Tthis final episode - perhaps final episode - ? of what we want to say about the whole
Bletchley Park story, it's got a very personal touch for me because this one
is triggered by that question that all sons and daughters ask of their parents,
their Mom or their dad, and I certainly did. I said to my Dad: "Dad what did you do
in the war?". And I got the reply - and always did: "Codes and cyphers son. It's
absolutely top-secret". Still, I mean, this was in the 1950-60s, I was asking.
"Can't tell you about it, sorry" My Dad was not actually at Bletchley Park but he was
what was called a "cipher sergeant" and he received summarized decrypts from
Bletchley Park and it was his job [at] the place he was posted - RAF station or Naval
Station - to take the decrypts in the most secure conditions to the person in
charge, who knew about what was called The Ultra Secret. He had to have full
security clearance and my Dad did as well so I'd like to tell you that story
but perhaps we ought to lead up to it a bit more chronologically and get you
there in stages. we left the story last time in 1941-42.
Even the four-rotor Naval Enigma could just about be got on top of. The Army and
Air Force one, really, from about 1940-1 was not too much trouble.
So, you've got these decrypts and they're all wonderful and they're giving you all
of this intelligence. How on earth do you get it out "into the field" to the
commanders that need it fast enough. If you think about it, it would come in you
know that the the code settings are going to be changing another 12 hours
time you'll have to work those out, you let the the techies the "boffins" as they
called them in those days, get on with that. But what about the intelligence
community behind them? Hut 3 and Hut 4 I think were two of the big intelligence
Huts at Bletchley Park and their job was to take all of the decrypts and see
what they meant and try to synthesize them; put them all together;
decide who should get what; try to make some sense out of it. Because, you know,
sometimes if a decrypt was saying: "Private Schmidt is being sent to
somewhere else" the first reaction is: "Who is Private Schmidt? What do we know about him?"
"Let's go and have a look at the card index". So, eventually - and it had to be done very
quickly because time was of the essence in this - intelligence digests were prepared.
The really hot stuff - the top, top, top secret stuff - the really
crucial things - were sent off to a man called R. V. Jones in Whitehall, who was
indirect ... he was Churchill's intelligence man and passed all of this stuff on to him.
In terms of the Armed Forces, and how they got their decrypts - so they got out
to Admirals generals and so on - one of the advantages that Bletchley Park had,
right from the start of the war, there was an insistence that all of the
services would be at Bletchley Park. They could have their own Hut's but
we're not having any of his nonsense, like they had in the States, about the
Army's ... sorry(!), the Navy's decryption effort - it's always the Navy -
had to be totally separate to everybody else's, far better funded and preferably
hundreds of miles away from what the Army was doing. It's not to say that at
Bletchley they weren't inter-service rivalries, there were. But in the end
everybody trusted the man in the middle - the man who decided who got to know
about what was called the Ultra Secret. And here we have it, in his book. Freddy [Winterbotham]
had served in the Army in World War I. He was 42 when World War II, started so
the young man had been in the army, been transferred to the Air Force by World
War II. Clearly at his age you're not going to be put up in fighter airplanes
but he became, basically, chief of the Air Department of the Secret Intelligence
Service. And he did a superb job, because he had to be trusted by the other services
to say who was high enough up the chain to be entrusted with knowing
that decryption was going on in Bletchley Park.
And who had to be kept out of the picture. Because always, as you can
imagine, the idea was to pass off the intelligence gained as somehow having been
acquired from another source and not, of course, from decryption. So, Freddie walked
around in a bomber jacket and I'm assured by my Dad was a complete - how
should we say - "personality" ?! And [he] went round and glad-handed everybody and clearly
did a superb job. And Freddie was in charge of what were called Special
Liaison Units [SLUs]. These were people posted out to RAF or Army or Naval stations, to act as
a liaison between the Bletchley Park mob and the commanders who really needed
this intelligence. So, the Bletchley Park linguists
intelligence officers and so on, prepared agreed summaries, at the end of every day.
They were sent out over secure land-lines were these summaries, but there was
no way you were going to trust to that. They were sent out encrypted over secure
land lines. As a result of encountering the Enigma, the Allies - or rather the the
staff at Bletchley Park principally I think - had come up with their miitary
colleagues with the idea of having a better Enigma. A much better and more
secure machine. They came up with a Type X. It was an Enigma but without the flaws.
It was bigger, better, faster and above all it would sometimes encrypt a
letter to itself so it avoided the fatal flaw. The summaries were encrypted using
Type X and sent out over secure land-lines. If you were taken on by Freddy,
to do this work, it didn't matter if you were only a Leading Aircraftman Mark II -
as my dad was - if you were taken on to do the work [then after training] you immediately got promoted to
Flight Sergeant. [This is] my Dad's proud portrait of himself, taken I think in 1943, in the
town in Yorkshire where we lived at the time. In Harrogate, And there he is. If you
look on the right of the picture you can see his Flight Sergeants stripes. So that
pretty well enables me to date it. He was stationed up in the north-west of England
near a town called Carlisle, at an RAF base called Annan. Almost you could tell
he was the right candidate for this sort of thing because he taught himself
shorthand when he was a teenager. He loved the idea of secret writing and he
also taught himself to type. Touch typing nowadays with computer keyboards - some of
us ( I've have never got around to it(!).) have also taught ourselves touch typing. So it
might be commonplace today, but in early 1943 a circular would come round saying
all those who would like to be interested in better paid work are
invited to come and take an intelligence test. And part of that intelligence test
would be a crossword puzzle. So my dad had a go at it. I think it was a
[Daily] Telegraph concise crossword. You weren't give them very long to do it. But he must
have done well enough because eventually the call came to report to London and he
reported to part of the GC&S set up, which wasn't in Bletchley Park, it was
still in London. [He] had loads of interviews, loads of further tests and so on. And he was
eventually told that he'd passed the tests and that if he accepted the job
offer he would be [after further training] instantly promoted to Flight Sergeant [with] more money and it would be a
much more interesting job. And that he will be helping, in some small way, to win
the War. Fine. In the final stages of the interview you got to meet Group Captain
Freddy [Winterbotham] himself. It went something like this. And my Dad said, yes, it really
went just like that. You get called in: "Brailsford, I have to congratulate you.
You have passed all our tests, all this you know. What I'm now about to reveal to you
is the biggest secret of the War.If you ever reveal a word of this - this is what
will happen to you! [He] presses a button on his desk. In comes
the Staff Sergeant with a service revolver fortunately not loaded but I
don't know [if] my dad knew that, at the time. He pointed it at my dad's head and just
went 'click' . He said: "Yes we will kill you if you ever reveal this secret!".
And, of course, as Freddy says in the [BBC] interview "... well we reduced them to jelly, you know"
Yes it did. My Dad was always a quiet and rather reserved chap, And honestly I
I do believe, in some ways, it made him slightly more introverted. It wasn't that
he wasn't a charming chap, and a great Dad. He was. But I think, like many people
related to this work in the war, they were worried, all the time, that not
deliberately, but just by accident, something they said might give the game away.
He really, really, worried about it, I can understand that now. So, anyway, we
went on - on this basis of "What did you do in the War, Dad ?" "Sorry, son, I can't tell you"
for many many years afterwards. And suddenly - all of a sudden - I didn't even
know about Freddie Winterbotham, my Dad, in the early 1970s, phones me up.
I was in Nottingham at the time. My Dad said: "Look at this! You remember that I told
you how top-secret this was?". He said "The chap who personally threatened me with
instant death if I ever revealed a word of this - has now gone and published a book on it!
I can't believe it!" The Ultra Secret. We weren't even supposed to say the word
"ultra" - that's how secret it was!" Is that so, I thought, heavens .... !
So I said: "Come on then Dad, tell me all about it"
Afterwards I found out that it wasn't just Freddy being a maverick, although he was.
The reason that he got permission to publish this - and he did get permission -
was something like the following: the Winston Churchills and the "top brass"
in Whitehall of this world, wanted to keep Bletchley stuff secret preferably for a
hundred years. Their American colleagues who were building all these Bbombes near
Enigmas and replicas and were joining us [said]: Ow! come on! You cannot keep the lid on it
for that long!" It'll become 'old hat'. No come on, you know, you guys you've got
like a 25 or a 30 year rule?" And still Whitehall were saying: "Not nearly long
enough we need far longer than that" And the Americans said: "Look, we are far better with
the stuff than you are." I don't think they quite had a Freedom of Information
Act but they made it very clear that they were going to tell at least some of
the story after 30 years", Around about 1974, all of a sudden, Freddie who'd
[always] wanted to publish a book and being told resolutely "No!", suddenly gets
the go-ahead [to publish]. I think - I'm cynical about this - that some
of the top brass had worked out that Freddie's story about: "Yes it's top secret,
there's all these boffins doing this wonderful stuff but I don't know the
details. But I will tell you how I recruited my cipher sergeants"
Absolutely ideal! No technicalities involved and yet it
sent a clear signal, across the Atlantic, "This is our show - we're going to get in first".
you know. So, that's why Freddie went on a book tour and cheerfully would sign
books. So my Dad went up after the talk, introduced himself. It was the first time
he met Freddy since he was threatened with instant death, I think. And as you
can see on the description here [in] Freddy's wonderful handwriting you know
what does it say? "F. Brailsford - one of the Silent Men. Signed FW Winterbotham.
So this writing is so bad my Dad has had to write the word "silent" so that we
can decrypt the signature as it were. As far as my Dad was concerned what then
followed was really interesting, glamorous in some ways, but full of cold
and muddy tents. At the same time one of his first postings as was in late 1943
[and] was to Admiral Bert Ramsey's operation at Portsmouth. This later merged in with
a much bigger operation because those of you of an older generation out there,
will know that it was decided in the lead-up to D-day in 1944 that the
Supreme Commander would of course have to be an American since they were
putting in the great majority of men materiel and so on. Effectively my dad
was attached as a part of the huge encampment of people right next door to
Eisenhower's headquarters and what would happen every day is that he would, at a
certain time, connect his Type X machine to the secure landline from Bletchley
Park. He would get, over the teleprinter landline, the summary, suitably encrypted.
He would set up his Type X machine. He would then go with the decrypt off to - not
Eisenhower himself but a senior intelligence officer
who Freddie had agreed was senior enough to be in on the Ultra Secret and know
all about it. And I think what had to happen - I'm not sure - was that the decrypt
in some way - I'm not sure of the details - was then transcribed to a one-time pad, as it
was called, you know a cipher mechanism that's used once only. [It was] taken into
Eisenhower deciphered in front of him, you know strong security at all stages.
Eventually, once the message about this crucial thing about, I don't know, Timing
of D-day", or whatever, was got through, the Intelligence Officer would come back
shake my Dad by the hand and the two of them had to solemnly burn all of the
transcripts and stir the ashes and throw them away. And all this. It was almost a
ritual, my Dad said, that you had to go through to destroy the evidence.
And I said: "Well what ... were there any problems?" And he said: "Well, apart from not
being able to sleep in the tents and the constant buzz of airplanes taking off,
and so on, the biggest problem were people both on
the American and the English sides who were fairly senior, but not senior enough [for Ultra],
jumping up and down and starting to say: "Come over here, Brailsford, anything you
show to those Americans you show to me! And having to show them your top secret
orders that said that wasn't true and then watching, in great glee, as a
US vs. England shouting match broke out. Thefurther adventures [for my Dad] involved having to
follow behind Eisenhower's headquarters [that were] set up a little bit later in 1944;
crossing to Northern France. Of course you needed the intelligence operation
right behind the leaders. At the same time Churchill was completely and totally
paranoid about not wanting the SLUs and the Type X machinery to get too
close to Berlin because what Churchill was worried about - and it's even mentioned in
the "Imitation Game", quite correctly. Churchill was paranoid not so much about
the Germans but about the Russians getting a hold of this technology.
I think my dad was demobilized at VE Day which is mentioned in Freddie's book. I
think he was in the Ardennes in Belgium at the time
and everything went very smoothly till the end of the war. But that's just part
of the story and I suppose my friends and so on say to me: "Well, this is amazing
you know, your Dad was one of these Cipher Sergeants. Do you think it's got
anything to do with you being interested in puzzles and Sudoku and computers?"
[Sighs!] I have not the slightest doubt it is. If you believe in genetics
at all, I now look back at what my dear Dad was interested in and how he really
love to have explained to him everything I was doing more or less insofar as he
could follow it. He's not in any way up in the Alan Turing genius category,
not at all. But he was ... he had that talent for taking immense pains about things
and plodding on for ever until he understood it, and was very methodical
and all that. So, yeah, I think it was inevitable, folks, that's probably a large
part of the reason why I turned out to be a computer scientist.