The Hut Six Story : Breaking the Enigma Codes [Paperback]

The men and women of Bletchley Park, who repeatedly broke German military cyphers throughout the Second World War, made an incalculable contribution to the allied success. This book, written by one of the code-breakers provides a fascinating insight into the process.

Despite the core subject, this is not really a book about cryptography, but about how to manage people and technology to solve complex, important problems. Welchman was the "glue" between the pure ideas men like Alan Turing, and the code-breaking production line. His talents were clearly in building the organisation, and liaising between the different parties so that interception, decoding, understanding and using the intelligence became a repeatable success.

Welchman's insights into British wartime society and bureaucracy are keen and frequently very humourous. Many of his insights are equally applicable today, in business as well as military circles. For example an individual's promotion, prestige and salary should not depend solely on the number of subordinates.

Although he was very modest about it, it is clear that Welchman was no mean cryptologist himself. The book does attempt to explain several of the ways in which Enigma was cracked, but I found the primarily verbal explanations difficult to follow. However, this doesn't prevent an understanding of the principals, and how different methods were applied at different points during the war.

The book does have some limitations. Because he was not personally involved, he explicitly refuses to discuss the effort focused on the German naval codes so important to the Battle of the Atlantic, and generally says little about the use of the intelligence information. Sadly, the current edition of the book omits much of Welchman's advice on the analysis of battlefield communications, and how to keep such communications secure. However, one observation has been retained - it was a fundamental mistake to believe Enigma was secure simply because of the enormous computing power required for a brute-force attack. This should perhaps be noted in our Internet age, when so much depends on the assumed difficulty of factoring large numbers.

If I have a criticism of the book, it's the rather poor production in places, with very faded photographs and occasionally blurred text. Figures are sometimes absent when they are most needed, e.g. when first explaining the Enigma machine. I read this book having only recently attended an excellent lecture and actually seeing an Enigma - otherwise I would have struggled at such points.

Nonetheless this is an excellent, insightful and inspiring book, containing a range of lessons relevant today, and I thoroughly recommend it.

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Fascinating account of Gordon Welchman's work at Bletchley Park, where he worked particularly on understanding patterns in German radio traffic (for example, call signs) and more generally on cryptography. The later part of the book talks about his experiences after the war, for example with MITRE, and includes numerous well-thought-out policy recommendations.

I purchased this book as an adjunct to Robert Harris fictionalized account of Bletchley Park, Enigma, which of course is much higher on overt human-interest type things (love affairs, cloak-and-dagger operations) than this non-fiction account. But one can still see the excitement and danger lurking through the surface of this work.

Welchman comes across here as an extremely careful and scrupulous (auto)-biographer. He is careful to qualify all his conclusions, and he even goes out of his way to minimize his own role. This understated style, needless to say, is well out of fashion.

Nevertheless, Welchman paints a very interesting portrait of himself and his compatriots. Some were mathematicians, some were chess-players, some were classicists. He describes in great detail exactly how he went about deriving a method for breaking Enigma.

Despite Welchman's rather understated, perhaps classically British, account, it's clear that there were great people working there at that time, and that they were in fact utterly critical to the defeat of Germany. Welchman persuasively argues that Germany would likely have won Europe, or at least invaded England, had Bletchley Park not been so dramatically successful.

Welchman's policy suggestions also seemed wise. He believes American should focus more on communication security. He specifically notes Afghanistan as a potential theater of future war operations (this in 1982).

Even apart from the distinct possibility that Bletchley Park preserved Europe from the Nazis, and the certainty that its work dramatically changed the course of the war, and even the importance of what were then some of the earliest computers, somehow I found more interesting Welchman himself. He comes across as a pleasant, warm, good person; who loves puzzles; who loves mathematics; and who is extremely honest and careful. And Bletchley Park itself comes across as one of those rare times and places in history when people like Welchman can and do succeed. So there is almost a wistfulness to the passing of the place.

There were also a lot of just fun and fascinating details. Perhaps the major theme running through the book was the remarkable carelessness of the German radio operators. Welchman notes the Enigma itself was relatively secure: but the operators failed to follow good cryptographic protocol. For example, the person who chose the keys got lazy and just reused old keys! Sometimes operators would select keys based on patterns on the keyboard. One operator in the African theatre of operations daily sent the same message "nothing to report", letting that day's key be quickly cracked (apparently Bletchley toyed with the idea of instructing the Allies to leave him alone).

Another notable point, to show how flummoxed were the Germans, was that after Rommel began to suspect that Enigma was insecure, the German cryptanalysts reviewed the code (several times in fact) and always concluded it was unbreakable.

Many of the sacrifices made by British were perhaps not so spectacular and visible as the high-profile codebreakers, but nonetheless critical and moving. Welchman has a nice passage (pp. 141-142) describing the plight of the WRENS, the women navy operators. They had signed up for the navy expecting to be on ships, to see the world, and they were consigned to listening to transcribing Morse code gibberish for the entire war, hour after hour, year after year. They never saw the decrypts and they could never be told much about the value of what they did - and yet, like everyone there, they were never allowed to leave until after the war. Some WRENs did operate the bombes, the machines that helped decrypt the Enigmas, as well of course.

One example of the personal sacrifices made by the analysts there was that they were often viewed by others as cowards or shirkers for not fighting for Britain. Welchman tells of one young man who "received a scathing letter from his headmaster accusing him of being a disgrace to his school." (p. 86).

Looking back on all this seventy-odd years later, and nearly thirty years after the book itself was published, I was struck by two things. One was the great character of the British at the time. And the second is how incredible it seems nowadays, for a government to accumulate so many smart people, working tirelessly, penuriously and secretly for years just to save others, all with complete support of the government. Not since the Apollo project (or before that, Manhattan) has anything like that been seen, or even can be seen as plausibly occurring.

Hut Six by Godon Welchman is a gripping story about how British code breakers broke the code of the Enigma Machine. This code machine was used by the German High command to send secret messages to and from the commanders in the field, including those from and to Hitler. The Germans were secure in the thought that the code generated by the machine could not be broken. Every day the key was changed to ensure, they thought, that their war messages remained secret.

The British high command kept secret that the code had been broken to the extent that a deciphered message alerted the highest authority. Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered that the Royal Air Force not be informed that the British town of Coventry not be defended from a German Air Force attack the following morning. Had the British Air Force engaged the enemy it could be deduced by Germany that their code had been broken.

The British commanders were given the info that referred to their sphere but not the info that did not apply to their specific engagements. Two Generals, American Mark Clark and British General "Monty" Montgomery arrogantly refused to accept the information unless they could have ALL of the info, even that which did not concern them. Consequently they probably, because of their obstinacy, some lives were unnecessarily lost.

If you are interested in the history of World War II you should read this book. You will be glad that you did.