Ronald C. Roat is program coordinator of the print and online journalism sequences and an associate professor of journalism. He joined the faculty in 1986 after a professional career as a reporter, columnist, and/or editor at six newspapers in Michigan, West Virginia, Ohio, and Indiana, including the Lansing State Journal and the Dayton Daily News. He has written regular opinion page columns for three other newspapers. Professor Roat is the author of three mystery novels, Close Softly the Doors, A Still and Icy Silence, and High Walk, all stories in the Stuart Mallory Mystery series. A Michigan native, he earned his master of arts degree at Oregon State University and his bachelor's degree from Michigan State University. He currently writes a weekly Internet column for The Evansville Courier & Press. Roat is in his 19th year at USI and is the single father of his daughter, Brittany, and is working to complete a book on which is an outgrowth of many of his columns and his unscheduled “rants” he delivers to his students. After that, Roat will finish the next Stuart Mallory novel, Some in Velvet Gowns.

Bletchley Park
Britain's best kept WWII secret is still secret in some ways

by Ron Roat

BLETCHLEY, England – When the British government saved the Sir Herbert Leon Mansion from demolition in 1938, it was a nice place in the country. The Government Code and Cypher School sent a couple dozen men there to tinker with codes and mess around with scratch pads and pencils. After all, the mansion wasn’t all that big, and it was 60 miles outside London. It included just a couple farm outbuildings and some Quonset huts.

Before World War II ended, though, anywhere from 10,000 to 12,000 people – mathematical geniuses, resourceful engineers, crossword puzzle masterminds, foreign language whizzes, worried admirals and secretaries – toiled at what became known as Bletchley Park, or Station X, Britain’s best-kept secret. These code breakers saved civilization by unraveling Germany’s best-kept secret, the Enigma, a typewriter-like machine capable of producing trillions of codes.

The Enigma machine was a wonder. Four – and eventually five – wheels with 26 possibilities on each side were set in specific locations each day according to an exacting schedule. The message was typed one key at a time. Wheels turned one notch on each stroke, so if you hit the same key twice, you got two different letters. At the other end the meaningless series of letters were decoded through the second Enigma set up in the same way. To anyone intercepting the message, the code was total chaos even if you had an Enigma machine. If you didn’t know that day’s wheel settings, you had a few trillion combinations to sort through.

But that is how thousands of messages were decoded.

Bletchley Park designed and built apparatuses, known as “Bombe” machines, which would run intercepted messages through likely possibilities. Decoded messages were then delivered in a tray to the next “hut” through a short tunnel with doors at each end. Each tray was pushed halfway by broomstick and the door shut. Someone at the other end would open the second door and retrieve the tray, again using a broomstick. Workers seldom knew the tasks of the people in the next building. That’s how you keep secrets. As quickly as possible, each message moved from the Bombe rooms to language experts to military people who made decisions.

Some decisions were grueling. Imagine knowing the target of an incoming squadron of German bombers and be unable to direct your defenses there, lest you tip the Germans to your knowledge. Instead, the Royal Air Force caught the bombers low on fuel and on their way back to France.

The biggest challenge was the Enigma machines used by the German navy, especially the U-Boats. They had an extra wheel, and the navy was tight-lipped about its process. The U-Boats, of course, were sinking hundreds of ships in the North Atlantic, convoyed ships destined for England or Russia. They carried from the United States the food that kept the English alive and the arms that kept both countries from falling to their knees. It was a race against time, and for far too long the Germans won the race.

However, the folks at Bletchley Park – English and Americans side-by-side – built the world’s first computers, collected millions of messages, and closed the temporal gap. Eventually German submarines left port into seas where they were the targets as well as the hunters. We have Bletchley Park to thank for much of that.

The base, which remained a listening post for many years, was decommissioned in 1987 and faced urban renewal again. Some of those who worked there saved it and formed the charitable trust which now keeps it open as a public museum. Because Station X was maintained over the years, not renovated, it still has the feel of World War II. Cleverly, those who operate the park add to that atmosphere. The grounds come complete, for example, with moviemaker U-boats built for a recent motion picture - Enigma - which also offers that Bletchley ambiance.

When you drive in, you must wait at the gate until an armed guard comes to your car and asks your purpose, even though he knows why you are there. He looks business-like and formidable as he glances through your car and makes a decision about your entry. The guard gives you a moment to realize this was once serious business, and remains serious business somewhere, perhaps on a farm somewhere in England, or in an anonymous glass-enclosed corporate structure sitting in the middle of London.

We cannot be certain where that kind of work takes place. After all, code breakers don’t usually put up a flag and advertise.