Elizabeth 'Betty' Balfour, 88, joined the Wrens when she was 17 - she has now revealed she and her co-workers used to dry their bras and pants on Hitler's Enigma machine during chilly, damp nights.
In Bletchley Park wurde der Code der deutschen Enigma-Chiffriermaschine während des Zweiten Weltkriegs geknackt (siehe dazu auch mein Buch). Weitere Fotos auf Flickr.
'Men Were The Bosses In Those Days'.. But 80% Of Britain's WWII Codebreakers Were Female
Sarah Baring, the mother of Samantha Cameron's stepfather, played a vital role during the war in her work at Bletchley Park where she translated German and intercepted Nazi codes.
Let me set the stage a little: A movie called "The Imitation Game" will be released nationwide Christmas day, the latest of several attempts to tell the…
GC&CS enjoyed tremendous success against foreign diplomatic codes between the war, but was much less successful against the mechanical and electromechanical cipher systems, most famously Enigma, used by the military forces of the countries the UK would go to war with in 1939
'Men Were The Bosses In Those Days'.. But 80% Of Britain's WWII Codebreakers Were Female
In the 1960s Jack Good, known in the United States as an academic working in statistics and mathematics, used to drive around the campus of Virginia Tech University in a car which sported the personalised number plate 007 IJG. It was his oblique way of referring to what for decades he could not speak about – his important wartime role as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park, where he and colleagues did work which is credited with shortening the war.
A new book reveals the important role women held at Bletchley Park - not least Jane Fawcett, an upper-class debutante
Sarah Baring, who has died aged 93, was a leading light on the London social scene before spending three years at the top-secret code breaking establishment Bletchley Park; on VE-Day she met the heir to a viscountcy and was engaged to him within a week.
Max Newman is the man credited as being Alan Turing's mentor at Bletchley and later at Manchester University. Newman's son William recalls a childhood where he got to play and beat Turing at Monopoly
The trust has raised the £2.4 million required to restore the huts where British codebreakers including Alan Turing shortened the war by up to two years - and ushered in the computer age.
Tommy Flowers shortened the Second World War by at least two years according to historians. During his first trip to Bletchley Park he helped Alan Turing develop a new Bombe machine. Though this new Bombe was abandoned in its early stages Turing was so impressed with Flowers that he introduced him to Max Newman, who was working on the Lorenz enciphering system which was even more secure than Enigma (and had been broken by Bill Tutte.) Newman asked Flowers to help fix the Heath Robinson (which was an attempt at a machine to mechanise the breaking of Lorenz). Flowers insisted he could improve Heath Robinson. The Bletchley management believed that Flowers was wrong because Flowers wished to use valves in the new machine. So Flowers was forced to work with his small team of engineers at the Dollis Hill research facility. In December 1943 Flowers had finished, Colossus was born and the digital age had begun. Colossus was a giant machine which used a tape reader and 1800 valves. The valves wouldn't break unless the machine was turned on and off regularly. The Bletchley management immediately changed their tune and ordered Flowers to build more. They were used to read messages sent within the German High Command in the days leading up to D-Day. Colossus has since been defined as the greatest invention of the 20th Century. It was the worlds FIRST programmable computer. Flowers was given £1000 for his war work, a pathetic sum considering what he had done. He then split this money equally with his colleges despite the fact that he had invested so much of his own money in the project. Flowers applied to the Bank of England for a loan in order to build another Colossus like machine. They turned him down believing that such a machine was impossible. He was unable to inform them that he had already built one due to Cold War paranoia and the Official Secrets Act. In 1949 he was heartbroken to see that the Americans were claiming to have invented the worlds "first" computer. Flowers died on October the 28th 1998. Flowers really is an unsung hero. Tutte and Turing have also been treated very badly by history. However Turing has been the subject of god knows how many movies now, and has his own statue in the Foreign Office. Whenever Bletchley is mentioned in new reports and newspaper articles, his name is always quite rightly mentioned. Tutte has his own memorial in Newmarket which was unveiled last month. And what does Flowers have? Well, a small bronze bust kept away from the public at BT, and a road that used to be named after him. Many people have argued that the Colossus replica built by Tony Sale is enough of a memorial for him. After all he was an engineer and perhaps one of his greatest achievements is now the centre piece for one of this countries greatest museums. However, the rebuild is in the National Museum of Computing so will on be seen by those visiting TNMOC or the Bletchely Park Trusts museum on the same site. He really needs to be given a public memorial like the one that Tutte was given, so that they will both be remembered and perhaps become household names like Turing.
How 25-year-old Winifred Roberts went from working in a battery factory in Salford to helping crack the Germans' Enigma code during World War Two.
Bremont launches the aesthetic Codebreaker watch, a monument to the World War II Bletchley Park veterans who cracked the Enigma code day in and day out.
Professor Peter Hilton, who died on November 6 aged 87, played a key role in the secret wartime codebreaking agency at Bletchley Park and went on to become one of the most influential mathematicians of the postwar generation.
The role of female spies is a little-known part of the war effort. Now 89, Rozanne Colchester, a code breaker and postwar MI6 agent, recalls the "strange isolation" of Bletchley, the impact of the Cambridge Three and discussing brothels with Graham Greene
A 94-year-old woman talks about how she was recruited for secret wartime work code-breaking at Bletchley Park.
Harriet Jackson never told her family that she was a code breaker and that she actually helped to shorten the world war.
Singers and A-listers have been targeted.
Established in the 1939 the Women's Auxiliary Air Force was an integral and vital part of the Royal Air Force's war effort. Find out more about WAAF.
Historical military photographs of warships and aircraft from Germany United Kingdom and the United States of America USA
