Historians and the public widely recognize the contributions of the men at Bletchley Park, especially Alan Turing, who cracked the Germans’ Enigma Code. (So, too, is the tragic end to Turing’s life.) But a sizable female workforce made Bletchley Park’s success possible, contributing to efforts many credit with shortening World War II by as much as two years. The story of that workforce is only now able to be fully told, just as the few remaining female codebreakers pass away. Discover more about them in this edition of Tech Time Warp.
Turing developed the Bombe, a machine used to determine the daily key for breaking the German code. Women at “Station Y” locations across England intercepted German radio communications. Many of these women were members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, known as “Wrens.” These women would transmit the radio messages back to “Station X,” which they did not know was at Bletchley Park. At Bletchley, another group of women would operate the Bombe to decipher the intercepted messages. By 1944, more than 1,600 Wrens were operating over 200 Bombes, attempting to decode up to 18,000 messages a day.
The women knew their work was of the utmost confidentiality, and when the war was over, they weren’t able to tell their families how they had contributed. It wasn’t until the declassification of wartime information in the 1970s that word of the female codebreakers at Bletchley Park began to get out. Now, there are concerted efforts to tell their stories through documentaries, books, fictional works, and museum exhibits.
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