E56 - Enter Japan

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 9 March 2017

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

March 2017

This month’s It Happened Here story is a truly global one. It’s about what happened when the war was no longer just in Europe.

In December 1941, Japan entered World War Two. This meant intelligence gathering and processing became a far bigger and more complex task, which brought about the need for a significant expansion of the top secret operation at Bletchley Park.

We'll hear from two of the women who worked on Japanese codes at Bletchley Park, Betty Webb and Mary Every, who had never met until they were interviewed together for a Japanese newspaper. We look back at this seismic change with Bletchley Park's Research Historian, Dr David Kenyon. As well as all that, Podcast Producer, Mark Cotton, was allowed privileged access to the Bletchley Park Archive to look at flash cards used to help hapless Codebreakers learn Japanese in double quick time.

Also this month, we bring you a sneak preview of an exciting new exhibition opening soon at Bletchley Park, Off Duty. Although few official records remain of what people did in their spare time, this exhibition will use stories pieced together from letters, diaries and surviving wartime documents from Bletchley Park. Off Duty will feature a number of Veterans’ memories gathered by the Oral History Project, which help us understand what it was like, in their own words.

Image: ©Bletchley Park Trust 2017

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #Enigma, #WW2, #Veteran, #History

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The From the home of the co-breakers and the birthplace of modern computing, this is the Bletchley Park podcast.
0:38.3	Welcome to the March 2017 episode of the Bletchley Park podcast, Enter Japan.
0:44.4	This month, we tell the story of how the code-breaking operation nestled in the Buckinghamshire countryside grew exponentially once Japan entered World War II.
0:53.6	People who'd been diligently digging away at coded
0:55.9	messages in German and Italian had to turn their hand to a whole new language and were sent on a
1:01.6	startlingly short Japanese language course in nearby Bedford. They had to hope it would be enough.
1:08.4	We'll hear from two women who worked on Japanese codes doing very different jobs. One learned
1:13.7	the language while the other had to use her mastery of English to disguise the source of the
1:18.3	stolen messages. They'd never met until they were interviewed together for a Japanese newspaper.
1:24.3	But first, the next new exhibition to open titled Off- Off Duty, High Spirits in Low Times,
1:29.7	will explore what happened outside of the grueling shifts the thousands of workers did day and night.
1:35.8	Wartime work at the Government Code in Cipher School was stressful and tiring,
1:39.9	but the authorities understood it was important to keep staff happy and healthy.
1:44.9	I had to wander through the exhibition space with the exhibitions manager, Erica Monroe.
1:56.0	We're in one of the grander rooms at Bletchley Park in the iconic Victorian mansion as we like to call it.
2:01.6	This is a wood-panelled parquet floor room with a grand ceiling in gold and white sort of roses and
2:08.5	coving and beams. It's very fancy. Erica, what happened in here during World War II?
2:14.7	This room, beautiful as it is, was used for a variety of purposes during the war
2:18.6	and quite different ones as well. So from the start of the war, teleprinter machines were based in
2:23.7	here, noisy racket of a sound where communications were coming into the park. As you can hear,
2:29.8	this is actually quite an echo room. If I tap my foot, it sort of booms out. Can you imagine noisy machines in here?
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Bletchley Park, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Bletchley Park and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.