How do you keep 8,995 codebreakers secret?

"We Also Served" is one hell of a quote to describe the people at Bletchley Park who kept their mouths shut about their duty

My grandmother worked at Bletchley Park - she was invited to a meeting after winning a crossword competition. She ended up working in the Japanese area of the park. She did not talk about what she did in the war untill she got the letter and medal from PM Gordon Brown.

I love that that myth is almost inverted - they didn't not act because it'd give away they'd broken Enigma, they DID act because it made their forces look bigger and more fearsome than they really were.

Bletchley Park is the exact place and time where "computer" turned from a job into a machine.

Apparently the code breakers would get gifts for Hitler's birthday. A lot of easy to decrypt messages to Berlin, which then made all the other massages for the day easy.

David was, in my opinion, the best guide so far in this series. Excellent eloquence and knowledge.

Britain really said "If we are always where they are, they will think we are everywhere." And it worked

What happens at the Intelligence Factory, stays at the Intelligence Factory!

One of my favorite subjects on WW2 is the development of the intelligence industry. They laid the groundwork for how we handle sensitive information today. My Great Uncle worked in intelligence during WW2, we never found out in his lifetime what he did but after we died we found a box full of plans about German aircraft. He was a very talented model maker, and as it turned out his job was to make detailed scale models of German planes. Later in life he turned those skills into make models of sailing ships, some of which are still displayed in a local museum!

My Mum's mentor/friend served at Bletchley Park, and never told anyone, including her family, until just before her death, some 60 years post WW2. Those folks took the secrecy VERY seriously.

The extreme siloing reminded me of the bit in Monty Python where a deadly joke had to be translated one word at a time so the workers didn’t die of laughter. Wonder if that’s where they got the idea?

This is one of those joyful videos where I get to hand over to Someone Very Qualified. | AD: 💼 Find a fulfilling career that also helps the world: /tom

I love when one of Tom's videos unintentionally references a Citation Needed episode! "The lady navy??"

Jesus, that quote about secrecy at the fireplace really hit hard. Thank you for shining this particular light on this particular part of the operstion.

I remember a story of a man being told all his life for being a coward and never going to war, accused of malingering. He never argued and lived with the shame till he was on his deathbed, and a historian tracked him down. During the war, he was trained by the SOE and SAS post Africa and Italy, not to go into Europe, but to disappear if the Country was ever invaded, and he and his team of irregulars, others who were trained also, priests, gamekeepers, poachers, farmers, would hide in secret underground hides, and launch sabotage attacks on the invading Germans. One of their primary tasks was to find Englishmen who were either sympathetic to the Germans, or held great state secrets and not the fortitude to hold them and assassinate them. He was interviewed in a care home, not a medal to his name, but a trained killer to run suicide missions to harass the enemy.

Don’t forget, Enigma was in fact commercially available before the war, and it was broken by Polish mathematicians using nothing more than punched paper sheets, known as the ‘bombe’. Mechanisation was primarily about speed, reducing the possibilities exponentially, but not to solve it. That was still done by hand.

19:00 this is actually where the popular myth that carrots are good for eyesight comes from. It was a rumor started to explain why the brits were so good at shooting down Nazi planes during the blitz even during nighttime raids. The real answer is primarily the brits had really advanced accurate radar that would let them know exactly where and at what elevation the planes were flying. Secondary is we had mostly cracked open the initial enigma cypher and were reading their attack orders. So we knew where and when they'd get there and could amass resources

If you remember the Monty Python sketch about the joke to make the enemy die laughing. No-one could see more than one line of the joke as it was too dangerous and that compartmenting, included in the sketch, applied to Bletchley Park.

When I hear such stories I tear up. I think of my mum in the blitz. I think of how awfully Turing was treated. And I am filled with gratitude for their sacrifice.

I remember when people were allowed to talk in 2009. My Dad found out one of his teachers had been at Bletchley.