E156 - Italian Tiebreaker

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2023

⏱️ 76 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

October 2023

The fight up the Italian peninsula involved some of the most arduous battles of the war for Allied soldiers, but they were being supported at every stage by intelligence from Bletchley Park.

Ultra intelligence helped inform Allied strategy in Italy, kept commanders constantly up-to-date about enemy forces, and sometimes proved the difference between victory and defeat on the battlefield.

In this ‘It Happened Here’ episode, Bletchley Park’s Research Officer Dr Thomas Cheetham will tell us how this difficult and inconclusive campaign can also be seen as one of the most successful of the war for Bletchley Park.

Many thanks to Dr Ben Thomson for voicing our archival documents.

Very special thanks to Lowden Jim for his recording of The D-Day Dodgers. His work can be found at www.youtube.com/Lowdenjim

Image: ©Bletchley Park Trust 2023

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2, #Enigma,

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The From the home of the codebreakers and the birthplace of modern computing, this is the Bletchley Park podcast.
0:39.2	Welcome to the October 2023 episode of the Bletchley Park podcast, Italian tiebreaker.
0:46.5	The fight up the Italian peninsula involved some of the most arduous battles of the war for Allied soldiers,
0:53.0	but they were being supported at every
0:54.5	stage by intelligence from Bletchley Park. Ultra intelligence helped inform Allied strategy
1:00.8	in Italy, kept commanders constantly up to date about enemy forces, and sometimes proved the
1:06.9	difference between victory and defeat on the battlefield.
1:12.4	In this It Happened Here episode,
1:15.2	Bletchley Park's research officer, Dr Thomas Cheatham,
1:18.3	will tell us how this difficult and inconclusive campaign can also be seen as one of the most successful of the war for Bletchley Park.
1:24.3	Special thanks, as ever, to Dr. Ben Thompson for voicing our archival documents.
1:42.6	This is Bletchley Park.
1:46.6	It happened here.
1:51.2	In this It Happened Here episode, we're going back just over 80 years
1:55.8	and we're returning to the Mediterranean Theatre of War.
1:59.7	Following on from episode 153, where we looked at the Sicilian campaign, we're now going to look at what came after that.
2:09.2	And this is something you wanted to do in depth for a while, isn't it, Tom?
2:13.3	Yeah, I'm quite interested in the Italian campaign from the point of view of intelligence.
2:18.4	It's a really interesting case study in how Bletchley Park supports the war in many different
2:24.0	ways, as I hope I'm going to make clear.
2:27.0	And can you just give us a bit of background, just remind people where we are at this point
	...

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