The

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

Welcome to the October 2018 episode of the Bletchley Park podcast, over here and over there.

In this It Happened Here episode, we're going to look at the increasing involvement of the USA

in Bletchley Park's co-breaking operations, both over here in the UK and over there in the United States.

This involvement increased to a new level in the autumn of 1943.

But first, let's set the scene of what was happening 75 years ago,

not only at the Government Code in cipher school, but in the wider war.

As usual, we're joined by Bletchley Park's resident historian, Dr David Kenyon.

This is Bletchley Park. It happened here.

David, we're at autumn, 1943. Remind us where we got to with the progress of the war from our last episode.

Well, last time we were talking about the summer of 43 and in particular the invasion of Sicily,

which began in July, and then of course the Battle of Kursk, which was the big Russian offensive on the eastern front.

This time we're looking more at the autumn of 1943 and from the point of view of the Western Allies,

the main event at that point is the invasion of mainland Italy, and that campaign carries on

throughout the rest of 43, and indeed right up until the end of the war, the fighting continues

in Italy. So it becomes a major preoccupation of the British and American armies from this point on for the rest of the war.

And why did the Allies want to invade Italy at this point?

Well, not all of the Allies did.

The Americans, when they started deploying troops in the European theatre against the Germans,

they wanted to crack on and basically invade Germany

by the most direct route. So there was pressure from 1942 to attack in Northern Europe and in France,

...