E60 - PQ17 Disaster in the Arctic

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 9 July 2017

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

July 2017

What happened when the Admiralty didn’t believe the intelligence coming from Bletchley Park? The answer; huge losses at sea. But this is not to suggest blame - hindsight can be cruel.

The Tirpitz was a much-feared German battleship - it was the biggest they had built. Bletchley Park provided intelligence under the banner of Ultra - the highest level of secrecy - that it had not yet set sail. But this reassuring news was not taken on board by the naval powers that be. Convoy PQ17 was scattered, in the mistaken belief that the Tirpitz was on the move, and resulting in huge losses. We look back at this moment in World War Two, when intelligence was not enough, with help from Bletchley Park’s research historian, Dr David Kenyon.

Image: ©Bletchley Park Trust 2017

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #Enigma, #WW2, #PQ17, #History

Transcript

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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.
0:45.3	Welcome to the July 2017 episode of the Bletchley Park podcast, PQ17, disaster in the Arctic.
0:50.2	This month we'll look into what happened when the Admiralty didn't believe the intelligence coming from Bletchley Park. The Turpitz was a much-feared German battleship. It was the biggest
0:56.0	they'd ever built. Intelligence that it hadn't set sail yet came from Bletchley Park but wasn't
1:01.8	believed. So convoy PQ17 was scattered, resulting in huge losses. In the summer of 1942,
1:10.0	Bletchley Park was reading the German Navy's messages,
1:13.3	but the wrong decision was still taken by the Admiralty. How did it go so wrong? Let's find out
1:19.2	more from Bletchley Park.
1:39.9	It happened here.
1:45.2	I would say let's start at the beginning, but I want to start before the beginning.
1:48.8	So I want to go back further than when PQ17 happened and there were those terrible losses.
1:54.4	I want to look at firstly how intelligence that was coming out of Bletchley Park was being perceived,
1:59.8	perhaps in the period leading up to the summer of 1942?
2:03.4	Well, the relationship between the Admiralty and Bletchley Park developed much more slowly
2:06.8	than it did, perhaps, with other departments, because it took Bletchley longer to read
2:11.6	naval traffic in any significant quantity, because it was much more complex.
2:15.9	So it wasn't until late 1940 that they were making significant progress with decrypting enigma,
2:23.5	but Bletchley all the way along was collecting German messages, even though they couldn't read them,
2:28.6	and doing a lot of traffic analysis and producing a lot of useful intelligence from
2:32.4	just who was communicating with who and
2:35.4	timings and things like that.
	...

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