Bletchley code breaker Betty Webb dies aged 101
bbc.com
bbc.com
We have almost lost the chance now to hear personal testimony of WWII. I've met several Battle of Britain pilots too, but the last died in Dublin recently:
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2025/0318/1502596-hemingway/
I do gather that some parents are rather sanctimonious and scandalized about their children learning anything but the most sanitized version of history. That seems so far to be the most presence in banning anything. Witness Harry Potter being listed as one of the most challenged book at the height of popularity.
History as it was taught in my grade school years certainly wasn't whitewashed and they are rather explicit about some of the horror. Moreover, the problem is that history wasn't taught well and made 'boring'.
This. 100% this. At school we got an extremely biased view of history, but even then it was taught soooo badly.
History (regardless of viewpoint, correctness, or accuracy) could be an enormously exciting topic. It's full of things that would appeal to any child when presented well.
But school history curricula for me was full of meaningless names, dates, actions - endlessly repeated with no enthusiasm at all.
By way of example, "the founding fathers were Christians" is a classic oft-repeated phrase I continually hear, to which I love talking about Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, all of whom were clearly agnostic (at the time, they were "Deist" which was essentially equivalent to "agnostic" nowadays). Thomas Paine's phenomenal book "The Age of Reason" was utterly mind-blowing and extremely radical at the time, receiving widespread banning and igniting firestorms in the culture. It's still a great read today! Especially fascinating when you consider this was many decades before Darwin would provide one of the most important scientific explanations that massively shrunk the area for God of the Gaps.
Some examples of the discomfort: to many white people now the history of slavery and racism is deeply uncomfortable. It's not even difficult to find hard evidence of such as many racist attitudes persisted well into the era of recordings and have been immortalized in movies and TV shows. I suspect a big part of that is the recency effect since we're still living with many follow-on effects of the practice even if we don't practice it actively anymore.
Much less talked about though is the history of racism and slavery among nearly all people at different times. For example a large majority of the black slaves that were sold to Europeans (including the Europeans living in the Americas) were originally enslaved by other black Africans and sold to the slave traders. Not all the slaves were sold either. To be fair the Spanish (at least in first half of the new world exploration) didn't have much of a problem doing the enslaving themselves as they routinely enslaved native people's after conquering them. We can also go back millenia and see the same behavior. Greeks, Romans, Persians, pretty much everybody had their slaves for as far back as history is recorded (and surely much, much farther).
We like to think we are enlightened nowadays, but I think history really demonstrates that as humans we are almost universally inclined toward enslaving other humans. Hopefully we're irreversibly past that now and well on our path to the Star Trek society, but even if that is the case it doesn't make the history any more comfortable.
Don’t worry, there will be another one along any minute now.
Definitely controversial academically, but the idea of a generational cycle has been considered.
I would however like to point out that people are not only victims of society, and that they have a responsibility as a critical member of society and an elector. Historic awareness, understanding of economics, law and geopolitics.
To give an example: Mr Trump was not just votes into office, but RE voted into office. His plan was public for all to see.
More than 50% of American voters voted for him. I am having a difficult time to believe that 50%+ of the US are economically oppressed that had no choice but to vote for Trump.
Inequalities exist but they do not justify everything, neither do they explain everything.
Or are we saying now that 50%+ of the US has “no prospects or no hope”? Really?
Anyone thinking that is sorely mistaken about how good we have it, and I’m afraid is soon to find out. Destroying the apparatus of state and destabilizing international relations is not going to be good, certainly for those “with no prospects or hope”.
And that was not difficult to foresee.
I'm a little confused - if you agree, then why did you mention inequality in the first place?
As I said in my original comment, I think that is hyperbole at best, and deluded victim-thinking at worst. But I do consider that there is an issue of inequality.
So I softened the original statement, and then showed that it still did not explain or even justify the massive vote for Trump ("Inequalities exist but they do not justify everything, neither do they explain everything")
In other words, I interpreted the original statement generously and replied to the best possible version of the argument. That is one of the unwritten house rules, and it is what keeps HN a nice place.
I think it's important to be accurate with this stuff. 49.8% of voters voted for Trump, approximately 32% of eligible voters voted for him, and roughly 23% of the population voted for him. Don't discount apathy, disillusionment, and disenfranchisement in all this.
WWII had very little to do with America in the sense that the American involvement was only a reaction to others messing things up.
While the other two are purely American.
I am just pointing out that you can make up any list in hindsight and make it look like Nostradamus prophecies.
Where is french revolution or the great war in that list?
Yes, it was. America was setting up the scene for the pacific war by raising customs and tariffs on Japanese imports with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (1930). The Japanese were just democratizing when the US decided to kill their economy. Thus, the Japanese had one of two choices - take needed resources they purchased before by force, or accept a massive decline in standard of living. They decided to take the first route. Attacked the Chinese, and when the US started sanctioning it, eventually they bombed Pearl Harbour.
And don't forget how the Nazis were basically funded out of American pockets.
Just because the first shot was not fired by an American does not mean they were not the cause.
My objection was just about bringing numerology into the discussion.
The myriad of trash google results on the topic aren’t even close to 1 in 4. Even an Israeli tabloid says it’s 1 in 10.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/12/07/one-in-fi...
He was 99 and said he just wanted to live to be 100, but sadly he didn't make it.
I remember my late grandmother telling us they had made mittens for my great uncle, but he died in that battle before the mittens arrived.
Crazy to think I passed up my chance to have a cup of coffee with a man who might have fought beside my great uncle.
Besides being very interesting it felt odd to hear all this in such an out of the way place. Well after the war he collaborated on some books with a professor teaching at the college there.
And they didn't.
Like the Zanryu Nipponhei [0], they were loyal to the last. Even my own father kept things about his airforce days way too tightly wrapped up long, long after the official secrets sell-by date. I have some admiration for this, but in the end it's a loss to historical record.
That's fantastic! RIP.
some tasks performed include registering messages on little cards, which Webb believes totaled 10,000 a day in the whole park, and organizing the cards into shoeboxes according to a strict order so they could be retrieved efficiently when called for.
I suppose times have changed.
> In Block F, she worked on intercepted Japanese messages, something she excelled at so much that she was later sent to Washington to support the American war effort.[6]
Whether something is the first computer is - inevitably - a definitional argument, but TNMOC has several candidates (though not all of them) including (a modern reproduction of, the original was destroyed as a secret) Colossus which is famous because of its involvement in the war.
Bletchley Park is also still an actual stateley home, all the war stuff was built on somebody's grounds - there's a good chance you either don't care about stately homes or you're intending to visit a more interesting one (or indeed one of the Royal Palaces), in which case no need to care, but that's a third distinct thing on the same site.
[Edited to make clear there is no original Colossus, we destroyed it because it was a secret]
Operationally independent, although they have been considerate enough to synchronise their opening hours.
If you're interested in London Buses however, I'd actually recommend the (also unrelated) London Transport Museum, as this one is located in the tourist heart of central London in Covent Garden.
( NB: Brooklands is itself a great museum, but more for the aviation history )
Really shows the extent and impact of this knowledge - they virtually sat at the same table as the Nazi high command.
The title includes ‘Six’ not ‘6’ (not that it should trip up a search algo, but you never know)
At least WWII, unlike those preceding it, has a vast well of literature to draw those lessons from. The trouble, however, is not just getting younger people to sit, read and analyze it, but also to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, with all the propaganda and misinformation to be had these days about the events of WWII, the Holocaust, Hiroshima/Nagasaki and so many other things that would make this list exceptionally long.
Books, are not the same as having lived it, of course. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it best in The Gulag Archipelago.
“If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people's bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: 'It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.'
Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.”
I'm curious as to what sort of propaganda or misinformation you're referring to. I'm in Europe and I haven't seen much of it, but maybe it's different in the US.
Not to mention the US literally rounded up citizens who had Japanese ancestors and sent them to concentration camps. They apologised, decades later, but note these aren't enemy civilians who happen to be in the wrong place, they're your own citizens who merely look similar to the enemy.
Because the Americans sent babies to these camps for the crime of having ancestors born in Japan there will be a decade or so of people who have memories (albeit fuzzy ones) of this actually fucking happening to them after the people who fought WWII are dead.
† Grave of the Fireflies is set in Kobe, which was also fire bombed.
[Edited to specify that Grave is in Kobe]
Worse, an entire generation of young men especially are being told that WWII wasn't what it really was. You see the results of this in the US but also eastern Germany, Poland, Hungary, across Europe where right wing parties are on the rise substantially supported by these young men.
It's a really fascinating perspective on WWII and how crap Monty was at being a general; he was reading the Germans' messages and still couldn't defeat Rommel. Only when the Med fleet intercepted and sank all his resupply ships did Rommel's crew finally lose.
The Germans' overconfidence in the Enigma machine was a big part of their downfall, especially once America's resources came to bear. Of course, that's what they deserved for having a leader speedballing meth and morphine.
All that said, the interesting historical twist is that no WWII history before the 1970s is accurate because all the Bletchly work was completely classified until one of their officers wrote a book about it. They cover that in the documentaries, too. There were men and women who had never told their families about what they did during the war, until the news finally broke. One mentioned how her daughter wondered why her mom knew that 'M' was the 13th letter.
He did defeat Rommel though, didn't he?
The Germans only feared one Allied General, and it wasn't Monty (it was Patton).
If fact, Patton being relieved of command for slapping his soldier allowed him to serve as the uber-decoy in Great Britain to distract the Germans from being ready for a Normandy landing. God works in mysterious ways, indeed.
The Germans thought Patton's sacking for slapping a soldier was a ruse; that's how much esteem they had for him.