Post by Administrator on Jan 23, 2023 1:01:33 GMT
VIA: Flashback - British Social History.
In May 1941, the Bismarck, Germany’s mightiest warship, had become a prime target after it sank one of England’s most powerful vessels, the battle cruiser Hood, in the battle of the Denmark Strait, between Iceland and Greenland. Much of the British fleet was in search of the Bismarck, which was presumed to have withdrawn to the North Atlantic around Norway.
Ms. Fawcett, then known as Jane Hughes, had just turned 20 and had been working for a time at Bletchley Park, the Buckinghamshire estate north of London where the intelligence operation known as the Government Code and Cypher School was located.
Thousands of young women worked there during the war; many, like Ms. Fawcett, had been recruited and hired from the upper social strata. They performed a variety of tasks assisting the mostly male chess geniuses, linguists, mathematicians and rogue intellectuals struggling to unscramble German military communications written in the devilishly complex disguise generated by so-called Enigma machines.
Enigma generated new codes daily, and though by 1941 the Allies had achieved some success in decrypting German missives, it remained labor-intensive hit-or-miss work that required vigilance by a chain of operatives. At Bletchley, Ms. Fawcett worked in Hut 6, where the focus was on breaking codes emitted by the German Army and the German air force, the Luftwaffe.
On May 25, 1941, Ms. Fawcett was among those in Hut 6 briefed on the search for the Bismarck.
“We all knew we’d got the fleet out in the Atlantic trying to locate her because she was the Germans’ most important, latest battleship and had better guns and so on than anybody else, and she’d already sunk the Hood,” Ms. Fawcett recalled in the book. “So it was vitally important to find where she was and try to get rid of her.”
She was just over an hour into her shift when she typed out a message from the main Luftwaffe Enigma. Reading the message, she recognized that a Luftwaffe general whose son was on the Bismarck had sought to find out if he was all right and had been informed that the ship, damaged in the previous battle, was on its way to France — to the port of Brest, in Brittany — for repair.
The message, passed instantly along the chain of command, was instrumental in finding the Bismarck, which was first spotted from the air by a seaplane and subsequently attacked by aircraft carrier torpedo bombers and swarmed by Royal Navy battleships and cruisers. It was sunk in the Atlantic west of Brest on May 27.
In May 1941, the Bismarck, Germany’s mightiest warship, had become a prime target after it sank one of England’s most powerful vessels, the battle cruiser Hood, in the battle of the Denmark Strait, between Iceland and Greenland. Much of the British fleet was in search of the Bismarck, which was presumed to have withdrawn to the North Atlantic around Norway.
Ms. Fawcett, then known as Jane Hughes, had just turned 20 and had been working for a time at Bletchley Park, the Buckinghamshire estate north of London where the intelligence operation known as the Government Code and Cypher School was located.
Thousands of young women worked there during the war; many, like Ms. Fawcett, had been recruited and hired from the upper social strata. They performed a variety of tasks assisting the mostly male chess geniuses, linguists, mathematicians and rogue intellectuals struggling to unscramble German military communications written in the devilishly complex disguise generated by so-called Enigma machines.
Enigma generated new codes daily, and though by 1941 the Allies had achieved some success in decrypting German missives, it remained labor-intensive hit-or-miss work that required vigilance by a chain of operatives. At Bletchley, Ms. Fawcett worked in Hut 6, where the focus was on breaking codes emitted by the German Army and the German air force, the Luftwaffe.
On May 25, 1941, Ms. Fawcett was among those in Hut 6 briefed on the search for the Bismarck.
“We all knew we’d got the fleet out in the Atlantic trying to locate her because she was the Germans’ most important, latest battleship and had better guns and so on than anybody else, and she’d already sunk the Hood,” Ms. Fawcett recalled in the book. “So it was vitally important to find where she was and try to get rid of her.”
She was just over an hour into her shift when she typed out a message from the main Luftwaffe Enigma. Reading the message, she recognized that a Luftwaffe general whose son was on the Bismarck had sought to find out if he was all right and had been informed that the ship, damaged in the previous battle, was on its way to France — to the port of Brest, in Brittany — for repair.
The message, passed instantly along the chain of command, was instrumental in finding the Bismarck, which was first spotted from the air by a seaplane and subsequently attacked by aircraft carrier torpedo bombers and swarmed by Royal Navy battleships and cruisers. It was sunk in the Atlantic west of Brest on May 27.