name War Office Y Group (WOYG) for the Service as well as Government Communications Wireless Stations (GCWS) for the radio eavesdropping stations , was the British radio eavesdropping service that worked mainly in England during World War II , but also worldwide . The main task was to intercept and record the enemy, especially the German radio traffic.

Name meaning

In English, the "Y" stands onomatopoeically for the initial syllable of the word wireless (German literally: "wireless", meaning: "funk"). A corresponding translation of Y Service is therefore "radio monitoring service". During the Second World War, the German term “Horchdienst” (short: “H-Dienst”) was also in use. The associated Y stations can be referred to in German as “ radio listening stations ” or “listening posts”. The British referred to the resulting intelligence as Y intelligence . The B service of the Kriegsmarine can be seen as a counterpart to the Y service on the German side .

history

The HRO of the National Radio Company was the most widely used wireless receiver in the British Y Stations
Sound sample of a secret Morse transmission
By the British Y service intercepted encrypted German Enigma - radiogram

The Y-Dienst was founded in World War I and also proved to be particularly valuable in World War II. Various Y Stations were operated by all three branches of the armed forces, namely the British Army , the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force (RAF) . The British Foreign Office , more precisely the subordinate secret services MI5 and MI6 , as well as the Post Office (English: General Post Office ) and even the Marconi Company maintained Y stations .

They were supported by up to 1,500 radio amateurs serving voluntarily throughout the kingdom, who were referred to as Voluntary Interceptors (VI) , in German  for "Freiwillige eavesdroppers" , and those in the Radio Security Service (RSS) , in German  for " Radio Security Service " of MI8 were organized. They, too, made a major contribution to the British war effort.

Originally, the wiretapping service included not only the interception of broadcasts, but also traffic analysis and the deciphering of at least the weakly encrypted messages. From October 1943, however, he concentrated solely on recording the radio transmissions and - in stations spatially separated from the listening points - the direction finding , i.e. determining the direction and location of the transmitting stations, while traffic analysis, deciphering and evaluation were carried out centrally in Bletchley Park (BP) were. In 1943, for example, more than 80,000 radio messages were intercepted and deciphered per month , an average of more than 2,500 every day; during the war it was over two and a half million.

In the British feature film " Enigma - The Secret ", which is based on the novel Enigma , the work of the Y service is shown using the listening station in Beaumanor as an example . The place is near Loughborough in the county of Leicestershire in the middle of England about 80 km north of Bletchley . The two protagonists in the novel and the film visit the "WOYG" (abbreviation for War Office Y Group , German: "Kriegsministerium Y-Gruppe") in Beaumanor with the intention of obtaining important copies of Enigma radio messages from the archive there . They also meet the female assistants, called “ wrens ” , who were entrusted with the often monotonous work of listening to and recording the seemingly pointless sequences of letters in the encrypted German radio messages. In fact, however, the work of the young women contributed significantly to the British war effort and was extremely useful, because the encrypted radio messages contained war-relevant information that the British cryptanalysts in BP were able to decipher and interpret, and which were summarized under the code name Ultra .

The War Office Y Group in Beaumanor was just one of the many informers for the BP code breakers. There were also dozens of other wiretapping stations scattered across the country and around the world. The RAF maintained an important Y station in Chicksands , not far east of Bletchley, in the county of Bedfordshire, and the British Foreign Office operated a listening post directly in London . It was located just south of the city ​​center in the Camberwell district and was housed within the Metropolitan Police station on Denmark Hill . This listening post specialized in the interception and recording of German high-speed radio transmissions. About 25 km south-east of Central London in the town of Knock Holt was the mid 1942 homestead Ivy Farm used to the encrypted secret German teletype service intercept and record the British the pseudonym Fish had given.

There were even mobile Y Units (German: "Y-units") that accompanied the British armed forces on the various theaters of war. For example, on October 23, 1942, when the Battle of El Alamein between the German Africa Corps and the British 8th Army began, special Y units were located both in the headquarters of the British Commander-in-Chief Field Marshal Montgomery and in the headquarters of each participating army corps , while others Y units were held in reserve behind the front.

The British military services were supported by numerous radio amateurs (English: "hams" ), who made their contribution to the British war effort as so-called "Voluntary Interceptors" (German for example: "Freiwillige eavesdroppers"). Most of the intercepted radio messages were simply recorded by hand, collected in Arkley View , just north of London, and transmitted to Bletchley Park by motorcycle couriers, sometimes with the help of carrier pigeons . Wired telex lines were later used for this purpose .

Even today, the extensive records of the Y Service represent one of the most important sources for authentic Enigma sayings. The archives are full, but unfortunately only a small part is publicly available so far.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stephen Harper: The Battle for Enigma - The Hunt for U-559 . Mittler, Hamburg 2001, p. 21. ISBN 3-8132-0737-4
  2. ^ A b Francis Harry Hinsley, Alan Stripp: Codebreakers - The inside story of Bletchley Park . Oxford University Press, Reading, Berkshire 1993, pp. XXI. ISBN 0-19-280132-5
  3. ^ Gordon Welchman: The Hut Six Story - Breaking the Enigma Codes . Allen Lane, London 1982; Cleobury Mortimer M&M, Baldwin Shropshire 2000, p. 201. ISBN 0-947712-34-8
  4. ^ The Radio Security Service , accessed June 3, 2019.
  5. ↑ Jack Copeland : Enigma . P. 256.
  6. ↑ Stephen Pincock and Mark Frary: Secret Codes - The Most Famous Encryption Techniques and Their History . Bastei Lübbe, 2007, p. 109. ISBN 3-431-03734-8 .
  7. ↑ Robert Harris: Enigma . Novel. Weltbild, Augsburg 2005. ISBN 3-89897-119-8
  8. ↑ Robert Harris: Enigma . Novel. Weltbild, Augsburg 2005, p. 248ff. ISBN 3-89897-119-8
  9. ^ Francis Harry Hinsley, Alan Stripp: Codebreakers - The inside story of Bletchley Park . Oxford University Press, Reading, Berkshire 1993, p. 101. ISBN 0-19-280132-5
  10. ↑ James A. Reeds, Whitfield Diffie, JV Field: Breaking Teleprinter Ciphers at Bletchley Park: An edition of I. J. Good, D. Michie and G. Timms: General Report on Tunny with Emphasis on Statistical Methods (1945). Wiley-IEEE Press, 2015, pp. 513-529 (English). ISBN 978-0-470-46589-9 .
  11. ^ Francis Harry Hinsley, Alan Stripp: Codebreakers - The inside story of Bletchley Park . Oxford University Press, Reading, Berkshire 1993, p. 204. ISBN 0-19-280132-5
  12. ↑ Stephen Harper: The Battle for Enigma - The Hunt for U-559 . Mittler, Hamburg 2001, p. 21. ISBN 3-8132-0737-4