Michael Loewe - Bletchley Park Code Breaker 1942-45
Duration: 1 hour 28 mins
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| Description: | Michael Loewe relates his personal experience of work at Bletchley Park during WW2. The high-level intelligence produced at Bletchley Park, codenamed Ultra, provided crucial assistance to the Allied war effort. Sir Harry Hinsley, a Bletchley veteran and the official historian of British Intelligence during the Second World War, believed that Ultra shortened the war by two to four years and that the outcome of the war would have been uncertain without it. |
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| Created: | 2013-02-14 16:16 | ||
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| Collection: | Clare Hall Colloquium | ||
| Publisher: | Clare Hall | ||
| Copyright: | Michael Loewe - Clare Hall | ||
| Language: | eng (English) | ||
| Keywords: | Bletchley Park; codebreaking; WW2; | ||
| Credits: |
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| Abstract: | Michael Loewe was recruited as a code breaker while still an undergraduate at Oxford. He writes:
‘We were a mixed bag: highly distinguished scholars and mathematicians; senior officers of the armed services; eccentrics; wise men and fools; veterans, long experienced in ‘the game’; or, as some of us, undergraduates torn away from the dreaming spires of Oxford or the fens of East Anglia. Codes and ciphers varied in their complexity. There were the simple systems used solely to deny information to lower ranks in the German, Italian or Japanese forces. There were the highly refined versions of the commercially available ‘Enigma’ machine and its successors, used by commanders in the field, captains of submarines or naval attachés. In some cases, once the key to reading a message was found or broken, it could be read in its entirety; but for some systems the work was never complete and did not allow more than a partial reading, perhaps with the key word (the name of a place or a ship) undecipherable. Codes and ciphers were broken by exploiting basic information, such as the behaviour of units of a language or predicting parts of the content of a message. Those struggling with their wits at the Park blessed the well worn habits, the careless errors or the laziness of the cipher clerks! But a basic characteristic of the Enigma machine itself provided the way in. Occasionally the British services themselves helped, e.g. by a specially planned military operation designed to capture documents, or by laying a minefield at sea to provide a reaction by signal.’ |
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