Bletchley Park
Constance Martin
Online Journal Articles
A Chaos That Worked: Organizing Bletchley Park
Drawing on a major historical study of the organization of Bletchley Park, the site of British and Allied codebreaking during the Second World War, this article shows that it was characterized by ‘chaos’ in terms of a lack of clear formal structures. It is argued that the success of Bletchley Park can be explained in terms of various factors including shared social capital of some employees, organizational hybridity, centralization, knowledge-sharing and organizational porosity. These factors may be understood to be the reasons why Bletchley Park was successful despite its organizational chaos, but the paper seeks to advance the stronger claim that it was successful because of its organizational chaos.
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Christopher, G., & Andrew, S. (January 1, 2010). A Chaos that Worked: Organizing Bletchley Park. Public Policy and Administration, 25, 1, 47-66.
50 Years After Breaking the Codes: Interviews with Two of the Bletchley Park Scientists
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The work conducted at Bletchley Park during World War II led not only to the breaking of the codes of the opposing military forces but also to the postwar development of computing systems. While there is little evidence of the direct evolution of general-purpose computers from the machines created at Bletchley Park, the experiences of the participants led to two of the first three major computer projects in Great Britain. Two of the participants in the code-breaking activities and in the postwar computer development, I.J. Good and Donald Michie, came together on the fiftieth anniversary of their earlier association to reminisce about those times, the people they met, and the achievements of the BP community. The article documents portions of those discussions.
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J. A. N. Lee and G. Holtzman, "50 years after breaking the codes: interviews with two of the Bletchley Park scientists," in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 32-43, Spring 1995.
An Organizational Culture of Secrecy: the Case of Bletchley Park
This article examines the structure of Bletchley Park, the British codebreaking center in the Second World War, from an organizational behavior perspective to analyze the issue of secrecy. Through detailed empirical examples, Grey, a professor at Cambridge University, identifies the key processes of organizational secrecy as ignorance, silence, and surveillance. These organizational processes, both positive and negative, were instrumental in the way work was conducted at Bletchley Park. This article is an interesting contrast to the one above that focuses on the chaotic lack of structure.
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Grey, C. (January 02, 2014). An organizational culture of secrecy: the case of Bletchley Park. Management & Organizational History, 9, 1, 107-122.
Websites
Bletchley Park
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Bletchley Park is a 19th-century mansion and estate in Buckinghamshire, Great Britain that became the principal center of Allied code-breaking during World War II. The Bletchley Park Trust was formed in 1991 to save large portions of the site from developers and turned the estate into a museum, open daily to visitors. It houses interpretive exhibits and rebuilt huts as they would have appeared during their wartime operations, and is visited by thousands of school children and adults annually. The website is a treasure trove, providing the history of Bletchley Park, depicting the story of the work done by the codebreakers, and exploring the different types of machines and codes that were used during World War II.
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Bletchley Park Trust. (n.d.). Retrieved April 22, 2020, from https://bletchleypark.org.uk/
M15 in World War II
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The United Kingdom’s domestic counter-intelligence and security agency, also known as MI5 (Military Intelligence, Section 5), is its domestic counter-intelligence and security agency, somewhat parallel to the FBI. Its website includes a section on the organization of Britain’s Security Service during the war, which provides an overall context for the work conducted at Bletchley Park. The site points out, thanks chiefly to the codebreakers of Bletchley Park, who provided indispensable support for what was known as the Double Cross System, Britain had better intelligence about Germany during World War II than any power had ever had about its enemies in any previous war.
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Andrew, C. (n.d.). M15 in World War II. Retrieved April 24, 2020, from https://www.mi5.gov.uk/mi5-in-world-war-ii
News Articles
Bletchley Park: No Longer the World’s Best Kept Secret
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Bletchley Park was once the world's best kept secret and a key part of the country's war effort against Germany. Every detail about the sprawling Buckinghamshire estate was shrouded in mystery as German Enigma codes were cracked. Wartime information was declassified in the mid-1970s; previously no-one who worked at the home of the Government Code and Cypher School was allowed to talk about it. Following a painstaking restoration that took 10 years, the original buildings have been brought back to life and the facility opened as a visitor attraction, in a remarkable turnaround from top secrecy to worldwide attraction.
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Lewis, K. (2014, June 18). Bletchley Park: No longer the world’s best kept secret. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-27808962
Meet the Female Codebreakers of Bletchley Park
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The codebreaking work at Bletchley Park could not have been completed without the assistance of many young women recruited to work at the isolated mansion in Buckinghamshire. They signed the Official Secrets Act and were not even allowed to tell their parents what they were working on, long after the war ended. Interviewing survivors, this article describes how deciphering enemy code during World War II was arguably the first role for women in technology.
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Bearne, S. (2018, July 24). Meet the female codebreakers of Bletchley Park. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2018/jul/24/meet-the-female-codebreakers-of-bletchley-park
Videos and Podcast
The Bletchley Circle (Video/DVD)
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In post-war Britain of 1952, four former workers at the top-secret Bletchley Park with an extraordinary flair for code breaking, have slipped back into the anonymity of civilian life. One of the four female friends summons the others to use their unusual skills to track down a serial sex killer. Although this mini-series is set after World War II, outstanding reviews and resulting popularity created new interest in the work done at Bletchley Park and recognition of the lack of meaningful work available after the war to many of the women who had worked there.
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Burt, G., Hopkins, T., De, E. A., Payne, J., Harding, S., Maxwell, M. A., Stirling, R., ... Graham, J. (2014). The Bletchley circle: Series one & two.
Bletchley Park: Code Breaking’s Forgotten Genius (Video)
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Gordon Welchman, one of the original elite codebreakers crucial to the allies defeating the Nazis in World War II, is considered a forgotten genius of Bletchley Park. Filmed extensively at Bletchley Park, the center for codebreaking operations during World War II, this documentary features the abandoned buildings where thousands of people worked tirelessly trying to crack the codes; Hut 6, where Welchman pioneered his groundbreaking work; and the machines that Welchman helped design.
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BBC. (2015). Bletchley Park: Code Breaking’s Forgotten Genius. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b069gxz7 (currently available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnr4pM-ntdc).
The Imitation Game (Video/DVD)
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The Imitation Game is a historical drama movie, based on the biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges. In 1939, the British intelligence agency recruits mathematics expert Alan Turing to crack Nazi codes, including Enigma, which cryptanalysts had thought unbreakable. Based at Bletchley Park, Turing's team analyzes Enigma messages while he builds a machine to decipher them. Turing and the team finally succeed and become heroes, although his own story ended tragically in 1952. Although the movie was criticized by some for its inaccurate portrayal of historical events and for downplaying Turing's homosexuality, it was very well reviewed and received eight nominations at the 87th Academy Awards, winning for Best Adapted Screenplay. It provides a general overview of the Bletchley Park undertaking.
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Strong, M., Knightley, K., Goode, M., & Cumberbatch, B. (2014). The imitation game (DVD). United States: Anchor Bay Entertainment.
The Origins of Enigma Codebreaking at Bletchley Park (Podcast)
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Sir John Dermot Turing, author and nephew of brilliant but tragic Bletchley Park cryptanalyst Alan Turing, discusses the origins of Enigma codebreaking at Bletchley Park, the Bombe machine and how it worked. In 1939, six weeks before the outbreak of World War 2, the British codebreakers knew next to nothing about the German military Enigma machine. He will explain how was it that, by mid-autumn, they had already designed the Bombe machine which would win the codebreaking war.
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Turing, J. D. (2019, February 18). Retrieved from http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/origins-enigma-codebreaking-bletchley-park