Codebreakers of World War II By. Kelsey Stiverson P.2 The Codebreakers of World War II were a vital part of the defeat of Hitler and the Nazis during the war. For the most part all code breaking was done at Bletchley Park located in England. Here, they were able to crack German Enigma machines codes. These machines allowed someone to put in a message and then it scrambled it to make the message, unintelligible. When the receiver went to unscramble these they had to know the exact settings of the wheels on the machine. The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park consisted mostly of young women. These women were teenage military personnel, crossword geniuses, and countless 18 year-olds taken from quiet home towns. Before they started working they had to sign the Official Secrets Act. From that moment on they lived a double life Ruth Bourne once said. Bourne described her live(s) by using the terms A-Block and B-Block. A-Block is the life where you discussed boyfriends, the best place to shop, and ate and B-Block is your work life where you worked in silence unless you could be heard above Bombe machines, and the part of your life your parents never knew. At Bletchley Park a simple yet effective system was crucial in the defeat of Hitler. Here women deciphered encoded German information sent to Nazi generals. Mathematicians and intelligence experts along with the help of early computers began the complex and urgent task of cracking the codes. Their first success was in the 1940 Norwegian campaign. Then, in 1941 their …show more content…
The Polish were able to reconstruct an Engine machine and shared this information with British. The British took this information and started the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley