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Bletchley Park’s contribution to WW2 'over-rated'
- lqet 6y agoTLDR: > "Bletchley is not the war winner that a lot of Brits think it is". > But he said Bletchley still played an important role. > "Intelligence never wins a war on its own," says Prof Ferris. The latter seems to be a trivial statement. Of course: if you know the enemy will launch a 100-megaton bomb at your capital in 2 hours, and all you have at your disposal is light cavalry, you will most likely still not win the war.
- secondcoming 6y ago> He said because GCHQ was able to intercept and break Argentine messages, British commanders were able to know within hours what orders were being given to their opponents GCHQ were only able to break the Argentine encryption because the Dutch gave them very strong hints on how to break it.
- goatinaboat 6y agoGCHQ were only able to break the Argentine encryption because the Dutch gave them very strong hints on how to break it. And the Argentines had no need to break British encryption as the BBC kept them up to date. The BBC revealed for example that Argentina’s bombs weren’t detonating on British ships because the fuses were set wrong. And they revealed troop movements too. This is a matter of historical fact.
- mcintyre1994 6y agoThat sounds pretty interesting, do you have a source?
- secondcoming 6y agoI'm not aware of BBC leaks, but there was this: "In a debate on the Falklands War on 3 April 1982, Rowlands revealed that the British were reading Argentine diplomatic traffic" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Rowlands,_Baron_Rowlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Rowlands,_Baron_Rowlands
- goatinaboat 6y agoSure https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehistoryherald.com/articles/british-irish-history/falklands-war/six-better-fuses/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehistoryherald.com/articles/b... To avoid the high concentration of British air defences, Argentine pilots were releasing their bombs from very low altitudes, giving the fuses too little time to arm before impact. The BBC reportedly broadcast this information and was severely criticised by the task force Commander, Admiral Woodward, who blamed them for alerting the Argentines to the supposed fault. Interestingly, Colonel H.Jones, commanding the Paras on Falkland, had also accused the BBC of giving information to the enemy when reporting on the capture of Goose Green before it actually happened and had threatened to bring charges of treason against the Board of Governors. Sadly he was killed at Goose Green before he could pursue the charge. First I could find but this has been extensively written about in books.
- gampleman 6y ago> The current director of the intelligence agency, Jeremy Fleming writes: "GCHQ is a citizen-facing intelligence and security enterprise with a globally recognised brand and reputation." This sounds like some A+ BS. Since when do national intelligence agencies have globally recognised brands?
- nullsense 6y agoSince the CIA, FBI, NSA, Five Eyes? I've also heard of GCHQ as they open sourced CyberChef which I quite like.
- goatinaboat 6y agoSince when do national intelligence agencies have globally recognised brands? KGB, Mossad, MI6? All global brands with distinct reputations and images to maintain.
- richrichardsson 6y ago> KGB Showing your age there! FSB is the contemporary version.
- goatinaboat 6y agoTl;dr: someone you’ve never heard of trying to get famous by saying something “edgy”.
- peteretep 6y ago"someone" in this case, if you'd read the article, was a historian commisioned by GCHQ themselves
- simonh 6y agoI'm sure it is possible to over-rate the contribution of any one factor to winning the war. Where would Britain have been without it's sea power, the RAF, huge numbers of recruits from Imperial colonies, the USA. However that doesn't really reduce it's significance, it just puts it in context. When thinking about the invasion of Normandy we naturally think of thousands of troops rushing up the beaches from landing craft, but without air power those landings would have been impossible. Similarly many of our efforts were enabled or materially supported by high quality intelligence. I think it's best thinking about it in the same terms as air and sea power. It's another domain of conflict that supports the action on the ground, and in fact in all the other domains of conflict. It can make a huge, even essential contribution, but none of them is decisive on it's own. The point about GCHQ is interesting and I'd not thought about their importance to the UK in quite those terms but it does make sense. Our armed forces punch well above their weight, but our primary asset is actually our relationship with the USA, and our value to the USA may well be primarily in the Intelligence arena.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoI think what also didn't help that they weren't 100% able to act on all the information, as that would have immediately given away their ability to read the enemy's traffic and they would change their cypher. So they always had to do things like fake a 'random spotting plane' etc and sometimes even letting attacks happen. So there's always a limit to what you can do with this kind of information to protect its existence in the future. In WW2 there actually were times where German analysts were getting suspicious as to why the allies were so lucky. But their concerns were trumped by the leadership's enormous confidence in the Enigma. By the way, the Germans were reading lots of the allies' cyphers too.
- ErrantX 6y agoThere was definitely a huge amount of disbelief in the German high command. Another example is their agents/spies; most modern accounts suggest that the British captured or turned all of the spies sent into the country - and ran a highly successful counter agent network (the double cross system[1]). Who knows if that is true - what is certain is that the German Abwher were highly confident in their spies and ate up the misinformation. Hitler was hugely impressed with the agent network... ...as enigma decrypts showed. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Cross_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Cross_System
- MichaelMoser123 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cairncross#Operation_Citadel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cairncross#Operation_Cita... Johny Carincross was a spy who passed over raw intercepts decrypted with Tunny to the Soviet Union; so they got the German order of battle and other information in advance of the battle of Kursk; that sounds like a major contribution to winning the war (the spy was confirming information that the British passed on via official channels, however they seem to have put more trust in the reports of their spy). The outcome of the battle of Kursk did make a big difference. > "Intelligence never wins a war on its own," says Prof Ferris. Another event where spies/code breakers made a major difference is the battle of Moscow; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sorge#Wartime_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sorge#Wartime_intellig... "Various writers have speculated that the information allowed the release of Siberian divisions for the Battle of Moscow, where the German Army suffered its first strategic defeat in the war. To that end, Sorge's information might have been the most important military intelligence work in World War II. However, Sorge was not the only source of Soviet intelligence about Japan, as Soviet codebreakers had broken the Japanese diplomatic codes and so Moscow knew from signals intelligence that there would be no Japanese attack on the Soviet Union in 1941.[46] "
- mianos 6y agoIt reminds me of this comic: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/ Let's spend X on a super uber computa password cracker or let's spend X/100 on a bribe to a guy who works there.
- MichaelMoser123 6y agoespecially as they didn't have the money for a super computer as they were fighting the real war.
- xLaszlo 6y agoOvermentioned not overrated. Estimations usually say that breaking the Engima shortened the war by a year. That's hardly "winning the war".
- bArray 6y agoHe says: > "Intelligence never wins a war on its own," says Prof > Ferris. Then says: > "I don't think Britain could have won the Falklands > conflict without GCHQ," Prof Ferris told the BBC. So intelligence gathering is not winning a war single-handed, but it's pretty important? I thought that must British people knew this... Of course the War effort was much larger than a few buildings down in Bletchley. I think this is just to sell his new book - say something controversial and barely featured in the book, then ride the press: > The new book - Behind the Enigma - is released on Tuesday > and is based on access to top secret GCHQ files.
- DarkmSparks 6y agoAnyone who has paid any attention to what went on at Bletchly, from knowing they had won the Battle of Britain to the single decoded message that determined the outcome of the D-day landings - should also be deeply offended by this sales pitch imho. I wonder if its rooted in a distain for Alan Turings sexuality that would lead them to think this kind of marketing ploy is OK? I really cannot think of any other reason right now. Akin to saying "The degree of racism in the US is over rated and the struggle against poverty was much bigger than that speech by Martin Luther King, buy my book".
- nickik 6y ago> from knowing they had won the Battle of Britain I mean they would have learned this eventually when the German stopped trying. They knew that they were winning anyways. > single decoded message that determined the outcome of the D-day landings What message?
- DarkmSparks 6y ago"knowing they had won" meant knowing the Germans would not try a land invasion. The air assaults didnt stop. ->what message. Theres a good google talk called the "theory that wouldnt die" by Sharon McGreyne on youtube. It gets talked about in that iirc.
- KaiserPro 6y ago
- LatteLazy 6y agoNo one in the West acknowledges it, but 80% of winning ww2 was Russia. People go on an on about D-Day, but the tide turned at stalingrad. People assume Nagasaki and Hiroshima convinced Japan to surrender, but it was actually the (surprise) Russian declaration of war...
- arethuza 6y agoMy father was in the RAF in WW2 - he was pretty clear that he regarded that Soviets as having done most of the fighting against the Nazis. I don't think that was an uncommon view amongst those who actually lived through those times.
- nix23 6y agoYes but that changed because of the Cold War, a Union that helped to win the war against Hitler was not the desired picture of a enemy for the Nato.
- older 6y agoAlso it looks like not many acknowledge that Soviet Union was not just Russia, so your 80% has to be divided somehow between ex-USSR countries.
- nix23 6y ago>but 80% of winning ww2 was Russia Exactly, it's a real shame, Russia had the biggest sacrifices and the West just pats his own back.
- ErrantX 6y agoIt's not right, but historically it "makes sense" - the Cold War is between us and WW2. Plus, of course, post-war it plays to the local government's interest to emphasise your own country's contribution. Another factor is; a lot of senior (and sometimes non-senior) officers were comissioned after the war to write memoirs and histories - these were at best personal views and at worst outright biased. Because of secrecy (which the cold war didn't help remove) these were often the only reference material for 20th century historians. A great example is a lot of the work on deception during WW2 (one of my pet subjects). Early works were heavily redacted and biased, and later seemingly scholarly works by real historians have since been shown to be simply parroting a lot of that misinformation. It is only in the last 5-10 years as material has been declassified that the truth begins to emerge.
- rich_sasha 6y agoBefore someone else says it: Polish people are usually very bemused by the Bletchley Park story, because the Brits barely ever mention that they built on early work by the Polish cryptographers [1]. Enigma evolved over the years, needing further work, but as of mid-1939, Enigma was broken by the Poles. The British took over, and achieved huge things on their own too (while also excluding the Polish cryptographers, now UK-based, from the project), very possibly doing a lot more than the Poles ever did. But I see that even when saying Bletchley Park was 'over-rated', even then they can't give credit where it's due. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma#Polish_breakthroughs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma#Po...
- nickik 6y agoIn pretty much every series academic work this is very well documented. But equally the story of Bletchley is one industrial scale, not just essentially what I would consider a prove of concept. But lets be honest, about every single thing in WW2 there is nationalist 'No I did it first' argument between all the nations.
- rich_sasha 6y agoAll true. And yet... No one monopolises D-Day. The US make a point to remark on the work of the Navajo code-speakers. Somehow, Battle of Britain is celebrated as a multi-national cooperation. But not Enigma-breaking, that was just plucky Brits in Bletchley Park. I understand and respect national myth-building, equally I feel credit, in popular literature, is under-attributed.
- mathw 6y ago> Somehow, Battle of Britain is celebrated as a multi-national cooperation. Not that I've ever noticed. I don't think I learned until I was 17 or 18 that there were non-British pilots involved on the British side. And I live in England! We should know! I'm glad the article isn't quite as blunt as the headline suggests. If GCHQ are saying that public perception of Bletchley's role is overrated... well, they're entirely correct about that. But if you actually go to Bletchley Park they're quite clear about the role of Polish intelligence in breaking the Enigma machine.
- WalterBright 6y agoI often wonder why the Germans (and Japanese) simply didn't just assume their encryption was broken and regularly create new systems. For the U-Boots, there were few enough that one-time pads would be practical, and unbreakable. There are also ways to set traps to see if your code was broken.
- mamon 6y agoHubris. They thought Enigma is unbreakable.
- ncmncm 6y agoSince exactly zero of the top ten battles of the war were fought on the western front, it is hard to see GCHQ as so useful as is often claimed. Yes, Stalin was also given access to some decrypts. Yes, Stalin murdered or imprisoned ~15 million Soviet "citizens" (a majority citizens of invaded neighbors, but plenty of Russians, too, including his own senior officer corps) before the war. Yes, Russia provided a huge share of the resources to build up Germany's armory before the war. Yes, Russia invited Germany to split Poland with it. Yes, in the final two years the Soviets depended on the US for food, fuel, steel, and trucks. Yes, Stalin had been poised to invade Germany when he was surprised and lost the bulk of his own armory at the outset. Yes, a majority of the Soviet troops killed were not Russian. Yes, the naval war was mostly conducted by the US and British Fleets. Yes, the US was busy in the Pacific theater. Still, the war was mainly a battle to the death between two totalitarian regimes, with the US and Britain harrying at the edges. The Allied bombing, while it killed many, many civilians, utterly failed to stop massive growth of production of tanks and aircraft, right up to the end; that declined only in the final half-year as original German territory was overrun. (Production of pilots failed to keep pace, limiting the aircrafts' value.) It took only a small fraction of German forces to keep the US and Britain fully occupied in Africa, then Italy, and even after D-day. At the end, Stalin had to park and wait months for the Allies to catch up, and spent the time chasing Nazis out of the south. "No Simple Victory", by Norman Davies using material exposed after the Soviet collapse, is an eye-opening resource.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago...meanwhile in Neutralistan: https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-ann-linde-and-switzerland-ignazio-cassis-get-frosty-over-espionage-claims/ https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-ann-linde-and-switzer... edit: much earlier but connected https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7992651/US-spies-gave-Thatcher-secret-Argentine-Falklands-War-messages.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7992651/US-spies-ga...