E71 - The Bombe Breakthrough

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 9 April 2018

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

April 2018

A brand new exhibition telling the story of the Bombe machines has opened in Hut 11a, where they were housed during World War Two.

Hundreds of Bombe machines were made and operated at both Bletchley Park and its outstations. This exhibition tells the story of how this incredible technological breakthrough came to be, and the stories of the people whose ingenuity and hard work made them both a reality and a success.

This episode takes you to the official opening of the exhibition, by Bletchley Park’s Royal Patron, HRH The Duke of Kent KG. We met the Veteran Bombe operators Brenda Abrahams and Jean Marshall, Reg Young who built the machines and Margaret Bullen who worked in the Newmanry.

We also hear from the Polish Ambassador to the UK, Arkady Rzegocki, who was an honoured guest at the launch, along with the Polish Deputy Foreign Minister, Bartosz Cichocki and Olga Topol from the Jozef Piłsudski Institute in London. They were there to celebrate the story of the Polish mathematicians whose breathtaking pre-war achievements in breaking Enigma gave the Government Code and Cypher School a huge head start, once war broke out.

Also in this episode, we hear how important this new exhibition is in the ongoing restoration of Bletchley Park, from the staff who created the new exhibition, Chief Executive Iain Standen and Trustee, Sir John Dermot Turing, whose uncle, Alan Turing, along with Gordon Welchman, invented the Bombe.

Image: ©Andy Stagg

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

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.
0:38.2	Welcome to the April 2018 episode of the Bletchley Park podcast, the bomb breakthrough.
0:44.7	We join you from the royal launch of a brand new exhibition, all about the bomb machines in
0:50.0	Hut 11A, where they were during World War II.
0:53.7	These machines were a crucial breakthrough in speeding up the process of breaking enigma.
0:58.8	Messages were extremely time-sensitive,
1:01.3	so it was hugely important to get those daily settings as quickly as possible.
1:06.3	Now, for the first time, the story of what happened before the war is also told,
1:10.7	where the
1:11.0	baton was picked up here at Bletchley Park.
1:20.5	I'm David Kenyon. I'm the research historian here at Bletchley Park.
1:25.0	So, David, very simple question. Why was the bomb so important to
1:29.6	Bletchley Park? Well, the bombs, plural, are important to Bletchley Park because they developed a
1:36.0	system for breaking enigma messages, but reading any one enigma message doesn't really help you.
1:40.6	You need to read hundreds, if not thousands, of enigma messages every day.
1:45.2	And the bombs are absolutely crucial to that because they work through a whole number of
1:50.9	possible enigma settings. They work through something like 17,000 settings in a little bit under
1:54.9	12 minutes. And that's a task that a human being would take days or weeks to do. Also, by the end of the war, they have over 200 of these machines.
2:03.5	So you can imagine how many thousands of times quicker that is than employing people to do the work.
2:09.9	So that mechanisation and upscaling the operation is absolutely fundamental because it allows
2:15.6	you to process thousands and thousands of
	...

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