thought to be a man’s job. At the rectangular table sat serving officers, Army and RAF, one or two of each. These were the Advisers. Behind the head of Watch was a door communicating with a small room where the Duty Officer sat. Elsewhere in the Hut were one large room housing the Index and a number of small rooms for the various supporting parties, the back rooms.
Once the watchkeeper had written the report it was checked by the Watch No. 1, who then passed it to either a military or an air adviser depending on the content. The adviser’s job was to ensure it made military sense and to add any comments on what was previously known about the unit before passing it back to the Watch No. 1 so that it could be teleprinted to London.
‘Material came in from Hut 6 in more-or-less cablese German and a lot of it corrupt,’ said Jim Rose, another of the air advisers.
Urgent messages were sent direct to Commanders-in-Chief. All messages went up to the service ministries. If the air adviser or the military adviser had anything to comment he was allowed to do so and then next morning we would send deeper comment to the Commander-in-Chief. Some of the information was tactically immediate, some of it was strategic and some of it was a build-up of order-of-battle, strength, weaknesses, supplies and so on, which most generals don’t know about their enemy. So it was very important in so many ways.
Meanwhile, Nigel de Grey was put in charge of an ‘Intelligence Exchange’ Section, Hut 3a, to work on long-term intelligence analysis and reporting. ‘There was an inevitable tendency for us to concentrate on the more urgent and spectacular aspects of our information,’ Lucas said, ‘to try to send out intentions and front lines, battle HQs and tactics with all possible speed, while ignoring by comparison matters of more lasting interest such as organisation, strength, habits of the Luftwaffe and the German Army and so on.’ De Grey’s role was to remedy that by setting up a group of backroom analysts and reporters. One of their first tasks was to set about acquiring more detailed maps than the Baedeker tourist guides the Hut 3 Watchkeepers had been forced to work with during the campaigns in Norway and France. They also looked at the various terms used by the Germans, many of which had completely baffled academics more used to translating Goethe than Guderian; and, most importantly of all, began to build up a detailed picture of the structure of the German armed forces.
The fall of France cast a dark shadow over everyone at Bletchley Park, but the French liaison officers from ‘MissionRichard’ were clearly worst affected. ‘I remember seeing several of the Frenchmen who were attached to the French Mission here clustered around the wireless set with their ears almost glued to it,’ said Phoebe Senyard. ‘They were listening to very faint announcements made by the BBC, or getting on to a French station and becoming more and more dejected and downcast with every fresh announcement.’
Mavis Lever was eating her dinner in the mansion dining hall when the news that Paris had fallen was announced. ‘We had some Frenchmen working with us at the time and I was sitting next to one of them and he burst into tears,’ she said. ‘I simply did not know what to do. So, I went on eating my sausages. I mean we weren’t going to get any more and it seemed to me there was nothing really I could do if other people were going to burst into tears. I’d got a night shift to work on, so on with the sausages.’
Following the German invasion, Bertrand and the Poles set up a new station on a country estate, the Château de Fouzes at Uzès in Provence, working with the Vichy French government’s Groupement des Controles Radioélectriques . This was supposed to be monitoring British communications with the underground resistance movement but in fact assisted Bertrand and the Poles by intercepting Enigma traffic and allowing them to continue
Once the watchkeeper had written the report it was checked by the Watch No. 1, who then passed it to either a military or an air adviser depending on the content. The adviser’s job was to ensure it made military sense and to add any comments on what was previously known about the unit before passing it back to the Watch No. 1 so that it could be teleprinted to London.
‘Material came in from Hut 6 in more-or-less cablese German and a lot of it corrupt,’ said Jim Rose, another of the air advisers.
Urgent messages were sent direct to Commanders-in-Chief. All messages went up to the service ministries. If the air adviser or the military adviser had anything to comment he was allowed to do so and then next morning we would send deeper comment to the Commander-in-Chief. Some of the information was tactically immediate, some of it was strategic and some of it was a build-up of order-of-battle, strength, weaknesses, supplies and so on, which most generals don’t know about their enemy. So it was very important in so many ways.
Meanwhile, Nigel de Grey was put in charge of an ‘Intelligence Exchange’ Section, Hut 3a, to work on long-term intelligence analysis and reporting. ‘There was an inevitable tendency for us to concentrate on the more urgent and spectacular aspects of our information,’ Lucas said, ‘to try to send out intentions and front lines, battle HQs and tactics with all possible speed, while ignoring by comparison matters of more lasting interest such as organisation, strength, habits of the Luftwaffe and the German Army and so on.’ De Grey’s role was to remedy that by setting up a group of backroom analysts and reporters. One of their first tasks was to set about acquiring more detailed maps than the Baedeker tourist guides the Hut 3 Watchkeepers had been forced to work with during the campaigns in Norway and France. They also looked at the various terms used by the Germans, many of which had completely baffled academics more used to translating Goethe than Guderian; and, most importantly of all, began to build up a detailed picture of the structure of the German armed forces.
The fall of France cast a dark shadow over everyone at Bletchley Park, but the French liaison officers from ‘MissionRichard’ were clearly worst affected. ‘I remember seeing several of the Frenchmen who were attached to the French Mission here clustered around the wireless set with their ears almost glued to it,’ said Phoebe Senyard. ‘They were listening to very faint announcements made by the BBC, or getting on to a French station and becoming more and more dejected and downcast with every fresh announcement.’
Mavis Lever was eating her dinner in the mansion dining hall when the news that Paris had fallen was announced. ‘We had some Frenchmen working with us at the time and I was sitting next to one of them and he burst into tears,’ she said. ‘I simply did not know what to do. So, I went on eating my sausages. I mean we weren’t going to get any more and it seemed to me there was nothing really I could do if other people were going to burst into tears. I’d got a night shift to work on, so on with the sausages.’
Following the German invasion, Bertrand and the Poles set up a new station on a country estate, the Château de Fouzes at Uzès in Provence, working with the Vichy French government’s Groupement des Controles Radioélectriques . This was supposed to be monitoring British communications with the underground resistance movement but in fact assisted Bertrand and the Poles by intercepting Enigma traffic and allowing them to continue
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