"THE GROUP-CAPTAIN has blown what was one
of the best-kept and certainly one of the
most important secrets of the Second World
War.” The
Listener.
“... it has opened the lid of a
veritable Pandora’s box of
information.” The London Sunday
Telegraph.
“… and it is hard to resist
the publishers’ claim that, following
Winterbotham’s revelations, many
histories of World War II will need
rewriting.” The
Observer.
So went some of the reviews
of a book entitled ‘The Ultra
Secret’, published in 1974 by
Weidenfeld and Nicholson and written by
Group-Captain F.W. Winterbotham CBE, Chief
of the air department of the Secret
Intelligence Service (MI6) from
1930-1945.
In 1939 a small government
department was set up in what has been
described as 'a hideous stately home in
North Buckinghamshire'. One of its tasks
was to crack the German coding machine,
Enigma which was being used to carry the
secret signals between the topmost enemy
commands. This operation was code-named
‘Ultra’. (This British
cover-name was adopted in June 1941 and
onwards for all high level intelligence
obtained from signals from Enigma, 'Fish'
i.e. Lorenz and similar machines, and from
Japanese and Italian codes and
ciphers.)
Group-Captain F.W.
Winterbotham, chief of the air department
of the Secret Intelligence Service, was
responsible for the organization,
distribution and security of
‘Ultra’. In 1974 he revealed to
the general public for the first time the
part that this intelligence played in the
war.
Winterbotham's book,
‘The Ultra Secret’, did not,
however, publish the full story - much of
the information regarding 'Ultra' was, at
that time, still 'classified'. It was only
later that the methods used to decrypt the
messages were made public; Alan Turing, the
'Bombes' and ‘Colossus’ are not
even mentioned in Winterbotham’s
book. Incidentally, Winterbotham was
awarded the CBE in 1943 and after the war
retired to a farm in Devon. He died in
1990.
This website is based on
information that has been revealed up to
the present time. That information is
readily accessible in a growing number of
books, of which Winterbotham’s was
the first, in articles in various journals
and on the internet (some of which contain
some surprising inaccuracies!) and, of
course, at the fascinating exhibition at
Bletchley Park.
Note: 'Ultra' was the code
name applied to the 'product of the
decryption of the more important enemy
ciphers' during World War II. 'Enigma' is
the name of one of the machines used by the
Germans to encode their secret
messages.
BLETCHLEY PARK, situated in
Buckinghamshire, England, lies on the
outskirts of the 'new town' of Milton
Keynes. The M1 motorway and mainline
railway from London to North-West England
and North Wales run close by.
Nearest large towns are Bedford,
Northampton, Buckingham and Luton.
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