The importance of the code-breaking operations at Bletchley Park cannot be underestimated.
They produced vital intelligence that played a huge part in swinging the war in the Allies’ favour.
As Winston Churchill said at the time, the Bletchley staff were ‘the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled’.
When scouring the land for the government’s secret Code and Cypher School, which obtained signals intelligence by breaking high-level encrypted enemy communications, the Bletchley Park recruiters left no stone unturned
Intelligence from Bletchley played a vital part in the defeat of the U-boats in the six-year Battle of the Atlantic, British naval triumphs in the Battle of Cape Matapan in 1941 and the Battle of North Cape off the coast of Norway in 1943.
Alan Turing helped win World War II for the Allies
By 1944 British and American commanders knew the location of 58 out of 60 German divisions across the Western Front.
In addition, a great deal of information was decrypted about General Erwin Rommel’s Nazi forces in North Africa.
The German commander enjoyed a great deal of success against the British but with the help of intelligence from the codebreakers General Bernard Montgomery’s British forces were able to drive him back in 1942.
The success of Bletchley’s cryptanalysts was partly due, however, to German operators failing to encrypt messages properly.
Had they not been so sloppy, the outcome of the war could have been very different.
Sinclair McKay Bletchley Park Brainteasers is out now, published by Headline