Touch Points: Enigma and the Codebreakers of Bletchley Park

Cue the Alexandre Desplat soundtrack

I could give a lot of credit here to The Imitation Game (2014) and Benedict Cumberbatch, Kiera Knightly, Mark Strong, Matthew Goode, and Allen Leech. I have watched the movie so many times. But the idea of Bletchley Park has stood out in my mind for far longer than that movie has been out.

The idea of a massive code breaking scheme that was kept secret, not just from the Germans during World War II, but from the entire rest of the country is not just amazing, but fascinating. It has spun off into so many mediums.

I don’t know when I first encountered reference to the enigma machine, but it has cropped up in so many places that I have found to be favorite historical fiction pieces. The movie, Enigma (2001), with Kate Winslet and Dougray Scott is certainly a start. The TV show, Bletchley Circle, is yet another spin into a fictionalized world of code breakers - but not just code breakers. The women who were employed at Bletchley Park. And maybe that’s where my fascination comes in. Women who were able to break the mold, in large part because it was wartime and they were needed. (Also, this is the show that introduced me to Anna Maxwell Martin. She is fantastic.)

One of my absolute favorite pieces of fiction around Bletchley Park, however, is Kate Quinn’s The Rose Code. Published in 2021, it follows three girls who worked in different huts at Bletchley Park, both during their days at Bletchley, but also after. The fictional main characters are all built around real people, and there are a few bigger names that do come into the story as well. Much like The Imitation Game, I have read this book again and again.

I have been looking at World War II history from another angle recently, and was trying to think back to what brings me back to this period of time over and over again. We have a lot of lessons to learn from that war, lessons that we are still learning. For women, there was a lot of freedom gained that was almost immediately lost when the war ended. In some ways, I think looking at how women coped with that loss is interesting from today’s perspective.

What interests me even more, however, is the sheer brilliance of the operation at Bletchley Park. The code they needed to crack, the minds that did that, and the calculated logic of concealing what they knew so that the Germans wouldn’t find out that the code had been cracked.

If you’re curious, there are websites that imitate the Enigma machines. It’s worth looking up and trying to code and decode a message to yourself - just to see if you can. It’s not quite as easy as you would think. It encrypts messages in a way that seems primitive compared to today’s higher level computational encryption. But at the time, it absolutely flummoxed the British. And playing around with it, knowing what technology they were working with - it makes sense.

And speaking of my earlier post about history in place: yes, Bletchley Park is absolutely on my bucket list of places to visit.