{"id":20955,"date":"2013-07-05T08:20:17","date_gmt":"2013-07-05T12:20:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=20955"},"modified":"2018-01-15T18:22:30","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T23:22:30","slug":"the-secret-army-of-monitors-who-fed-enigma-signals-to-bletchley-park","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/07\/05\/the-secret-army-of-monitors-who-fed-enigma-signals-to-bletchley-park\/","title":{"rendered":"The secret army of monitors who fed Enigma signals to Bletchley Park"},"content":{"rendered":"

The BBC<\/a> remembers the volunteer radio tinkerers who helped win the intelligence war in Europe:<\/p>\n

One day, towards the start of World War II, a captain wearing the Royal Signals uniform knocked on a British teenager’s door.<\/p>\n

The 16-year-old was called Bob King. When he went to greet the visitor, he had no idea that soon he would become one of Britain’s so-called “voluntary interceptors” — some 1,500 radio amateurs recruited to intercept secret codes broadcast by the Nazis and their allies during the war.<\/p>\n

“The captain asked me if I would be willing to help out with some secret work for the government,” remembers Mr King, now 89. “He wouldn’t tell me any more than that.<\/p>\n

“He knew that I could read Morse code – that was the essential thing.”<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

By mid-1941, the new base, Arkley View, was receiving about 10,000 message sheets a day from its recruits.<\/p>\n

“I worked for five years scrutinising the logs that came in from the other amateurs — thousands of log sheets with the signals which we knew were wanted, and you could only know it from experience,” remembers Mr King.<\/p>\n

“We knew it wasn’t Allied army air force, we knew it was German or Italian — various things gave that away, but it was disguised in such a form that it looked a bit like a radio amateur transmission.<\/p>\n

“We knew it was highly important, everything was marked ‘top secret,’ but only many years later we discovered that it was German secret service we were listening to.<\/p>\n

“Of course you didn’t ask questions in those days, otherwise you’d be in real trouble.”<\/p>\n

Encoded messages were transmitted to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, the UK’s former top-secret code-cracking centre.<\/p>\n

Once decoded, the data was sent to the Allied Commanders and the UK Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The BBC remembers the volunteer radio tinkerers who helped win the intelligence war in Europe: One day, towards the start of World War II, a captain wearing the Royal Signals uniform knocked on a British teenager’s door. The 16-year-old was called Bob King. When he went to greet the visitor, he had no idea that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1118,7,339,5,230],"tags":[157],"class_list":["post-20955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-germany","category-history","category-italy","category-military","category-ww2","tag-encryption"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5rZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20955"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20956,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20955\/revisions\/20956"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}