Cracking the Luftwaffe Codes: The Secrets of Bletchley Park (review)

Recent years have witnessed a steady stream of books and articles on communications intelligence (Comint) in the Second World War. Facilitated by the declassification of wartime (and prewar) Comint records in Britain and the United States, these studies have illuminated what had long been one of the darkest and least explored corners of World War II studies. This scholarship, however, has reflected a rather narrow approach. Not surprisingly, intelligence historians have focused primarily on operations, seeking to identify the communications targeted, the codes and ciphers broken, and the impact of the resulting intelligence on diplomatic, economic, and military policies. Secondarily, historians have described the organizational and bureaucratic structures that emerged as the small prewar Comint services evolved under the demands of war into veritable cryptologic industries. Unfortunately, there has been little effort to investigate what might be called the social history of wartime communications intelligence. The work-a-day life of the codebreakers, intercept operators, traffic analysts, and translators, their training, working conditions, living arrangements, recreational pursuits, and personal relations, remains obscure. This brief memoir is a step toward addressing this deficiency.

The author, then a nineteen-year-old enlisted woman in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), arrived at Bletchley Park (BP) in the summer of 1942 after brief service in the Royal Air Force Records Center. She knew nothing about Bletchley Park, the top secret center of Britain's codebreaking effort, and nothing about codebreaking. Assigned to the German Air Section, the BP unit responsible for solving the low-grade ciphers used by the Luftwaffe for routine administrative messages and air-ground communications, she learned her new trade on the job. Her story, however, is not about codebreaking. Despite the title, there is little about cracking codes, although a short appendix provides some details about Luftwaffe cryptosystems. The focus here is on people rather than operations, but not the well-known personalities, such as Alan Turing, Hugh Alexander, John Tiltman, and Gordon Welchman, who seemed like demigods to the staff who worked their shifts at the decryption tables. Instead the light is on the mid-level staffers who lack biographers and references in the standard histories. We learn about their housing and dining arrangements, their recreational pursuits, their social life, and their adaptation to the myriad rules and restrictions of a top secret intelligence facility.

The author perpetuates the myth of wartime Bletchley as an equalitarian community of free spirits where the genius, talent, charm, and culture of the inhabitants prevailed over the hierarchy, uniformity, officiousness, and mediocrity that apparently characterized all other wartime structures. This rosy-hued picture is overdrawn. Aside from the fact that by the end of the war BP was a large bureaucracy and bureaucracies are notoriously indifferent to genius and culture, the blessed circle of codebreakers of which memoirists such as this author are so enamored represented only a minority of the Park's population. Pleased to have been part of an educated community where "good writing" and "good conversation" mattered, the author fails to notice that the community was exclusive and that the fellowship did not extend to those perhaps less educated personnel (guards, drivers, cleaners, repairers) who did not approach writing and conversation so self-consciously. Charmed by the eccentricities of colleagues who simply could not remember to carry those pesky passes or who habitually lost their way between their work huts and the mess hall or who found the disciplined routines of a wartime facility simply too tiresome to acknowledge, the author still cannot see that such behavior unnecessarily increased the daily workload of other BP staff who read little poetry and spoke no foreign languages but whose sense of duty and responsibility was no less serious than hers. The "look at me and my clever friends" approach may be hard to avoid in a memoir, but the patronizing attitude toward those not in the charmed circle should not...