May 8th marks the anniversary of the end of World War 2, or at least the European part of it. WW2 lasted for nearly six years, but it could have gone on a lot longer had it not been for Milton Keynes. Or, to be a little more accurate, had it not been for a country house and some Nissen huts just outside Milton Keynes filled with some of the brainiest brains in Britain. This was Bletchley Park, home to the Government Code and Cypher School - the centre of British code-breaking during the Second World War. 7000 men and women were chosen to carry out this top secret work, brilliant mathematicians and linguists drafted in to try work out what on earth Germany might be up to and so turn the tide of the war. Forget Test The Nation - this really was British Intelligence at its peak.
The German armed forces sent coded messages to each other using a fiendish machine called Enigma. The Enigma machine looked like a typewriter in a wooden box, with an electric current travelling from the keyboard through a set of rotors and a plugboard to light up the 'code' alphabet. You can find out how one worked here, and have a go at using one online here. I saw a real Enigma machine in operation last month and was surprised both how small it was and how devilishly simple the technology was. Even so, Enigma could write any message into code in over 150 million million million different ways. Not surprisingly the Germans believed that their codes were unbreakable and that their military secrets were safe. Wrong.
Hidden away at Bletchley Park, the cream of the UK's code-breakers were ready and waiting each morning to try to crack that day's code. There were little clues, like the fact that messages often started with a weather report, or the fact that Enigma never ever coded a given letter as itself. The code-breakers also used some impressive technology of their own, first a huge mechanical device called a Bombe, and then in 1943 a machine that was nearly the world's very first computer, called Colossus. Colossus was 5 metres long, 3 metres deep and 2.5 metres high, made from plugs, cables and valves, and worked using punched tape. Ten identical machines were built and, eventually, they were able to crack the German codes on a regular basis. One of the men behind the invention of Colossus was Alan Turing, a true genius and the father of modern computing.
Bletchley Park didn't win the war by itself, but the people there helped it to come to an end quicker than might have been expected otherwise. Convoys of ships containing urgent supplies could find the safest way across the North Atlantic because the Allies knew where the German U-boats were. Invaluable information about the size and location of German troops helped to ensure that the D-Day landings were a success. And the Germans never once believed that the Enigma code had been broken, even when the Allies managed to score yet another unlikely and improbable hit on one of their military positions.
So, let's hear it for Milton Keynes, the birthplace of computing (one of the reasons that you're able to read this page on your monitor 60 years later) and the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany (one of the other reasons that you're able to read this page on your monitor 60 years later).
