Bletchley Park Tour [docu in full]

it's quite and peaceful now but between 1939 and 1945 it was a very different story and it's difficult to imagine standing here today that this if this site had never existed there are probably tens of thousands of servicemen and women who might never have made it through to the end of World War two and there were countless numbers of people alive today when you think about it might never even have been born and that's quite a sobering thought welcome to Bletchley Park the wartime home of the codebreakers this is the version here at Bletchley Park but when Sir Herbert Leon and his wife moved in in 1883 it was little more than a red brick farmhouse but over the years they expanded it outwards and upwards until we see the mansion as it is today sir Herbert died in 1926 and his wife in 1937 after that the entire estate was broken up for redevelopment and sold off and the mansion and the surrounding 55 acres were eventually purchased by Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair who was the head of sis the Secret Intelligence Service he also had links to G C and C s the government code in psycho school or as it was known by the employees the golf cheese and chess society Admiral Sinclair had been watching Europe very carefully he'd seen the rise of Nazism he'd seen the rise of Hitler and I think he was convinced his bones that World War two was pretty much on the cards and if that happened what he wanted to do was move the headquarters of G CNCs out of London to a safe and secure location and how much safe and secure can you get with a country estate buried in the depths of Buckinghamshire he was proved to be correct and just before war was declared the first intake of codebreakers moved into the mansion here in august 1939 and one of the very first that moved in was probably one of the most famous Allen cheering when the codebreakers moved into the mansion there was approximately 100 of them and they took over all of the ground-floor rooms the ballroom the music room the library anywhere where they could set up tables and chairs to work in fact visitors here to the mansion now can see on the walls behind me very brief biographies of the most famous people that worked here people like John Tillman max Newman maybe Spacey Peter twin bill Tut cheering himself many many others and it didn't take long to get the huts built which they needed around the site but the problem was that the building on the huts wasn't keeping up with a number of staff that were coming in and soon the ground floor was full they couldn't move upstairs because mi6 had taken over the upper floors so the only place they could go was outwards and the only place they could spread to was the garage this is the rear of the mansion and this was Sir Herbert's garage and in here he kept his two horse Terron land ales very splendid in those days but Sir Herbert was a very rich man and when the age of the motorcar cane he decided to buy himself a couple of Rolls Royces we don't think it actually by to Model T Fords now do you this is the inside of suhur box garage and any in his time it was a very nice wood paneled building quite luxurious considering the fact that he only had cars in here but when the codebreakers outgrew the mansion they had to come in here and that's when they took over the gallery that you can see running along the top I have to apologize for the scaffolding but a certain amount of refurbishment work has just been started and I think they've started it on the very day we started filming these days the garage is used by a local model Boat Club and they make all of these fantastic models and if you come down to Bletchley Park in the summer you'll actually see some of these sailing on the lake and what a fantastic sight it makes during the war this was one of the main entrances into the park the gates were a little bit nearer to us than they are now but you can still see the two brick built sentry boxes that were on either side and they were manned by armed guards 24/7 everybody who worked at the park had to have identification and they had to sign the Official Secrets Act in fact it's strange to think that there were men and women who came here to work at the park they met they married but they never talked to each other about what they did they really didn't know and I think in those days they probably thought that if they did talk they'd be carted off and incarcerated into the Tower of London for the duration in fact Winston Churchill whenever he mentioned Bletchley Park never spoke of it by name not in any of his memos his reports his letters nothing he always referred to it as my most secret sauce and the people here that works at the park he described as the geese that laid the golden eggs but never cattle and they never did not for the best part of 40 years this was also one of the main entrances for the dispatch riders and they used to bring messages in from our Y stations the Y stations were listening stations that we had all down the east the south east and the south coast of Britain and they were listening in to the airwaves listening for messages put out from the continent in Morse and they would take these messages down very very accurately and then they would give them to the dispatch riders the riders would come in here into the park and then the messages were disseminated around all the various code breakers Bletchley Park was so secret but it was only ever bombed once during the war and that was in November 1940 we think that it was a bomber either aiming for the railway lines about five six hundred yards in that direction and missed or he'd completely lost his way and thought to himself to heck with this for a game of soldiers I'm going home when he did he turned his plane around dropped his bombs one stick of bombs landed over in the churchyard did no damage at all one bomb landed over in the south of the park slightly damaged a couple of buildings but the third bomb landed just beyond these trees here it buried itself in the soft earth before it exploded now at this time hot number four just to the side of the mansion had actually been built and there were people working in it the bomb itself didn't do any damage but the blast moved pop number four about a meter off its foundations so when the Hutus stopped moving and the dust had settled we have it on record that one of the ladies who was working in the hut turned to one of her colleagues and uttered those immortal words did you feel the earth move Bletchley Park was also known as station X and in the next part we'll find out how it got its name and where the first breakthrough in enigma here at the park was made what you're looking at now is the square tower which into Herbert's time was the water tower but when the codebreakers moved in here to mi6 officers moved into that Tower with radio equipment and their job was to keep in touch with our embassies in Stockholm Helsinki up in the north down to Tunis in North Africa in the south and as far east as Istanbul but this wasn't a wise station it wasn't a listening station this was designated as an exit station or Station X X being the Roman numeral 410 because it was the tenth such station set up by the government when everything about Bletchley Park came out into the public domain station X became the generic name by which the whole of Bletchley Park was known and still is today but the code breakers they outgrew the mansion they outgrew the garage they had to move somewhere else the next place they moved to was the stable-yard this is the stable-yard and the building behind me in Sir Herbert Stein was his fruit store and all of the soft fruit from the estate came into this building but during the war it was taken over by the code breakers and Alan Turing and one or two more moved into here after they outgrew the mansion and the garage the building behind me was the tack and feet store during sir Herbert's time where everything for the horses was kept but when the code breakers moved in it was split into cottages cottage number one behind me was kept for meetings cottage number two house the only family that ever lived here at the park and that was the bud family Robert and Emma Robert had worked here at the park before war started and he was kept on although neither of them had anything to do with code-breaking work but cottage number three at the end that's where the story really started during World War one most of the British analysts worked out of room 40 in the Admiralty building and one of the most famous code breakers there was Dylan Knox or as he was no Dylan ox so it made sense that when world war ii started he would come here to the park and he did and he worked here in cottage number three together with a very small team and thanks to information that we got from the Polish script analysts in Warsaw plus the work that Dylan Hawks had already done on enigma he actually managed to make the first breakthrough in enigma messages here at the park in January 1940 we're now actually standing outside Hut number eight which is the only Hut up to now that has been fully renovated and refurbished many of the huts work together we had hot number four over by the mansion and that held the intelligence staff that were working on the German naval d-cups but in Hut number eight we had the code breakers who were actually breaking the naval codes and this was Alan Turing subdermal because a now we'll go through and see where the great man himself worked Alan Turing's office this way round here to our cheering's office this is the office where Alan Turing worked here in hot 8 during the Second World War there are very few photographs that tell us anything about how the office really looked but the way that it's laid out now we think is more or less how we would have looked fairly Spartan in those days a chair a desk a bookcase and of course a place for the gas mask cheering was an eccentric character certainly a genius of mathematics and computing he certainly was but it's often been said that he probably suffered from Asperger's syndrome which is a high-end form of autism although it was never officially diagnosed his behavior tended to indicate that that may well have been a problem for him it's also been said that Sir Isaac Newton may well have suffered from the same problem that contrary to popular belief I wasn't around in his day so I couldn't vouch for that he always used to come to work in a suit and tie but it was often said that his suits and dry cleaners had never been introduced to each other he served from hay fever but instead of taking medication and staying indoors in spring and summer he used to ride around on his clapped-out bicycle with a gas mask on him and his bike was so bad that the chain kept falling off it but cheering been cheering worked out that if he counted the number of revolutions of the wheels he will get to a point where if he back pedaled the chain wouldn't fall off I think probably only cheering could figure that one out he had no sense of humor if anybody cracked a joke he would smile politely but that was about it but as far as his bike was concerned and various other things he was he was almost paranoid about getting things stolen somebody once said to him why don't we get your bike fixed he said why should I was gonna steal that wreck and that even came down to his tea mug because what he did was he chained it to the regulator just to make sure it didn't disappear when he walked from here from his office over to the canteen for his meals he always used to walk with his head down he didn't like making eye contact with the people because he thought if they did they were drawn into conversation and cheering never really liked conversing with people who he thought were intellectually inferior to himself I can't really blame him for that to you we've just moved around the corner from hop number eight and behind me are two of the other huts that were very important during World War two the one on my left with the blue tarpaulin that was Gordon Welshman's Hut and he and his team were responsible for decoding the Army and the Air Force enigma messages Hut number three which was the Red Hawk behind me that held the intelligence staff who acted on those d Crips one of the reasons why they're in such a sad condition is that since the Bletchley Park Trust was formed in 1992 we've never had any government funding but recently more funding has come in we've had funding from English heritage we've had funding from the local council Milton Keynes and we just heard that we've also had some funding through from the Heritage Lottery Fund and if we add all of that up together plus the funding that we might be getting in the future it still falls very short of the ten million pounds that we need here to turn this into a world-class educational center and a World Heritage Site that's another story we've talked a lot of - now about enigma so I think now's the time that we actually ought to go and look at one this is the enigma machine and in the next part we'll be looking at how this worked and how the mistakes that the Germans made actually helped the code breakers here to crack it this is the Enigma machine it was invented in 1918 by arthur scherbius in germany and he'd originally invented it for the commercial and banking world and his original design didn't include the plugboard and it only had three rotors it was never a great commercial success that it was taken over in 1928 by the Reich's marine which was the forerunner of the kriegsmarine the German Navy they started using it and when Hitler came to power he saw it liked it and decided that the entire German military should use it so what are the various components of it we have the plugboard on the front this has got 26 letters of the alphabet and by each letter there's a socket the machine was supplied with ten cables each cable had a plug on each end so 10 pairs of letters could be bridged or stickered together stickered because this was known as the stacker Brett behind that as the keyboard laid out very very similar to today's QWERTY keyboards but instead of qwe rty we had T Z on the machine because said it was a very common letter in the German language behind that is an illuminated panel of 26 letters and each letter can be lit from underneath with a small bulb and at the back that's where the real heart of the machine is if we open the cover the first thing that strikes us is that it was fairly obvious that the Germans during the war were not using do SL plus batteries they had their own built-in battery we have the three rotors here we have on the right of the rotors what was called the entry disc and on the left was called the reflector which did exactly what he said on the tin but to appreciate the complications of enigma we have to appreciate how these rotors were wired and to do that we'll just take them out round each router there's a ring which has the 26 letters of the alphabet and this ring was capable of being moved completely independent of the internal wiring there were 26 contacts on one side 26 on the other and the contacts were wired across to each other but always differentially in other words the contact by s might be wide across to a the contact by T might be worried across to J and so on no contact on this side was ever wired directly across to its mate on the other side and each of the three rotors was wired differently as was the entry disc so if we pop these back you'll be able to see how it works once the Enigma was set up the operator could then begin to send the messages each one of the keys was connected mechanically to the fast rotor we have the fast the mid middle and the slow and half pressure on a key move the wrote around one letter and full pressure generated the signal which went through the Machine and lit up one of the lights on top so if we close the cover we'll be able to see exactly what happened if we press Y the rotor will go round and K light so if we press X the rotor goes around again and F lights up the signal was going from the keys down into the plugboard it went into the plugboard at one point came out at a totally different point and then went up to the entry disc it went into the entry disc at one point and because of the wiring came out at a totally different point and then went through the rotors via the very secure to swap wiring inside of those it then went into the reflector which turned around or reflected the signal back through the rotors via a different route to where it went in the first it therefore went through the entry disk at a different point to where it came out the first stamina came out at the different points of where it went in it then went back down to the plugboard at a different point to where it came out the first time when it came out at a different point to where it went in and little the light on top I hope you're still with me so we can see that if we press Y T lights up if we press X P lights up if we press C K lights up if we press C again L lights up enigma was arranged that no letter in the original message ever coded itself as itself in the final message and no matter how many times you hit a key you would never get the same light coming up twice now the Germans thought that this was enigmas biggest strength but if you had a coded message and you knew as British intelligence knew that no letter in that coded message represented itself in the original plaintext message what have you done we've completely eliminated one variable out of the equation so that means that that wasn't in it was biggest strength it was actually in English biggest weakness vans together with the mistakes that the German operators made allowed bloated Park to break into enigma fairly early and continue breaking it right to the end of the wall but how were the German operators supposed to use it and what were the mistakes they made the Germans had what were called key sheets and these worksheets divided into the various days of the month and opposite each date were the settings that they were supposed to put on enigma it would tell them which three rotors out of the five that the machine was supplied with they were supposed to pick what the ground setting for each rotor was ie which three letters were showing in the top what the ring setting was around the rotors and what the plugboard settings were now before they sent a message once they got the machine set up they had to send what was called an Indy later and this was to tell whoever was receiving the message how to reset his enigma machine in order to decode the message so he had to choose three letters at random from the keyboard now let's just say for this argument we choose qwe he would input that twice it was a double encryption and what came out on the panel on the top let's say was a b c d e f this was the indicator the operator would then reset his rotors to qwe and he would then type in the message and the radio operator would send the indicator and the message to whoever was receiving it and the first thing the recipient would do was to look at the indicator a b c d e f in this example he would key that in and what would come out on the top panel was qw e qw e because he nygma decoded as well as encoded he would then set his rotors to qwe and he would then type in the coded message and what came out on the panel was the string of letters that spelled out the original German message in clear or plain text now he was supposed to choose three keys at random that the German operators got lazy and they would actually choose something like qwe or said you I or Q a why some operators would even choose three a's or three B's or the first three letters of their wife or their girlfriend's name the weather shows that the Germans had out in the North Atlantic and a North Sea when they send their reports back to base would begin them weather report many of the operators finished off their messages with Heil Hitler and all of these stupid mistakes British intelligence lunched on two and they used that plus their knowledge of the fact that enigma never coded a letter as itself in order to break into enigma and they carried on breaking it continuously but it was no easy matter because the one thing you have to remember is that with all the variations on this machine the order of the rotors which wrote it down to the five that ring settings the plugboard settings what the code breakers were faced with was a machine that could code a letter in any one of 158 million million million ways with all of these complications therefore it didn't take the carburetors long to realize that breaking enigma by hand every day using paper and pen was just not viable it took too long and there were too many messages to break so it was obvious that some sort of machinery was required we can still forget on average day at Bletchley Park the code breakers could have been breaking anything between two and six thousand messages and that was German Italian Japanese and cycles as well but as far as enigma was concerned we needed some machinery and that is when Alan Turing had rather a good idea and that idea is what we'll be looking at in the next part it didn't take cheering long to realize that trying to break enigma with paper and pencil took far too long he needed a piece of machinery to do it so he conceived an idea he took that idea down to the British tabulating Machine Company in Letchworth in hartfordshire and he talked to the chief research scientists there Howard King and what team came up with was this machine this was called the bombe machine and it consisted primarily of the whole series of drums these were to emulate the rotors on enigma the fast of the middle and the slow rotor there were 12 of them in this direction three rows so we have essentially here 36 enigma machines all opened out and connected in series and over here we have the plugboard emulator this would normally live behind this machine this is not actually a working model this was a replica that was made for the 2001 film enigma a very good film by the way if you haven't seen it see it so how did this machine work what used to happen was that after midnight when the German operators changed all their settings on on enigma the messages came in here to Bletchley Park and what the code breakers did was to look at those messages now by experience and what they've already had through from intelligence they worked our war was called a now a crib was the best guess that they could make as to what parts of that original message meant from that crib they could make up a menu this is an example of a menu this is a very simple one but there were ones that were far more complicated than this this doesn't tell us very much but to a bomb operator this tells that operator how to set the drums on the machine and how to plug up the plugboard so given that menu what the farm operator would do was to go to the Machine and she would set the first three drums according to the menu each drum then was set one setting passed that first one she would then plug up the plugboard according to the menu and she would then switch the machine on but this is the clever bit of Turing's idea he knew that if you had to go through every single combination of the rotors on enigma that could take some considerable time was the first thing we had to break was the indicator once we've broken that then you can break the message and it was the indicator that we were making the attack on so he thought in Reverse he thought if we can have a machine that can discount all of the combinations that can't work what you're left with is a very few that may work and out of those there's probably going to be one that will work and that's on an electronic piece of equipment is a lot quicker than going through every single Nenshi to see if it works cheering was actually thinking in Reverse so once the machine had been plugged up the operator would switch it on and if the crib was good and the menu was good maybe within five minutes the machine would stop a bell would ring and the operator would then look to see what letters were indicated on these three drums here and she had a checking machinable so what should we do is put those settings on to the checking machine Plus what was indicated by the plugboard and she would feed into the checking machine egg and if what came out was j she'd then feeding J and if V came out she'd feed in V and if P came out she knew that setting was reasonably good so what she would then do is to give those drum settings and the plugboard settings over to another operator which worked here in the bond room and she was working on what was called a lecture earth enigma and that was a British coding machine that was set up to emulate in England rotors and plugboard and she would set up the rotors ask her the drum settings she would set up the plugboard ask her the plugboard settings and she would then feeding the coded message and providing the crew was good the menu was good those settings were good what came out on her machine was the original message in German being clear or in plain text if what came out of a machine was gibberish then obviously what the machine had come up with was not good which meant the crib and the menu were not good he went back to the codebreakers and then we did it and tried again and over a period of time with their experience and mistakes that the Germans made the code breakers got very very good at guessing these troops and getting the menus right and throughout most of the war they were breaking enigma on a very regular basis but enigma is only really one story here at Bletchley Park there was another story that was equally important although it didn't lead to as many decrypt the decrypt that it did lead to were just as important if not more important because that story concerns the coding machine that Hitler and the high command used and that's the story of Lorenz and that's where we're going in the next part in 1940 Hitler decided that he wanted his own coding machine that he could use to talk to his generals and all the members of the High Command without the rest of the German military knowing what he was saying so he decided to go to the lorenz company to see what they could come up with and what they came up with was this this is the Lorenz s-said 42 and unlike enigma which worked on three or four rotors this actually works on twelve rotors and around each rotor are a series of switches 501 in total and unlike enigma this didn't work on a 26 letter alphabet substitution code this actually worked on a 32 character teleprinter code or as it was known Bodo code and these switchers were very important because these formed the patterns on the rotors and the patterns determined which obscuring characters were pulled in to form the code whatever obscuring characters well in order to understand that we have to understand how Lorentz worked and to understand that then we have to go back to a little bit of basic theory in 1917 a man called Gilbert ver Nam was working for AT&T Bell Laboratories in America and he was working on a stream cipher for teleprinters now as we've seen with a Reince machine the teleprinter were some bodo code this is a representation of bodom code we have 26 letters of the alphabet some of those have got duplicate functions but in addition to those we've got extra characters like carriage return line feed etc and each character has got five data bits and we can represent these by zeros and ones and this is where teleprinter code of course varies from the colons enigma used which was similarly the 26 letter alphabet substitution code so what was the nails system well the first thing we did was to make up this matrix and this matrix consisted of purely randomly generated teleprinter characters once this matrix had been achieved and this mother was called a pad once has been achieved all of those characters could then be transferred on to punch tape and the tape could be put into the teleprinter machine so how did you count well let's say that I've got to send a message to my friend Sam the tape is in the machine ready with all the obscuring characters those generated characters from the matrix I'm keying S which has got those five data bits the machine then pulls in the first character off the table which you could be and that acts as an obscuring character because when we add those five data bits to those five database using the magic of modulo two addition which is the same as the XOR function in logic you finish up with those slide activates which represents a 10 by then key in a which has those five data bits the second character is pulled in from the tape which is that add the two together you get that which is W I think e and M third characters call they add the two together you get L and then I key in the rest of the message so what I've done is to key in sa n plus a message in clear and what comes out is MW l plus a whole string of characters that look like the computable gibberish and the beauty of this is that this encoded message is absolutely unbreakable because there's nothing in that message that indicates which obscuring characters were used that is only true under two specific substances and that is number one this pad of characters is purely randomly generated and the second circumstance is that it's only used once for one message if you want to send a second message and encode that message you have to produce a completely different palette of obscure characters that's why this is a called a one-time pad so Lorenz had a problem they knew a venoms work but how do you put all of these Lorenz machines out into the field with a whole stack of tapes and ensure that all those tapes are used in the same order Center to recipients they don't get damaged they don't get broken it's impossible to police and that's where Lorentz came up with a very clever idea of having those switches around the rotors of which we saw earlier five hundred one of them and those switches formed the obscuring characters however there's always a however no machine can generate purely random characters it has to work on hounds programmed so the characters that Lorenz was producing were pseudo-random unfortunately for us the code breakers they were more pseudo than random how did we break it well we did and the way we broke it was relying on the mathematical skills of John Chapman little Tut looks Newman and just a teeny-weeny little bit of help from the Germans what you're listening to there is not Morse code it's bodo code the problem is that we can't do anything with that immediately so it's got to go through another piece of machinery which is this this is called an undulator and this produces a paper tape now we set up a special listening station at noch Holt in Kent near the south coast of England to listen to these signals and they were picking these signals up since 1940 then coming in to knock holes they were producing those tapes and this is what a tape actually looks like that's the trace formed by that signal now we had people here at the park who could actually interpret that and interpret the characters from that they would then make a list of the characters those characters could be then punched up on tape and then we could go on to the next part of the process what we're going to see in the next part is how we broke Lorenz initially and then we'll be looking at the machinery that helped us break Lorenz right through to the end of the war our listening station at noch Holt was picking up these bodo coded messages right throughout 1940 and 41 and they were coming in here to the park and across the desk of Colonel John Tillman who also knew all about the names work but the problem was that he also knew how difficult they were to break what he ideally needed was for a German operator to send the same message twice on the same Lorenz settings and made lots of mistakes in one of the messages well what the chances of that happening well on the 30th of August 1941 a German operator had to send a message we think he was working on the Athens to Vienna link of the high command he said his Lorenz machine exactly as he should and he sent the message all 4,000 characters of it I reckon it probably took him best part of an hour and then he sat back for a rest he very quickly got a message back worse the effect of sorry didn't quite get all of that please send again well you can imagine how he felt he probably wasn't very pleased his fingers will probably saw but he knew he had to send the message again and he did and that's when he let the rest of the world know about the two catastrophic mistakes he just made with enigma the settings were changed usually at midnight and kept for the following 24 hours but with Lorentz the settings had to be changed for each message now this particular operator has probably been told the what he's got here is the latest state of the art completely unbreakable machine so he must have thought to himself twelve rotors 501 switches forget it what he did was he reset his Lorentz machine back to exactly the same star position that he used for the first message mistake number one mistake number two he decided that as he keyed in the message he'd abbreviated now the first word from the message was sprung number message number in the first message he typed that out in full in the second message he got as far as Brooke n and then realized that he could abbreviate number two n R which he did and then he abbreviated all the way down the rest of the message now knock halt intercepted these two messages they didn't know what they meant they realized that they were important because here they had two messages with exactly the same indicator because like enigma the operator had had to send an indicator first the first seven characters in each message were exactly the same the coded version of slug N and the second message was 500 characters shorter so he came up here to Bletchley Park and across the desk of John Tillman and what John Tilton did was he took one look at those messages and he knew exactly what the operator had done and this was his heaven-sent opportunity and over the next two weeks using his own mathematical skills he completely extracted the entire string of obscuring characters that we use for those two messages but the problem was that we didn't have anybody here who could do anything with it but we then got a new guy joined the research team his name was Bill Tut he was actually a chemistry graduate but he had one abiding passion and that was statistical mathematics so the head of research gave him the two messages gave him the key and said see what he can do with it so he went away starting work two months later he came back and he said well I can't tell you what it's called I can't tell you what he looks like but I can tell you how it works in fact what bells team done was to actually work out that this machine whatever it was had twelve wheels one bank of five which we call the K wheels one bank of five which we call the s wheels and a bank of two which we call the M wheels they also worked out that the K wheels all moved independently and incrementally the s wheels all move together sometimes move sometimes didn't and the M wheels were the to drive or pin wheels they also worked out that the K wheels introduced one obscuring character and the s wheels introduced another obscuring character in fact what built up his team had done was to work out the entire logic of Lorentz which was quite amazing because we never even saw a Lorenz machine here at the park until the very end of the war in fact one writer who picked up on this some 30 years later described it as probably the greatest intellectual feat of world war two so now we had a methodology for breaking the rest but the only problem was it took far too long we needed some machinery to do it so we went down to the post office research establishment at Dollis Hill just outside of London and what they came up with was this machine here now we didn't know what Lorenz was called so we codenamed it tummy and the messages that tony was creating we caught fish codes so this was the effect our own tummy machine was a tony emulator now it doesn't look very much like the german Lorenz machine but it does essentially the same job and in the next part that we've been looking at how the tony machine works and we'll also be looking at the other piece of machinery that we need in order to break Lorenz quickly this is the honey machine that was made for us by post office research it consists of a whole Bank of unis electors relays valves etc and 24 rows of plug sockets and all of these plug sockets are arranged in 12 pairs the top row in each pair can be plugged up with the wheel patterns from lorenz and the bottom row in each pair is plugged up with the wheel position so we can do that with all 12 wheels all 12 pairs of these plug sockets once that's done we then switch the machine on and what the machine has done is it's now initialized in other words it has set itself to exactly the same patterns and positions that the Lorenz machine had for the message that we're going to decode that message would be punched up on a long piece of tape and it would be put into this section here and on the teleprinter out came the original German message in clear or plain text but there was one tiny snag in order to do that we needed to know what the patterns and the positions were in the first place now we could calculate that out using built UPS methodology but the only problem was that depending upon the length of the message that could take anything up to six weeks because don't forget the mathematics involved in this are extremely complex and by the time we'd work that out and decoded the message that message is probably dead buried and long gone so we needed another piece of machinery to help us get those patterns and positions quickly and this is where max Newman got involved he was one of the great mathematicians that worked here and he was the head of what was laughingly called the Newman Airy that was a hub that was set up purely to look at to a mechanical means of breaking Lorentz so using built UPS methodology max Newman worked out a mathematical model that would give us what we wanted and he then went down to tre the telecommunications Research Establishment of Malden in Worcestershire and he saw a guy there called Charles Wynn Williams and what when Williams came up with was the design for another machine which is this machine here now I don't know how humour translates out of different countries but in the UK during the war there was a very famous cartoon character called Keith Robinson and what Heath Robinson did was to make incredibly complicated machines to do incredibly simple jobs and when this machine came up to Bletchley Park the operators took one look at it and said well that's Heath Robinson to start with what it actually does is it works on two paper tapes there was a reading head a whole selection of switches valves uni selectors and a readout and the idea was that one paper tape would be punched up with the actual coded message and then formed into a loop and put on one side of the machine the second tape was then punched up with some of the wheel pans that we'd worked out quite laborious ly longhand that was then formed into a loop and pulled to the other side of the machine the two tapes were then started from the same start point and run through the reading head and what this machine did was to compare those two data streams using what was called double Delta cross correlation and he teased out of those two data streams the pattern and the position for the first Lorenz wheel the machine was then stopped and the tapes were then put one character out of register and then run through the Machine again and it repeated the process it he's down the patterns and the position for the second Lorene's wheel and so on until we have the five K wheel positions once we have those we can work out the other seven relatively quickly but Robinson had a few problems the tape feed was friction and the tapes kept slipping and going out of register so we had to stop reset and start again using paper tapes the paper would stretch very slightly so we had to stop reset start again sometimes a tape would break a new tape had to be punched up start again it was relatively slow the reading head was reading characters of 1,000 per second and there was no print out on this machine it was a readout so that required the operators to be stood by the readout scribbling madly as figures flashed in front of them but when he did work he proved that max Newman's mathematics were absolutely correct but what we needed was something quicker and a lot more reliable now this point Alan Turing said to max Newman I think I know somebody who might be able to help he works with post office research he's a very very bright the electronics engineer his name's Tommy flowers why did he go and see him so much Newman did he went down to post office research he saw Tommy explained what the problem was explained the mathematics behind it Tommy started with a long piece of paper and the solution he came up with was quite staggering because what Tommy designed was the world's first semi programmable electronic digital computer it was called Colossus we have one here it lives next door and that's where we're going next until Tommy flowers designed Colossus the most complex piece of calculating equipment we were using had around 150 thermionic valves or vacuum tubes but the original mark one Colossus had 1500 valves the powers that be here at Bletchley Park were convinced it wouldn't work because they believed that vowels were far too unreliable but fortunately for us Tommy knew a great deal more about valves than they did the other great contribution that Tommy made was that he figured out the wheel patterns of lorentz could actually be calculated internally within the machine if he included a memory circuit and thyratron rings thyratrons being a particular type of valve and this completely eliminated the second paper tape that Robinson needed thus solving the synchronization problem timing problems were also solved by tiny holes that were perforated down the length of the tape so Colossus could read these and set his clock speed from them but it wasn't just a matter of putting a punch tape on the machine and the right answer coming out at the other end a tape was punched up with the coded message and formed into a loop it was then loaded onto this section of the machine fondly known as the bedstead it then passed through the reading head here at a linear speed of nearly 30 miles an hour reading characters at 5,000 per second five times faster than Robinson but Colossus didn't use a stored-program he used a switched program so the operators had a flow chart that showed them how to set the machine for each part of the operation the first thing they had to do was to set the data switches using these levers they then moved over to the logic circuits where the switches were set according to the information on their flowcharts next to the logic circuits were the plug boards where the trial wheels start positions could also be set collossus then started reading the data streams on the tape and did a count of the number of occurrences of a particular boolean function the machine worked using boolean mathematics essentially ones and zeros this bank of decade counters would then keep track of the count and output this information to these display counters that were calibrated in thousands hundreds tens and units when the maximum count had been achieved the operator would flick a switch and that information was output to the teleprinter the information being the patterns and position of the first Lorenz wheel the operator would then change the program by resetting the logic circuit switchers and Jack plugs according to the information on her flow chart and a second count would be made when that reached a maximum value it was output to the teleprinter and that was the patterns in position for the second Lorenz wheel this procedure was followed until we had all the requisite information for all 12 wheels Tunney would then be plugged up with these settings and the tape from Colossus was then put through Tunney and the original German message in clear obtained the length of time it took to obtain all 12 pounds and positions vary tremendously depending upon the original coded message it could take as little as 20 minutes or as long as eight hours the average was usually between three and four hours the first Marquand Colossus arrived here at Bletchley Park in December 1943 and was up and running by February 44 so successful was it that ten more were ordered but even whilst the mark one was being built Tommy flowers assistant Alan Combs was working on a mark 2 version which was even more powerful and had 2,500 valves in it we had 10 mark 2's working at the park by the end of the war with the 11th still in production and the original mark one having been converted to a mark 2 the very first mark 2 was installed on the 1st of June 1944 five days before d-day on the 6th and just in time for us to break some messages that proved Hitler had been fooled by all the misinformation that we'd been putting out about a huge army in the Southeast of England hundreds of tanks and planes and phantom convoys that would be sailing across the channel to mount the invasion at the pas de Calais whilst Normandy was just going to be used as a diversion many of his generals didn't actually believe this information but Hitler did and that was all that mattered and the rest as they say is history what you're looking at here are just a few of the two and a half thousand valves that the marketing machine has and this particular rebuild of the mark 2 is actually on the footprint of Colossus number 9 that was in this room during the war the fact that we have that mark to Colossus working here at all is down to the dedication the hard work of Tony sale and his rebuild to you Tony started in 1992 to rebuild Colossus but he had very very scant information the parts of three circuit diagrams literally a handful of pictures and a few notebooks from some of the original engineers Tommy flowers were still alive as was dr. Arnn Lynch the man who designed the reading head on both Robinson and Colossus so they all got together virtually reverse-engineered Colossus from the bits of the information that they had and then rebuilt it and 14 years later we see the rebuild mark - and to prove that it worked in November of 2007 Tony sail set up what was called the cipher challenge we took our Lorenz machine from the museum here to the Hinds Nixdorf Museum in Paderborn in Germany and there a message was coded up and broadcast over the airwaves and the challenge was intercept that message and break it so we received it here at the park we punched up the tape we put you through Colossus we got the patterns and the positions for the rotors we then put it through the tummy machine and decoded the message total time that took about three and a half hours the same as it did during wartime so then we sat back and we thought right let's see if anybody can beat that and did they oh yes and who was it a gentleman his name was your kin and he lived in Bonn just around the corner from paddy ball he did have two big advantages though number one was that he was a software engineer and he actually wrote the programs that he needed to do that to us in AD a high-level computer language he also had the advantages of using the latest painting powered computers in fact he did it in the fastest time and when he came over here to Bletchley Park to collect his prize he did point out that once Colossus was reading the characters of 5,000 per second his computers were crunching numbers at the rate of 1.2 million per second he also worked out that in 1944 Colossus was actually working faster than many of the computers that were being designed 20 to 30 years later and I think that says an awful lot for the genius of Tommy flowers original design on the mark Wong and Alan Coombs design work on the mark - and in the final part of these videos we've been looking to see what happened when hostilities finally ceased in 1945 almost forgot yokum's time to break the message 47 seconds just think what we might have achieved here if the chips that we had available to us in 1944 had been Pentium instead of just potato oh yes at the end of the war Churchill decreed that everything here at Bletchley Park had to be destroyed or the paperwork and the records were burned and all the machines were broken up into pieces as Churchill said no bigger than a man's hand and he put blanket secrecy over everything that had happened here and the reason for that was perfectly obvious we told the Russians that we've broken enigma but we hadn't told them and had no intentions of telling them that we'd broken Lorentz the Russians were allowed to come into East Germany and meet westernize in Berlin in fact it was Churchill that coined that very well-known phrase an Iron Curtain has descended over Europe because he was very astute and he knew that when the hot war finished the Cold War would begin he also guessed that as the Russians came in through East Germany they may well pick up some Lorenz machines and if they did and they thought that we'd never broken grants they must might start using those for their own coded messages and if they did then Churchill wanted the intelligence services to be able to intercept those messages and break them so to Colossus machines did actually escape the breakup and they eventually finished up at the successor to G C and C s which was GCHQ the government communications headquarters based at Chapman down in Gloucestershire those machines as far as we know we're working it until around about 1960 when they were finally decommissioned broken up and all the records destroyed so that really leaves us with the staff that worked here where did they all go well many of them went into the jobs that they had before the war started many of the academics went back into academia Colonel John Tillman who by the end of the war was now a brigadier he went to America and he worked for the NSA the National Security Agency on a consultancy basis and he was eventually inducted into their Hall of Fame one of the few non Americans ever to get a distinction gone Welshman he went to America as well and he worked in the secure communications industry built up he went to Canada and he went first of all to the University of Toronto and then towards Allu University where he set up a brand-new math department to study combinatorics and optimization and that department actually became one of the best in the world in those subjects max Newman he went up to Manchester University and he worked on the Manchester baby and then the Manchester one computers to the first computers to use stored programs and that really left cheering who was possibly the biggest nigma of them all he left the park in 1943 he went over to America to help them with their 402 vom machine design he came back to Britain and work for the National Physical Laboratory for some time and then he was tempted to go up to Manchester University to work with Max Newman but in the early 50s something happened that was not only to change Turing's life but to probably change the course of history in the early fifties the house where Turing was staying was actually broken into and when the police came to do all their interviews and forensics and whatnot he actually admitted that he was having an affair with a friend of the person who burgled the house and this really shows cheering's rather naive unworldly side because he didn't see anything wrong with them the problem was that that friend was another man because cheering was gay and here in the UK in the 40s and 50s for me being gay was illegal you could get prosecuted for it and indeed cheering was he was taken to court for indecency he was found guilty and he was given a choice either one year in jail or one year taking female hormones which was I suppose their answer in those days to this particular problem he opted for the hormones but a relatively normal male taking female hormones has some rather unfortunate side effects his weight started to balloon and here we're talking about someone who was a great athlete in fact he would have been in the bridge in 1948 running the marathon had not injury prevented it he also became of course extremely depressed and one morning in REM about June 1954 his housekeeper came in and found him dead in bed and on a table elsewhere in the room there was a partially eaten apple laced with cyanide the official cause of death was suicide but what a legacy he left many historians have argued and discussed since that time what cheering might have achieved considering what he did achieve in those just mere 41 years before his death in fact I've read somewhere that that some historian said that cheering could well have been the precursor to Bill Gates who knows we don't know we'll never know and perhaps it's best left that way but down through the years he's become known as the father of one computing science there are about six or seven science parks and science departments named after in statues of him he's even had a road system named after him so I think in hindsight it's really not about legacy to leave but I think to myself that it would have been nice if Tommy flowers say had been honored in the same way yes with everything about Bletchley Park came out into the public domain he did receive an MBE for the world that he did but I've always thought that to name a road system after Tommy where he was born and raised would have been very very nice because I think flowers way sounds so much nicer than the m25 motorway will it ever happen well who knows I rather think not and I think that would be a very great shame historians have discussed Bletchley Park ever since the end of the war and they've generally come to the conclusion that the work that was done here probably shortened the war by around two years and in the process saved not just hundreds of thousands but probably millions of lives on all sides if you've been watching this series of videos you've probably realized that there is a huge huge story to tell here at the park and all we've been able to do is literally scratch the surface many of the descriptions of the machinery for example have by necessity have been fairly simplistic the only real way to fully appreciate the enormity of the task that face the codebreakers and indeed the enormity of the solutions they came up with is if at all possible pay a visit here but I'd like to leave the last word to Britain's greatest wartime leader in late 1940 Winston Churchill made a speech in which he coined what's to become one of his most famous sayings and he used that saying to describe the pilots of the Royal Air Force's Fighter Command when they were pitted against the might of the German Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain the time when Britain truly did stand alone and I've often thought to myself as I walk around the park and I think about what happened he and I think what was achieved here I become more and more convinced that that's saying could just as easily have applied to the men and women who worked here all of those unsung heroes who because of the secrecy that was imposed upon Leslie Park the rest of the world never even knew about for over 30 years the code breakers at Bletchley Park you

Channel: PA3DMI

Views: 244,566

Rating: 4.8535872 out of 5

Keywords: bletchley, park, sis, soe, y-stations, spooks, wwII, uk, gc&cs, buckinghamshire, Codes, Centre, the, National, Museum, of, Computing

Id: OuEHcJ7CCzg

Length: 73min 51sec (4431 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 21 2012