Free The Secrets of Station X by Michael Smith Page B

reports regularly read simply: Keine besondere Ereignisse , or ‘nothing to report’, said Peter Twinn, one of the leading Bletchley codebreakers.
    â€˜You can guess sometimes how messages are started even though you haven’t seen the German text,’ Twinn said.
    For example you might expect that a message might start ‘ An die Gruppe ’ something or other, just an address. So you make a supposition that it started like this and you might be able to get a very little confirmation that if you wrote An die Gruppe something or other under the message, the one thing that the encoded message couldn’t for instance have is the A of An as A, it could be any one of the twenty-five letters other than A and the second letter couldn’t possibly be N and the sixth letter couldn’t possibly be G of the word Gruppe so if you had quite a long thing you might have far from certain evidence but quite a feeling it might very well be right.
    Cribs could appear at any point in the message. Even Keine besondere Ereignisse was likely to be preceded or followed by some piece of routine information. But the fact that none of the letters in the crib could ever be matched up with the same letter in the encyphered message made it much easier to find out where they fitted.
    â€˜Think of it as a sort of crossword technique of filling in what it might be,’ said Mavis Lever, a member of Knox’s team.
    I don’t want to give the impression that it was all easy. You didhave inspired guesses. But then you would also have to spend a lot of time, sometimes you would have to spend the whole night, assuming every position that there could be on the three different wheels. You would have to work at it very, very hard and after you had done it for a few hours you wondered, you know, whether you would see anything when it was before your eyes because you were so snarled up in it. But then of course, the magic moment comes when it really works and there it all is, the Italian, or the German, or whatever it is. It just feels marvellous, absolutely marvellous. I don’t think that there is anything one could compare to it. There is nothing like seeing a code broken. That is really the absolute tops.
    But in Hut 6, the codebreakers would not sit and decypher whole messages. They broke the keys and once they had done that left it to other less qualified staff to decypher the actual message. ‘When the codebreakers had broken the code they wouldn’t sit down themselves and painstakingly decode 500 messages,’ said Peter Twinn. ‘I’ve never myself personally decoded a message from start to finish. By the time you’ve done the first twenty letters and it was obviously speaking perfectly sensible German for people like me that was the end of our interest.’
    Diana Russell Clarke was one of a group of young women in the Hut 6 Machine Room, decyphering the messages. ‘The cryptographers would work out the actual settings for the machines for the day,’ she said.
    We had these Type-X machines, like typewriters but much bigger. They had three wheels, I think on the left-hand side, all of which had different positions on them. When they got the setting, we were to set them up on our machines. We would have a piece of paper in front of us with what had come over the wireless. We would type it into the machine and hopefully what we typed would come out in German.
    The decyphered message then had to be distributed in some way that made it clear the information was important and was authoritative while at the same time preserving the security of the source. It could not be revealed that the British were breaking Enigma. A new section was formed in Hut 3, next door to Hut 6, in what had previously been the Army section, in order to report the material down the line. The section was made up of just three men. It was headed by Commander Malcolm Saunders RN, even though Hut 6 only dealt with German