Codebreaker Page #3

And also very easily accessible from London.

It was a completely secret effort.

There's never been a place

where secrets were better kept

than they were kept at Bletchley.

We were on our honour not

to talk about this and we didn't.

My parents never knew what I did

until the day they died.

It was an extremely eccentric

bunch of people who were recruited.

There were mathematicians.

There was a British chess champion.

There were people who had won contests

to do crossword puzzles in a very, very fast time.

Turing was, in some ways,

the main architect of the code-breaking effort.

You needed exceptional talent

you needed genius at Bletchley,

and Turing was the genius.

I regarded him with a certain amount of awe

because he was 'The Prof'.

He was just regarded as very clever.

The Germans were coding their messages

using what was called an Enigma machine.

What you have here is a

German Enigma machine

developed in

World War II

to encipher messages between

parts of the German forces.

The whole point about the Enigma machine

is it could be configured

in a large number of ways -

15 million, million ways.

The German operator set the machine up

keyed the message in which scrambled it

transmitted the scrambled text.

The other intended recipient had a machine

set to exactly the same settings

and that descrambled the message

and revealed the plain text.

The Germans believed that this machine

was completely unbreakable.

Turing sat down with an Enigma machine,

and he looked at it

and he thought I can break that.

I had a dream.

Oh, good.

I didn't write it down though.

You should write them down.

What did you dream about?

I dreamt about Joan Clarke.

We worked together. I can't say.

Of course.

But, we were...

It was...

There was a war on.

I 'loved' her.

Or rather - I didn't not love her.

Joan Clarke was a rarity at Bletchley.

She was a woman who did the same work

and had the same status as male codebreakers

but she was probably paid less.

She was a mathematician.

It was known that

she and Turing had been close.

Joan and I, we...

we went to the pictures.

One didn't have to speak differently to her.

One could be amusing, have a laugh.

One didn't have to pretend.

Anyway, I thought that

if she was so sporting

one might just as easily

imagine her as a wife.

So I proposed marriage

and she immediately said 'yes'.

And just to be as sporting with her

as she was with me

I told her straight away that I fancied men.

And... this didn't bother her a jot.

At least she gave no outward sign.

It was a surprise to me when he said,

I think his words probably were

'Would you consider marrying me?'

He told me that he had

this homosexual tendency

and naturally that worried me a bit

because I did know that was something

that was almost certainly permanent

but...

we carried on.

Turing was doing something that was

fairly common at that time

which was, he was

going to make an effort.

He was going to make a

sort of stab at heterosexuality.

What was interesting was that he never

even reached the phase of marrying her.

He realised very quickly

that it was not going to work.

Did you never tell her that

you acted on your desires?

No.

Joan and I, we were interested in

how mathematics expresses itself in nature.

I thought our wonderful conversations

would be enough for both of us.

But a moment came

when you realised you would never

be able to be as honest with her

as she was with you?

Yes.

So I called it off.

I knew it would hurt her.

But it would hurt her

less than years of deceit?

Yes.

Turing was such, in some ways,

such an honest person.

Most would've married and either

led a sort of secret life with other men

or eventually divorced their wives.

And what this suggests to me was a much

higher degree of self-awareness

than a lot of other men

of his generation had.

I learnt nothing about

his homosexuality at Bletchley.

Turing was a very eccentric person.

He would wear a gas mask as he

went into work on his bicycle

because he suffered from hay fever.

He often went into work

with his pyjamas under his jacket.

This is the most eccentric thing of all:

he couldn't trust the banks.

He therefore decided

he would buy silver ingots.

And he would plant them in the park.

But he forgot where he had planted them.

And they have never been found since.

For Turing, wartime Bletchley

was a paradise.

It didn't matter if you were different.

All that counted was

outwitting the Germans.

The greatest threat to Britain's survival

was the war in the Atlantic.

Convoys were being attacked

by German naval U-boats.

It mattered because we

depended on sea transport

to get an enormous amount of supplies

into the United Kingdom for the war.

Defeating of the U-boats was the most

important task we had to perform

and without it we wouldn't have been

able to win the war at all.

We knew how important it was

and we knew also that

when we were not breaking

what the consequences were.

We had somehow or other

to break the U-boat codes.

Turing considered that the major way

of attacking Enigma cyphers was with cribs.

That is known plain text, in modern speak.

And this is where you could

guess the German text

which the operator

had keyed into the machine

in order to get the cypher text,

which you have actually intercepted.

A crib might be something so simple

as a word that would often occur

such as the word 'weather'.

The Germans always reported

to each other on the weather.

So the word 'wetter' - W-E-T-T-E-R,

became a very useful crib.

Time was of the essence.

And the conceptual breakthrough

that Turing came up with

was:
well, if a machine is being used

to code these messages

we need to build a machine

to break the code.

The machine, designed by Turing

and a colleague, Gordon Welchman

was called The Bombe.

There were over 200 of these machines

working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week

looking for the settings on the

rotors of the Enigma machine.

What the Bombe did

was to explore the relationships

between the cipher text and the crib

looking for the Enigma configuration.

It would've taken people with pencil

and paper weeks to do that by hand.

And the Bombe could do it

in a few minutes.

Within a couple of years they were able

to read virtually all the Enigma traffic

except for the traffic that

was pertaining to the Navy.

The reason it was so difficult to crack

was because the Enigma machine

used by the German Navy

had even more permutations

that it put the letters through.

Nobody had actually managed

to break the naval Enigma system

and understand this extra level of complexity.

And that was what Turing did.

He realised that you could

actually use mathematics.

That if you applied maths

to the codes and the ciphers

then you could reduce the space

that had to be searched.

You could then use the Bombe

to search those reduced spaces.

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