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Despite the Polish cracking Enigma in 1932, the outbreak of war meant the code changed at least once a day, giving 159 million million million possible settings to choose from, and so the breakthrough made at Bletchley was remarkable. To hide this information, reports were given the appearance of coming from an MI6 spy, codename Boniface, with a network of imaginary agents inside Germany.
John Jeffreys, Dilly Knox, Peter Twinn and Alan Turing – who was given a posthumous pardon from The Queen last year for the crime of homosexuality in 1952 – all worked on Bletchley’s code-breaking as brilliant mathematicians. Turing and Gordon Welchman created ‘The Bombe’: a complex electro-mechanical device, which sped up the eradication of the settings which would not work from those millions.
Special Communication Units were set up to feed the Bletchley Park intelligence to commanders in the field, first in France in 1940 and then North Africa and elsewhere from 1941. 1942 brought difficulties when the German Navy’s introduced a more complex Enigma cipher, but by the end of the year, this was also decoded. The codebreakers worked around the clock to intercept and decipher the intelligence they received.

The Duchess was shown the new interactive exhibitions at the park, such as the cyber security exhibition where she tried to crack a Morse Code message. Catherine also witnessed demonstrations of the sorts of decryption work that took place at Bletchley, much like what the public will see after the opening.
‘Station X’ was, of course, kept top-secret, and worked with the ‘Y’ Service, who monitored radio messages from the enemy; these listeners included civilians, but also Wrens, WAAF and the ATS, logging messages and trying to build a picture of the enemy’s plans; 80% of those who worked to help crack Enigma were women. ‘The Bletchley Circle’ was an ITV drama series centring around a group of women who had worked at Bletchley Park, and used their skills from the war to help solve murders.
The day was rounded off with Kate listening to speeches made to mark the reopening of Bletchley, and the planting of a tree to commemorate the completion of the work.
Pictures from @QueenVicMirror, Royal correspondent for The Daily Mirror, RossM, and Andrew and Annemarie via photopin cc]]>