Ultra - Station X - Bletchley Park

Prior to the start of the Second World War, the British Government began a program of acquiring and expanding its intelligence, counter-intelligence, and espionage operational sites throughout England. The Government Code and Cypher School, part of MI6, was the recipient of the tenth of a large number of sites acquired for wartime operations. This site was Bletchley Park. In May 1938, the 300-acre estate situated approximately eighty kilometres north-west of London, was acquired for the team of code breakers, mathematicians, technical experts, and scientists. This team and the activities they performed would become known simply as “Ultra”. Station X, the code name for Bletchley Park, became operational in August, 1939.

Bletchley Park, commanded by the likes of Alastair Denniston, Nigel de Grey, Edward Travis, and Clive Leohnis, grew to become one of the greatest organizations in cyber intelligence history. Code breakers and mathematicians like Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman, Dilly Knox, and Frank Birch, with the assistance of the Polish and Jewish cryptanalysts of Station X, led in the creation of the “Bombe”, a vital crypto-machine used in the deciphering of the Enigma Cypher, the mainstay of the German military and intelligence organizations during the war.

As the size of the operational staff and types of operations of Ultra increased, so did the facilities at Station X with the addition of large huts that were constructed on the grounds to house the expanded Ultra team. So secretive was Station X that even these huts were known only by a numbering system. The code breakers in these huts worked in pairs and were assigned specific enemy area codes to break. An example of this is that Hut 8, working with Hut 4, concentrated on messages from the German Navy and German Naval Intelligence. Other pairs of huts concentrated on the German, Italian, and Japanese military and political forces.

A network of radio listening stations, known as ‘Y’ Stations, in Britain and in other friendly overseas countries, were set up to intercept enemy radio traffic and then feed it to the code breakers at Station X. There the cryptanalysts, working with early computing machines like the “Bombe” and “Colossus”, decoded intercepted enemy messages. The men and women at Station X waged daily cyber battles against the enemy and their equipment, the “Enigma” and “Lorenz” machines.

The contribution of Ultra certainly lead to the Allied victory in the Second World War. Many decisive battles were greatly influenced by the Ultra team, such as the Battle of Britain, the Battle of Matapan (the defeat of the Italian fleet in the Mediterranean Sea), the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck, the defeat of U-boat submarine forces in the Battle of the North Atlantic, the defeat of the Afrika Corps in North Africa, the decisive sea battles of the Coral Sea and Midway in the Pacific campaign, Operation Husky (the invasion of Sicily and Italy), and Operation Overlord (the D-Day invasion of Europe - the beginning of the end), to name a few.

At the end of the war, Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower stated that “the contributions of Ultra were decisive to the Allied victory." Sir Harry Hinsley, the official historian of the British Intelligence services in World War II, made a similar assessment about Ultra when he said “it shortened the war by not less than two years and probably by four years," and Sir Winston Churchill’s communication to King George VI stated “it was thanks to Ultra that we won the war.”

But in the end, Churchill foresaw and feared the new menace on the horizon - the Communist threat - and therefore had much of the documentation and materials regarding the activities of Ultra – Station X were destroyed for fear of the information falling into communist hands. Therefore, the full story and contributions of the Ultra team to the Allied victory over the Axis powers will most likely never truly be known.