This seemingly impossible task was set up in an old country manor house, 50 miles north of London called Bletchley Park, secretly the ministry of defence equipped the building with radio equipment to receive the Enigma transmissions the radio call sign at Bletchley Park was “Station X” and thus the name stuck to Bletchey Park.
Unlike any military unit there was no uniform dress code and with an average age of 20 the staff being made up of school leavers and students or those who were exceptionally good at chess or crosswords these were the Station X staff and as you can imagine the atmosphere was electric.
In charge of cryptology was a brilliant young man named Alan Turing who at the age of 23 became a Cambridge Professor, it soon became apparent that this extremely shy and introverted man would hold the key to breaking the Enigma codes and that he did, he worked out the random codes and how to de cipher them creating a machine that could go through all the different combinations of code. These machines were operated by Wrens. This created even more problems for the staff at Station X with there being more women than men on site there were a few liaisons and in fact several marriages between the staff.
With Alan Turing in the USA the work load became even heavier when the Germans added more rotas to the Enigma machine and thus creating even more combinations of code to break. Here the Royal Mail became involved for at the Royal Mail research station there was another young man working on advanced technology, his name was Dr. Tommy Flowers and while at Station X he created “Colossus” the worlds first programmable computer, it contain 1500 valves to read telex type paper at speeds of 35 mile per hour. The machine was able to decode the Enigma every day until the end of the war.
Station X was closed down at the end of the war, the giant computer was destroyed and all paperwork related to the stations existence were burned in huge bonfires. It is believed that Station X not only shortened the war and saved thousands of lives; it proved that brains could beat bullets, that you can over come an enemy intellectually.
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