The

The From the home of the codebreakers and the birthplace of modern computing, this is the Bletchley Park podcast.

Welcome to the June 2025 episode of the Bletchley Park podcast.

Dyer Straits

In May 1945, the Royal Navy fought its last surface action against the Japanese fleet, sinking the cruiser

Haguro in the Malacca Strait off the coast of Malaya.

The successful location of the enemy ship was the result of Signals Intelligence.

It was also a product of the sophisticated network built up by Britain, the USA and Australia after 1943 to intercept, decipher and distribute

intelligence around the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

In this It Happened Here episode, we're joined by Bletchley Park's research historian Dr David

Kenyon to discuss the role of the codebreakers in this milestone on the road

to ultimate victory over Japan in 1945.

This episode features veteran Edward Simpson from our oral history archive.

Our thanks go to Dr. Ben Thompson and Owen Mugan for voicing our historical documents. This is Bletchley Park.

It happened here.

David, tell us how had code breaking against the Japanese evolved by 1945?

We've talked in the podcast before about code breaking in the early part of the war against the Japanese in 1942 with the invasion of Singapore and then the Battle of Midway which was a turning

point in the war. From that point on the co-breaking relationship between the UK and the

USA evolves towards getting ever better but it's quite a bumpy road to get there

and there are a series of different agreement that they sort of get

together and fall out, get together and fall out several times. The most significant agreement

that we've talked about previously is a thing called the Broussa Agreement, the Britain-USA

...