R2OK!

Toggy tea slurper · Guest

We went to the aformentioned today and thought it was brillaint. For those not in the know it is near Milton Keynes.
I was a beautiful warm, sunny day which was good as most of the guided tour was outside, we found it good value for money with no hidden extras as you often find in these places.
I would recommend a visit if you are ever in or near the area, the stuff that went on here during WW2 is incredible. Anyway here are a few shots I took today, hope you enjoy.

Enigma Machine

The Colussus computer

Another code breaking machine

Bletchley post office

Ella Sailyour · Joined: 11 Dec 2006 Posts: 579 Location: Marbella, Spain

When in the UK we actually live quite close to BP.

Unfortunately, I was looking in here earlier on a slowish GPRS connection and the pics caused everything to crunch to a halt whilst it waited for the download. Couldn't you have provided external links to the pics instead?

But yes - BP has an important place in Britain's history. Without the work of all those stationed there our country would be a`different place today.

Ella
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Toggy tea slurper · Guest

I don't know how to provide external links to pictures Confused

Cherskiy · Posted: Mon Apr 09, 2007 5:47 pm Post subject:

The top shot shows one of the four-wheel Enigma machines used by the Kriegsmarine during WW2 - the pre-war commercial version and that used by the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe had three (as did the Polish copies that were delivered to the UK for analysis). At the end of 1938 the Germans added two further rotors to each set, giving operators a selection of any three.

The three rotor set had 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible initial settings whilst the four rotor set had a staggering 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This meant that simple possesion of an Enigma set wouldn't allow someone to break the codes - which made the work of Station X all the more vitally important, even to the point of allowing some intelligence gleaned from reading Enigma intercepts to go unused lest the Germans discover their cyphers had been blown.

Apart from Channel 4's "Station X" series, there's a good (and concise) chapter in the BBC book from the 70s series "The Secret War" about the Enigma machine and how the codes were broken - I occasionally see both this and the video on sale in second hand bookshops.
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