World War 2 Codebreakers, England

World War 2 Codebreakers is a former British Intelligence facility in England. The British Intelligence service housed a strategically pivotal base here. During the course of the Second World War, highly-skilled codebreakers worked day and night. Their goal was to decrypt German military transmissions; the infamous Enigma Code. The world-renowned coders and cypher experts developed the world’s first automatic decrypting computers.

In fact, historians suggest that the work undertaken here played an important part in turning the tide of the conflict. Estimates suggest that intelligence gathered shortened the war between two and four years. This undoubtedly saved many thousands of lives.

Nowadays, much of Codebreakers operates as a museum. Sadly, this historic block still lies derelict and decaying. I visited this location in 2016, and again in 2017. On both occasions, the visit was brief and hurried and I regret not taking more photographs.

Cracking the Enigma Code

All Codebreakers staff signed the Official Secrets Act. This forbid discussion of work details outside of their assigned team. Originally, teams worked in insolation in separate huts. Each hut was only privy to a small part of the transmissions. In this way, only those at the top of British Intelligence being knowledgeable about the true content of the intercepted transmissions. National security demanded absolute secrecy.

Built in 1943, this was one of the critical buildings on site. The plan of these buildings is a “spider block”; 13 office spurs sprouting from a central spine corridor. The concrete and brick corridors are warren-like. 530 staff worked in this block initially. Ultimately, around 700 would be working here by the end of the war.

The purpose-built building accommodated several specialist teams of codebreakers. Those teams were; traffic analysis, transmission decryption and final translation. Housing these teams all-together enabled more efficient working and allow more code to be analysed.

Their main function was the cracking the German Enigma Code. Firstly, intercepted transmissions are decrypted. Purpose-built programmable computers eventually enabled this step to be automated. Fluent German-speaking translators would then go to work on the decoded message. Their job was to make sense of the message. This involved filling in gaps in the messages and translating them into English. Finally, the messages were delivered to British Intelligence officers. Those at the top then decided the best way to utilise this information.

The end of the Codebreakers

The team continued to operate for several months after World War 2, before disbanding. The exact nature of the work here was not declassified until the 1970s. The site served various facets of the government in the latter 1940s until the early 1990s. Codebreakers is owned by a trust, and is a now thriving museum.