Timewatch
Code-Breakers: Bletchley Park's Lost Heroes
Clips from this programme
Introduction: Mathematician Bill Tutte pulled off the greatest intellectual feat of World War Two, and GPO Engineer Tommy Flowers turned Tutte's ideas into the 'world's first computer'. Backed by the brightest talents of Bletchley Park the machine that resulted was NOT Enigma but something far more significant, probably shortening the war by a couple of years and saving millions of lives
Duration: 01:42Bletchley Park, MI6, Alan Turing and Enigma: Alan Turing was one of the 3 heroes of Bletchley Park, Bill Tutte who broke the Tunny system and Tommy Flowers who built Colossus, the other two (Captain Jerry Roberts, former Cryptographer at Bletchley Park)'the first computer ever'. (Professor Jack Copeland, Author of 'Colossus: The secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers'), Station X
Duration: 02:04Station X: 1939-The start of Bletchley's code-breaking history learning the enemy's secrets, Tunny in particular, the Testery. Captain Jerry Roberts, former Cryptographer at Bletchley Park, re-visits Bletchley
Duration: 02:17World War Two and the mobility of enemy armies relied on radio technology that could be intercepted if decoded: Tunny / Lorenz encoding was Hitler's secret writer. ENIGMA preceded Tunny/Lorenz
Duration: 01:25The Enigma machine used from the early days and throughout the 2nd World War with German Morse messages. Listening posts then heard a new coding machine with teleprinter data
Duration: 02:26Mathematicians brought in to Bletchley for Enigma. Hitler's demand for more security lead to the Tunny / Lorenz system needing less human operators, too. The Lorenz SZ40 / Tunny; Twelve wheels equalling 1.6 billion combinations. Teleprinter code, zeros and ones, highly encrypted
Duration: 04:18The principle of encoding/ decoding via Lorenz / Tunny (EOR, exclusive ORs) demonstration
Duration: 02:31Bill Tutte, his background (born in Newmarket), Trinity College, Cambridge, Bletchley from 1941 not chosen by Turing to work on the Enigma project, Bletchley: Research and Development
Duration: 02:24Lorenz / Tunny: The Breakthrough: Depth needed, a message sent with the same key (Captain Jerry Roberts, former Cryptographer at Bletchley Park)(Michael Smith, Author of 'The Secrets of Station X'), John Tiltman (One of the best codebreakers in the 2nd world war) realised that there was a method of breaking the code
Duration: 03:05The Lorenz / Tunny code's weakness demonstration helped with an inspired guess to de-compose combined messages, but how does the machine work
Duration: 04:20Lorenz / Tunny - Bill Tutte considers how the machine works, looking for patterns and breaks how it works. Brute force revealed the quality of the information involved from High Command, thanks to one sloppy German operator
Duration: 03:50Field test of Tunny decryption: Military Intelligence for the Russian front (Captain Jerry Roberts, former Cryptographer at Bletchley Park), The Red Army forewarned, turning the tide of the war
Duration: 01:39The National Archive: Bill Tutte, the one plus two method from intercepted messages, and the statistical methods of cracking the code needing much work for this to succeed
Duration: 01:24Tommy Flowers, GPO Engineer: Machine Man: His background, Dollis Hill, machines for code breaking, Max Newman (Paul Gannon, author of 'Colossus: Bletchley Park's Greatest Secret'), the Newmanry, Heath Robinson kept on breaking down: Flowers had a better idea with electronic circuits & valves (Tony Sale, Co-founder of 'The National Museum of Computing, tNMoC)
Duration: 03:29Colossus Built: Tommy Flowers, GPO Engineer designs and build Colossus, a massive task but it works first time, the first semi-programmable computer (Tony Sale, Co-founder of 'The National Museum of Computing, tNMoC), the bedstick inputting 5000 characters per second, a technical manual with circuit diagrams with ideas now used in modern computers. Colossus 'broke' the two 'chi' wheels only, so decoding Tunny was still a team effort - 7 Stages, the Newmanry handling two, the Testery handling the other five
Duration: 03:11More Colossus machines needed for D-Day. One more was delivered by then, 1st June, Bill Chandler, and then the operators, working within a pool of water. Tunny De-crypts made 2 major contributions to the success of D-Day (Tony Sale, Co-founder of 'The National Museum of Computing, tNMoC)(Captain Jerry Roberts, former Cryptographer at Bletchley Park)
Duration: 03:43Tunny intercepts of information also helped to 'get inside Hitler's head': e.g. War in Italy. The Germans totally put their faith in their machines, a failing
Duration: 02:23Britain's Code breaking organisation compared with Germany's, and different attitudes to the people types employed at Bletchley Park, job done by 1945
Duration: 01:46Bletchley and its People after the war: Maintaining the silence, keeping it secret (Sir John Scarlett, former Director General MI6). Colossus moved to new GCHQ buildings and used until the 1960s, Russian de-crypting during the Cold War, America announces they have built The First Computer ENIAC in February 1946, the true history of computing corrupted, Tommy Flowers' secrets maintained.
Duration: 02:01Bletchley and its People after the war: Bill Tutte: A fellowship at Cambridge, then moved to Canada (Professor Michele Mosca, Dep. Director Institute for Quantum Computing), Tutte a genius (Professor Bill Cunningham, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo). Bill Tutte talks about his work in the 1980
Duration: 01:55Bletchley and its People after the war: Some recognition in the 1980's (Tommy Flowers talks in 1982 at the Museum of Digital Technology, Boston)- Tommy did get to see the Colossus rebuild at tNMoC at Bletchley. Bill Tutte breaks his silence on Tunny, an enormous burden lifted, Fellow of the Royal Society from 1987, along with Alan Turing and Max Newmann (Keith Moore, Head of Library and Archive, Royal Society), Tommy passing an introductory course in Information Processing in 1993, aged 87 (Kenneth Flowers, Tommy Flower's son). Memorials: Headstone / the working Colossus re-build at tNMoC Bletchley Park
Duration: 05:53Summary (Captain Jerry Roberts, former Cryptographer at Bletchley Park)
Duration: 00:47