WWII Bletchley vet dies

Some of you are probably aware of Bletchley Park, the World War II British code-breaking site. Like the OSS was the ancestor of our CIA, Bletchley can be considered the parent of the Brits’ version of NSA, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). I suspect from some of the comments that several of you DWs and DWettes have worked around GCHQ folks.

Bletchley was a country estate, recorded in the 11th century in the Domesday Book. In 1937 Sir Hugh Sinclair, the head of MI6, bought the mansion and 58 acres around it out of his own pocket for use by the intelligence services because the government did not have the funds to do so. Close to many important ground transport lines, it was ideally situated midway between Oxford and Cambridge, from where many of the codebreakers were drawn. Wiki – Bletchley  You probably know the site from reading of the German Enigma encoding machines.

Bletchley was an unusual post – almost 3/4 of the staff were female. But with so many men off to war, that actually makes sense. One such was Charlotte “Betty” Reid, who passed this week at the age of 101.

A German speaker, Webb’s job involved reordering decoded messages in such a way that, if re-intercepted during forwarding to Allied commanders, the enemy would not know that their own original transmissions were being deciphered.

A member of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), Webb went on to paraphrase intercepted Japanese messages at The Pentagon in the United States in aid of the American war effort in the Pacific.

In 2015, she was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) and, in 2021, she was awarded the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest distinction, in recognition of her wartime service.

Although originally hired as a German -speaking secretary, her somewhat unusual talent surfaced.

Hailing from the village of Wythall, just south of Birmingham in the English Midlands, Webb initially worked at Bletchley Park as a secretary, which she said was “pretty boring but had to be done.”

But when it emerged that she was skilled at registering messages immediately without any training, she said she was instructed to commit to the Official Secrets Act by a “rather severe” army captain before being told to “get on with it” and start indexing some of the 10,000 messages with arrived each day.  DW

Message externals like addressees, word counts, etc. is an important part of signals intelligence.  As an example, if the Germans kept sending coded signals with 3, 4, 5, then 6 words, and started intercepting messages to Allied commands with coded 3, 4, 5, and 6 word combinations – a sharp analyst is going to take notice, maybe think German comms have been broken into, possibly even use that as a window into Allied comms.  But if they intercept coded groups of 4, 6, 7, 8, and 9 word sequences…no abnormal interest, right?

She kept shtum (hey, it’s a column about a Brit, right?) about the war and her role in it until 1975, when she started giving talks about it to various schools and organizations. She later became an advocate for women veterans in the UK.

Interesting lady.

Category: We Remember, WWII