Guest Author - Patricia Perkins

The most secret location in Britain during the Second World War is about 45 minutes' drive from the windles. It is Bletchley Park, where the English and, once we got into it, the Americans worked together to break the German u-boat, Luftwaffe aircraft and other codes, and to plan the D-Day invasion. The Germans had a really wicked coding machine called Enigma. The Poles, before the war, had broken the Enigma code but when war broke out, instead of changing the settings once a month or so, the Germans started changing them every day. The Poles, unable to deal with this latest development, turned over what they knew to the British.

The war was won, not exclusively, but in large part because of the activities of the up to 12,000 people who worked in total secrecy at Bletchley Park.

Bletchley Park is a funny place. Set in 55 acres of parkland, it is an architectural nightmare of a Victorian mansion with its ice house, its garages and outbuildings, and a collection of squat little huts not unlike the modular classroom buildings on many of our high school campuses.

The owner at the turn of the century was a somewhat tasteless but fabulously wealthy character, a London financier named Sir Herbert Leon. Apparently every time the Leon family went to The Continent, it came back with wilder and more creative ideas than ever, hired yet another architect and lathered on another layer of kitch. The Italians have ballrooms? WE shall have a ballroom! Four different architects designed the exterior and wings of the mansion. The mansion is such a hodgepodge of architectural styles that it has a kind of unassuming air, like a woman who is trying too hard to appear fashionable but doesn't pull it off because she naively mixes decades. When the American movie company showed up to film the movie Enigma (over half of which is completely inaccurate, said our guide), the director took one look at the weird mansion and declared it would never do.

On weekdays, there is a 3-hour, guided tour that starts at 2 p.m. in the hut where they explain about the theft, about ten or twelve years ago, of one of the historical Enigma machines that was on display. There is no wandering about the place on your own. You pays your money and you get the tour.

And a wonderful tour it was. Murlyn Hakon, our guide, was an impeccable English gentleman of a certain age. He obviously loves the story of this place, which though closed as a secret operation after wwii, didn't come to light until almost 1980. When the Brits are told to keep their mouths shut, by Lord, they keep them SHUT! It was a Frenchman (wouldn't you know it) who blabbed first. Since then, they have bought back the property from whoever they'd sold it to (British Telecom and the Civil Aviation Authority were owners at one time) and are in the process of recreating the whole scene, which was the birth of computers, which was a phony war conducted on top of the real one, which was keeping up with the everchanging trickiness of German intelligence and planning the D-Day invasion.

There were radio stations that intercepted the German messages to their U-boats in the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean. During 1942, the Germans were ravaging convoys of food and supplies from America. If Hitler could successfully lay siege to England, prevent the cargo of supplies, notably FOOD, from reaching the Brits, they would begin to starve and England would have to surrender. At one point, our guide said, England had about 10 days' supply of food on the island. Fifty-six per cent of the food had to be imported. The English HAD to break the Enigma's code or lose the war.

The brains at Bletchley did break that code and save Britain, and did it again in North Africa, and again, during the planning for D-Day. Thanks to Bletchley Park, we knew of Hitler’s weaknesses in Normandy and then used what we knew to feed erroneous information to the Germans about where the main thrust of the Allied invasion was going to occur.

Anyone who knows me in person, knows that the best book I've read in a LONG time is Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. It is fiction, but it tells a lot of the history that took place on the grounds and between the walls of Bletchley Park.

At the park gift shop, my British host James windle bought the dvd of Enigma, the movie, and we watched it last night. Our guide had told us that it was only about 50% accurate. I'd seen the movie before, but didn't remember it until I saw the ravaged-looking Tom show up at Bletchley Park. It was indeed strange to look at the manor house the movie's director chose for the main building after having seen the real architectural confection.

The "huts" were accurately enough portrayed, and the strange machine, Alan Turing’s Bombe (named after a Polish ice cream dish) with 36 cylinders that cracks the Enigma settings looked exactly like the real one we'd seen. That was where the historical accuracy ended. There were no Poles working at the real Bletchley Park, nowhere near the security laxity the movie needs for its premise. If you realize that the place shut down at the end of WWII, and nobody said a single word about what it had been until 30 years later, you have to appreciate that the secrets of the place were much safer than the movie imagines.

The Bletchley Park Trust, the private organization that is restoring and maintaining the site now has asked for those who worked at Bletchley Park to come forward to help them reconstruct what daily life was like. Slowly, the former WRENS and motorcycle dispatch riders and military men have arrived at Bletchley Park's visitor center and told their stories. Murlyn Hakon, our guide, recounted some of the stories as we made our way around the site.

The motorcycle dispatch guy told about volunteering for a job riding a motorcycle up and down the length of the country, never knowing the importance of the messages he was carrying. He got damned tired of the job when the weather turned the coldest and snowiest it had in years, and tried to get a transfer back to his old unit. Oh, no, he was told. You are in this for the duration.

Or the time one of the German planes carrying four 500 lb. bombs was disabled just a few miles from the Park and started to drop its bombs one by one on a path that was aimed directly at Hut 4, the most sensitive and important building on the property. One bomb hit the churchyard across the road. The second went into the cemetery "and disturbed the residents," and the third went right into a bank of trees old Sir Leon had planted to muffle the noise of the church bells, blowing Hut Four totally off its foundation. The women there went right on decoding messages and lost only seven minutes of decoding time. The next day, a huge crane came to put the hut back where it belonged, and they lost NO time while the operation was going on.

The fourth bomb hit right in front of the mansion, but didn't explode. As it turned out Alan Turing, the genius of the whole effort, was standing in front of the mansion and if it had exploded, said our guide, the course of the war would have been significantly altered.

The story of these people who wander onto the site, most of them quite elderly now, to tell their own little slices of the story of Bletchley Park, was what moved me the most. An old woman whose son declared in no uncertain terms that his mother, in tow, worked there but didn't have a very important job. And they took her around and showed her to huts and the rooms and she finally got to the most sensitive room of all and said, yes, I worked there, in a corner like that. She was, the guide told the astonished son, no doubt a member of most important department of military intelligence in England and hers was one of the most important jobs at the site.

You see the story of the daily life of Bletchley Park emerging from these little stories, these glimmers... because few of the right hands had any idea what the left hands were doing. It's like a treasure hunt you have to wait to come to you. They never know who will show up. They're looking, for instance, for the postal worker who sent 150 simultaneous telegrams to the scientists who would form the nucleus of the work, right at the start of the war, saying "Auntie Flo is seriously ill." That was the signal that the scientists should drop everything and converge on Bletchley Park. What did the postal worker think? "Either Auntie Flo came from a huge family or she was a very important person," surmised Murlyn Hakon, our guide.

Stories, stories...especially stories that allow us to piece together what happened to particular people at a particular time and place... There is so much power and so much poignancy just in the act of telling a story, and the story of Bletchley Park, its "ultra" secrecy, its collection of eccentric geniuses, its legions--12,000 strong at one time-- of small cogs who worked tirelessly never fully understanding what they were doing, and its importance in the Second World War, is better than most.