Bletchley Park’s contribution to WW2 'over-rated'
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
I think it's best thinking about it in the same terms as air and sea power. It's another domain of conflict that supports the action on the ground, and in fact in all the other domains of conflict. It can make a huge, even essential contribution, but none of them is decisive on it's own.
The point about GCHQ is interesting and I'd not thought about their importance to the UK in quite those terms but it does make sense. Our armed forces punch well above their weight, but our primary asset is actually our relationship with the USA, and our value to the USA may well be primarily in the Intelligence arena.
So they always had to do things like fake a 'random spotting plane' etc and sometimes even letting attacks happen. So there's always a limit to what you can do with this kind of information to protect its existence in the future.
In WW2 there actually were times where German analysts were getting suspicious as to why the allies were so lucky. But their concerns were trumped by the leadership's enormous confidence in the Enigma.
By the way, the Germans were reading lots of the allies' cyphers too.
Another example is their agents/spies; most modern accounts suggest that the British captured or turned all of the spies sent into the country - and ran a highly successful counter agent network (the double cross system[1]). Who knows if that is true - what is certain is that the German Abwher were highly confident in their spies and ate up the misinformation.
Hitler was hugely impressed with the agent network... ...as enigma decrypts showed.
The British took over, and achieved huge things on their own too (while also excluding the Polish cryptographers, now UK-based, from the project), very possibly doing a lot more than the Poles ever did. But I see that even when saying Bletchley Park was 'over-rated', even then they can't give credit where it's due.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma#Po...
But equally the story of Bletchley is one industrial scale, not just essentially what I would consider a prove of concept.
But lets be honest, about every single thing in WW2 there is nationalist 'No I did it first' argument between all the nations.
I understand and respect national myth-building, equally I feel credit, in popular literature, is under-attributed.
Not that I've ever noticed. I don't think I learned until I was 17 or 18 that there were non-British pilots involved on the British side. And I live in England! We should know!
I'm glad the article isn't quite as blunt as the headline suggests. If GCHQ are saying that public perception of Bletchley's role is overrated... well, they're entirely correct about that. But if you actually go to Bletchley Park they're quite clear about the role of Polish intelligence in breaking the Enigma machine.
It is just the mainstream media never report it, for all sort of reasons. It is like Thomas Edison invented the Light bulb. Everything gets dumped down to easily understandable pieces for public consumption.
Codetalkers are remembered not out of respect but because it's a rare neat trick (and it feeds into American Exceptionalism in a fascinating way.)
Presumably the BNP didn't know about the multi-national bit.
You might as well say not enough credit goes to Tommy Flowers, a man I have always admired for his ground-breaking work building Colossus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers
The popular imagination is not renowned for its grasp of detail, but the histories give due credit.
I would just say, antagonistic comments like "the Brits barely mention" and "they can't give credit where it's due" is nationalistic nonsense which has no place here.
Well that is the class system, Tommy was working-class whereas Alan Turing was a posh boy who went to boarding school and Cambridge. So of course he was airbrushed out.
It is an empirical observation. So not sure is expressing "nationalistic nonsense".
There might be some responsibility that the Russians share for the outbreak of WWII, but really, this was a war of Hitler's own design.
https://www.feldgrau.com/WW2-German-Military-Soviet-Union/
https://www.historynet.com/devils-bargain-germany-and-russia...
https://warontherocks.com/2016/06/sowing-the-wind-the-first-...
Under what government?
Exactly, it's a real shame, Russia had the biggest sacrifices and the West just pats his own back.
Another factor is; a lot of senior (and sometimes non-senior) officers were comissioned after the war to write memoirs and histories - these were at best personal views and at worst outright biased. Because of secrecy (which the cold war didn't help remove) these were often the only reference material for 20th century historians.
A great example is a lot of the work on deception during WW2 (one of my pet subjects). Early works were heavily redacted and biased, and later seemingly scholarly works by real historians have since been shown to be simply parroting a lot of that misinformation. It is only in the last 5-10 years as material has been declassified that the truth begins to emerge.
It also colonised half of Europe, gaining huge amounts of territory that would have been totally unthinkable ten years previously.
The post WWII settlement for russia was spectacular.
It's also interesting that the Soviet Union would probably not have been able to put up such a fight without the massive shipments of aid from the US - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Corridor
If you look at the amount of material, technology, and cost the German had to spend on the air war, air defense, u-boat war and fighting on a different continent. This type of fighting doesn't kill as many people but its very important. Without the Western Allied efforts Soviet Union had basically no way to effect German economy at all.
And one of the single most important points that is often ignored is the economic blockade of Germany that started in 1939. This was a massive issue for Germany.
Overall is far, far more then 20% any way you measure it other then casualties.
And that is without even mentioning that literally from the moment the German invasion of the Soviet Union started Britain was sending them important war material and eventually the Soviets received massive amounts from Western allies that massively helped them to actually win the war.
Britain even sent ships full of the most advanced fighter aircraft that were planned for the defense of Singapore, poor choice there Britain.
> People assume Nagasaki and Hiroshima convinced Japan to surrender, but it was actually the (surprise) Russian declaration of war...
This is often claimed but its simply false. Japan hoped the Soviets could help them make a deal and once they declared war, Japan understood that there was no deal to be had. What Soviet joining of the war did was to convince the last few people in the war part that conditional surrender was not possible.
It was the US nukes that convinced them that surrender was inevitable and in response to the nukes the emperor formally asked by the war council to give his opinion.
I'm all for questioning national myths, but many people are simply willing to believe anything as long as it goes against the national myth because they are so sick of hearing.
Edit: And I'm European not American, this is just my study of WW2 history
That is still a huge discussion in Historian Circles and NOT a Fact.
https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/education/008/expertclips/01...
>…The Soviet Union’s declaration of war, on the other hand, fundamentally altered the strategic situation. Adding another great power to the war created insoluble military problems for Japan’s leaders. It might be possible to fight against one great power attacking from one direction, but anyone could see that Japan couldn’t defend against two great powers attacking from two different directions at once.
Trying to call the Soviet Union at the end of WW II, a great power that could attack from a different direction is bizarre.
The few navy vessels that the USSR had that would be useful in an amphibious landing were ones given to it by the USA as part of Project Hula. The Soviet Union was not a threat to Japan at the end of WW II.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hula
Compare that to what the rest of the allies were planning on:
>...Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyūshū, was to begin on "X-Day", which was scheduled for 1 November 1945. The combined Allied naval armada would have been the largest ever assembled, including 42 aircraft carriers, 24 battleships, and 400 destroyers and destroyer escorts. Fourteen U.S. "division-equivalents" (13 divisions and two regimental combat teams)[28] were scheduled to take part in the initial landings.
and if that armada wasn't enough:
>...Ken Nichols, the District Engineer of the Manhattan Engineer District, wrote that at the beginning of August 1945, "[p]lanning for the invasion of the main Japanese home islands had reached its final stages, and if the landings actually took place, we might supply about fifteen atomic bombs to support the troops.
The invasion of Honshu would have been even more devastating:
>…Operation Coronet, the invasion of Honshu at the Kantō Plain south of the capital, was to begin on "Y-Day", which was tentatively scheduled for 1 March 1946.[33] Coronet would have been even larger than Olympic, with up to 40 divisions earmarked for both the initial landing and follow-up.[34] (The Overlord invasion of Normandy, by comparison, deployed 12 divisions in the initial landings.) In the initial stage, the First Army would have invaded at Kujūkuri Beach, on the Bōsō Peninsula, while Eighth Army invaded at Hiratsuka, on Sagami Bay.[35] Later, a follow-up force of up to 12 additional divisions of the Tenth Army and British Commonwealth Corps would be landed as reinforcements.[36] The Allied forces would then have driven north and inland, meeting at Tokyo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall
There is really no comparison.
However, many of those people then didn't actually follow threw with this, as even after Soviet Union joined some in the war council still didn't want to surrender.
What actually changed the situation in the war council was Hirohito coming out with a clear message, and he did not want to see Japan wiped out. Even then, some in the war council were still against surrender but they followed orders from the Emperor.
The people who believe nuclear weapons had nothing to do with the surrender always underestimate or ignore the opinion of the Emperor and simply put it as an 'excuse' rather then his actual opinion. His decision to come out with a clear opinion, against tradition, was not because the Soviets rolled up some Japanese armies in a far away land but rather what was happening to his subjects. That makes way more sense.
If you want to call it an 'excuse' then that fine also, but even so, a war its over then the other side admits its over. The war had been military decided for years, if it took nukes to give them an 'excuse' and allowed the emperor to make a statement then that is still the effect of that weapon.
The millions upon millions of lives that were wasted by russia is a utter tragedy.
> but it was actually the (surprise) Russian declaration of war...
its really not clear cut like that though is it? The timeline really doesn't back this up.
>According to the Russian historian Boris Vadimovich Sokolov, Lend-Lease had a crucial role in winning the war:
>On the whole the following conclusion can be drawn: that without these Western shipments under Lend-Lease the Soviet Union not only would not have been able to win the Great Patriotic War, it would not have been able even to oppose the German invaders, since it could not itself produce sufficient quantities of arms and military equipment or adequate supplies of fuel and ammunition. The Soviet authorities were well aware of this dependency on Lend-Lease. Thus, Stalin told Harry Hopkins [FDR's emissary to Moscow in July 1941] that the U.S.S.R. could not match Germany's might as an occupier of Europe and its resources.
Nikita Khrushchev made the same point in his memoirs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease
(Or for that matter how would the events of WW II have been different without the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact?)
>...People assume Nagasaki and Hiroshima convinced Japan to surrender, but it was actually the (surprise) Russian declaration of war...
The Soviet Union did not have the amphibious capability to invade Hokkaido. Though before the declaration, Japan still had hopes the Soviet Union would help broker a peace agreement. Knowing no one was going to help them negotiate with the allies, the emperor knew they had to surrender and as the emperor said:
>...Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
On the other hand, one could argue that 50% of starting WW II was Russia.
“Nikita Khrushchev, having served as a military commissar and intermediary between Stalin and his generals during the war, addressed directly the significance of Lend-lease aid in his memoirs:
I would like to express my candid opinion about Stalin's views on whether the Red Army and the Soviet Union could have coped with Nazi Germany and survived the war without aid from the United States and Britain. First, I would like to tell about some remarks Stalin made and repeated several times when we were "discussing freely" among ourselves. He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war.”
So that puts a bit of a stain on their efforts. As much as their soldiers fought and died bravely, a modern war without modern equipment is hopeless. That's how they broke through at Stalingrad: they attacked the flanks occupied by Romanians, who also fought and died bravely, but without good equipment, especially anti tank equipment.
So in the end, it was still a joint effort.
> "Intelligence never wins a war on its own," says Prof
> Ferris.
Then says:
> "I don't think Britain could have won the Falklands
> conflict without GCHQ," Prof Ferris told the BBC.
So intelligence gathering is not winning a war single-handed, but it's pretty important? I thought that must British people knew this... Of course the War effort was much larger than a few buildings down in Bletchley.
I think this is just to sell his new book - say something controversial and barely featured in the book, then ride the press:
> The new book - Behind the Enigma - is released on Tuesday
> and is based on access to top secret GCHQ files.
I wonder if its rooted in a distain for Alan Turings sexuality that would lead them to think this kind of marketing ploy is OK? I really cannot think of any other reason right now.
Akin to saying "The degree of racism in the US is over rated and the struggle against poverty was much bigger than that speech by Martin Luther King, buy my book".
The GDP of the british empire was totally astounding, the navy was bigger than any other country.
The british _funded_ the US war effort. it paid for the factories, the tooling etc. Lend lease was basically the british transferring its vast wealth to the USA in exchange for materials.
The myth that the battle of Britain was the last line of defence is laughable. The RAF was the first line. To invade, the germans would have had to have eliminated the RAF, then eliminate the navy (bear in mind that at this point its still twice as big as anyone elses, and that uboats are still not very good at this point)
Not only that they'd have to somehow get across the channel (which given that the germans didn't like standardisation and were nowhere near as mechanised as the french, would have been a challenge)
Plus they'd have to over come the anti air defences.
The _only_ doubt about WWII is whether britian would have signed a peace treaty.
Thats not completely defeated though is it. Thats the BEF stranded on a beach. Sure its a loss of equipment, but its not as much of a loss of man and machine as the nazis lost during the invasion of france They lost something like a third of their _entire_ mechanised army.
Britain was still in possession of India, most of Africa inc Egypt, Hong Kong, Burma, canada and Australia in 1940
The fall of singapore wasn't until 1942. by 1943 the tide had turned, it was a case of when not if the nazis were defeated.
As I said, the only risk was Britain coming to terms with the Nazis.
Germany had a plan to invade (Operation Sea Lion), and by the numbers it would have been a successful invasion. Dads Army would not have been any resistance.
They didnt invade because they thought the RAF was much larger than it actually was, Britain knew they thought this because of Bletchly, and therefore didnt surrender, instead declaring the Battle of Britain won in October 1940, the day or so after they decoded the message saying the invasion was being delayed indefinitely until the Luftwaffe could defeat (the already defeated) RAF.
If anything the role of Bletchly and Alan Turing is still under rated.
agreed
> before that America wouldnt get involved
Kind of apart from they were building vast factories and re-arming at a spectacular rate
> and Britain had no Army,
False. the BEF was around 390k, or 13 divisions. The army at that time was around a million.
Even accounting for losses in evacuation, (around 70k) There was still the Indian armies, the African armies and the various other imperial armies. More concerning was the loss of equipment.
Even so, you seem to forget that the worlds biggest navy owned the channel. (the stuff that was patrolling the north sea wasn't even most of the navy)
Then you forget that the british ports were well mined and defended. (just like the ports in normandy, hence the mulberry temporary ports to ship ammo, fuel and armour in, without which the effort would have failed, like market garden)
> no food
Again no, the blockade was later. Compared to the dutch, Belgians and the germans later on, england had loads of food.
> and no air force.
again, if the UK had no airforce, they wouldn't have had air superiority. Which meant that the german airforce could have dominated the channel and harassed the British navy.
To tackle your point about sealion
Without logistics it would have been very difficult for the germans to establish a beach head. First they would have tried to take a port. Ports that are well defended (they've had 200 years at this point to build defences against the french....)
Second, should they take a port, they have to keep it stocked up with fuel, ammo and arms. All of which is very difficult when you being bombarded from sea, air and land.
d-day only worked because they had complete control of the air, and almost complete control of the sea. Sealion was nowhere near close to any of those.
Its like chess. Once the King/Capital had fallen, the war would have been over, wouldn't matter how many pieces are left on the board.
>Again no, the blockade was later.
Rationing started in January 1940, the German U-boats were successful until Bletchly started cracking their navel codes, and that they managed by someone climbing into a sinking German sub. "Die Glückliche Zeit"
>again, if the UK had no airforce, they wouldn't have had air superiority. Which meant that the german airforce could have dominated the channel and harassed the British navy.
Its a matter of perception, force projection through the use of Radar meant Britain could spread what was left of the RAF in a manner that made the Germans think they were much larger than they were, when truth be told another month or so targeting the RAF instead of cities and they would have had that air superiority.
>Second, should they take a port, they have to keep it stocked up with fuel, ammo and arms.
Not really, they captured Paris in a few days, London would've been quicker. But I doubt it would have come to that, if Britain hadn't known the invasion was cancelled they would most surely have surrendered.
as we all know paris is a well known island.
You try it and see how you get on. unless I'm mistaken the belgians didn't have the world largest navy. The belgians didn't didn't air superiority either.
Go and look at the logistics of invading a hostile coast, but not only holding it, but pushing further in.
The paratroopers would have secured the landing spots well before the beach craft even set sail.
>belgians didn't have the world largest navy. The belgians didn't didn't air superiority either.
They did have an army and ammunition tho, something the UK did not throughout 1940 and beyond.
And they still only held out for 18 days.
I mean they would have learned this eventually when the German stopped trying. They knew that they were winning anyways.
> single decoded message that determined the outcome of the D-day landings
What message?
->what message. Theres a good google talk called the "theory that wouldnt die" by Sharon McGreyne on youtube. It gets talked about in that iirc.
For the U-Boots, there were few enough that one-time pads would be practical, and unbreakable.
There are also ways to set traps to see if your code was broken.
This sounds like some A+ BS. Since when do national intelligence agencies have globally recognised brands?
KGB, Mossad, MI6? All global brands with distinct reputations and images to maintain.
Showing your age there! FSB is the contemporary version.
Indeed, but the KGB brand is so strong it lives on! Most people use it as they would use a brand name like Xerox or Kleenex or Hoover to generically refer to a sinister all knowing Russian spy agency.
Even Gestapo lives on as a word decades after it ceased to exist, and Stasi for that matter. Of course intelligence agencies have brands.
I've also heard of GCHQ as they open sourced CyberChef which I quite like.
Well kept secret
Ever since they had a need to control the narrative about what they're up to. Intelligence agencies need people to think that they're the good guys. That is brand management.
> Brand /brand/ noun: > 1. a type of product manufactured by a particular company under a particular name > 2. an identifying mark burned on livestock or (in former times) criminals or slaves with a branding iron.
Now perhaps Mr Fleming (BTW that's a funny name coincidence) is trying to use the word with a much broader meaning.
GCHQ were only able to break the Argentine encryption because the Dutch gave them very strong hints on how to break it.
And the Argentines had no need to break British encryption as the BBC kept them up to date.
The BBC revealed for example that Argentina’s bombs weren’t detonating on British ships because the fuses were set wrong. And they revealed troop movements too. This is a matter of historical fact.
To avoid the high concentration of British air defences, Argentine pilots were releasing their bombs from very low altitudes, giving the fuses too little time to arm before impact. The BBC reportedly broadcast this information and was severely criticised by the task force Commander, Admiral Woodward, who blamed them for alerting the Argentines to the supposed fault. Interestingly, Colonel H.Jones, commanding the Paras on Falkland, had also accused the BBC of giving information to the enemy when reporting on the capture of Goose Green before it actually happened and had threatened to bring charges of treason against the Board of Governors. Sadly he was killed at Goose Green before he could pursue the charge.
First I could find but this has been extensively written about in books.
"In a debate on the Falklands War on 3 April 1982, Rowlands revealed that the British were reading Argentine diplomatic traffic"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Rowlands,_Baron_Rowlands
Johny Carincross was a spy who passed over raw intercepts decrypted with Tunny to the Soviet Union; so they got the German order of battle and other information in advance of the battle of Kursk; that sounds like a major contribution to winning the war (the spy was confirming information that the British passed on via official channels, however they seem to have put more trust in the reports of their spy). The outcome of the battle of Kursk did make a big difference.
> "Intelligence never wins a war on its own," says Prof Ferris.
Another event where spies/code breakers made a major difference is the battle of Moscow;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sorge#Wartime_intellig...
"Various writers have speculated that the information allowed the release of Siberian divisions for the Battle of Moscow, where the German Army suffered its first strategic defeat in the war. To that end, Sorge's information might have been the most important military intelligence work in World War II. However, Sorge was not the only source of Soviet intelligence about Japan, as Soviet codebreakers had broken the Japanese diplomatic codes and so Moscow knew from signals intelligence that there would be no Japanese attack on the Soviet Union in 1941.[46] "
Let's spend X on a super uber computa password cracker or let's spend X/100 on a bribe to a guy who works there.
https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-ann-linde-and-switzer...
edit: much earlier but connected https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7992651/US-spies-ga...
> "Bletchley is not the war winner that a lot of Brits think it is".
> But he said Bletchley still played an important role.
> "Intelligence never wins a war on its own," says Prof Ferris.
The latter seems to be a trivial statement. Of course: if you know the enemy will launch a 100-megaton bomb at your capital in 2 hours, and all you have at your disposal is light cavalry, you will most likely still not win the war.
I think BBC news has been overrated for some time now.
Yes, Stalin was also given access to some decrypts. Yes, Stalin murdered or imprisoned ~15 million Soviet "citizens" (a majority citizens of invaded neighbors, but plenty of Russians, too, including his own senior officer corps) before the war. Yes, Russia provided a huge share of the resources to build up Germany's armory before the war. Yes, Russia invited Germany to split Poland with it. Yes, in the final two years the Soviets depended on the US for food, fuel, steel, and trucks. Yes, Stalin had been poised to invade Germany when he was surprised and lost the bulk of his own armory at the outset. Yes, a majority of the Soviet troops killed were not Russian. Yes, the naval war was mostly conducted by the US and British Fleets. Yes, the US was busy in the Pacific theater.
Still, the war was mainly a battle to the death between two totalitarian regimes, with the US and Britain harrying at the edges. The Allied bombing, while it killed many, many civilians, utterly failed to stop massive growth of production of tanks and aircraft, right up to the end; that declined only in the final half-year as original German territory was overrun. (Production of pilots failed to keep pace, limiting the aircrafts' value.) It took only a small fraction of German forces to keep the US and Britain fully occupied in Africa, then Italy, and even after D-day. At the end, Stalin had to park and wait months for the Allies to catch up, and spent the time chasing Nazis out of the south.
"No Simple Victory", by Norman Davies using material exposed after the Soviet collapse, is an eye-opening resource.