Monday, June 24, 2002

Station X

I visited my Aunt this weekend and she took me over to Bletchley Park, the code breaking station from WWII. We didn't realise until we got there that they were holding a military weekend and it was rather spooky to be dropped off at the gate to be met by 1940s guards with Tommy guns. If you take the guided tour you are led into the library in the main building just as if you were being briefed about your work on the site. As we walked around we were disracted by small groups of soldiers in the uniforms of all nationalities (It was especially weird to see the group of German soldiers who had established a command post on the main drive and were standing unflinchingly manning their machine guns). Here and there were groups of people in 1940's civilian dress which really made the whole experience quite spooky. However, if you moved over to the main cryptological displays, the grass was occupied by every military group you could imagine from Norman knights via Native Americans to WWI cavalry. At 15:30 hours (I should keep the military theme going) an air-raid siren sounded which even for me was quite spooky. My Aunt who was in London during the war admitted that it was quite scary. We were lucky. It was one of ours or rather three of ours. We were overflown by the aircraft of the Battle of Britain flight all I assume with Merlin engines which gives any flypast a really gutsy feel. They came back twice and then the All-clear sounded. As they vanished behind the trees that surrounded the park, I felt rather strange, as if 60 years had just melted away. I almost expected Commander Denniston and Alan Turing to saunter across the grass deep in discussion.

Anyway, with all that excitement it's easy to forget that the main part of Bletchley Park is the Cryptology Trail which tells the story of how the Enigma and other codes were broken. I actually got my grubby fingers on a real Enigma machine, which is rather surprising in the light of the theft (and return) of a machine from the site. An unexpected bonus at the end was a room full of all sorts of computers from the last 40 years. Every machine I have ever worked on was there and that still only covered about 2% of the stuff there. And just think if Bletchley Park had had even a ZX81 60 years ago, they would have had a huge advantage over the Germans. If you think about how the Enigma machine actually works it is not that complicated; it's just that the function is simple in one direction but complicated in the other. The coding for a program to emulate the Enigma is simple - very simple compared to some of the stuff that I work on here. Indeed, there is this simulation of the Enigma on the web though it seems to use all numbers rather than actual letters which is a might confusing. Next to real Enigma which you are allowed to use at Bletchley, there is an exact simulation on a PC. It is correct down to the electrical symbol on the front. It still doesn't give you the thrill that you get from having your hands on the actual keys of the real thing. Enigma machines work not only as functional equipment but as visually and physically attractive objects as well. The British had machines which were functionally exactly the same as the Enigma but were built with available components.These were used to decrypt messages once the settings had been worked out using the Bombes. They don't look anywhere near as interesting as the genuine article. How about that Sun Tzu? The Art of War indeed. The Enigma machines could be happily displayed alongside all those various art in boxes like "After the Freud Museum". I think I want a photo of an Enigma machine for my found objects cupboard.

I have just had a thought. In the room where they describe the different Enigma machines they should play Elgar.

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