The Imitation Game: Back to Bletchley Park

The film The Imitation Game (IG) has reached the cinemas and film festvals in some countries. Elsewhere many newspapers have already carried reviews of it, so I need say no more about it as a film. In case you don't already know, it's a 'biopic' based on the life of British mathematician turned computer scientist turned cryptographer Alan Turing. The prevailing opinion rates it Oscar material. But I'm a historian (see my Profile on the right), and historical films are always more or less distant adaptations of history or biography, so they irk me.

The central backdrop to IG is the converted Victorian mansion at Bletchley Park (BP), north of London, that was bought and taken over by the UK Government Code and Cypher School just before the Second World War. Now it so happens, due to one of those fortunate coincidences which have enriched my life, that I spent a day touring BP only a few weeks ago and wrote two blog posts about it. To find them quickly, enter bletchley in the Search box on the right. It was not my intent to write a history of the place; for that, see Sources below. But my source and I are closer to the historical truth than IG. The film makes too much depend on the brilliant mind of one person so as to accentuate the tragedy of his demise. I sympathise with it as biography, because when I was young Britain was still living in the Dark Ages of its hypocrisy towards homosexuals. But there were upwards of 9,000 select bright people working at BP, including as many translators as cryptologists; not to mention the little band of Polish mathematicians who had prised out the initial reverse engineering of the German Enigma machine before the War began. Bill Tutte, for instance, a Cambridge chemistry graduate, deduced through mathematical analysis how another German encryption machine, the Lorenz, worked without ever having seen one. Although Turing had the fundamental idea that all mental operations convertible into binary coding were computable, he never actually built a computer himself. His first decryption machine, the Bombe, was an electro-mechanical device. The first real programmable computer, the Colossus in 1944, was the work of Tommy Flowers, son of a bricklayer and never went to university, and his fellow Post Office engineers. All this is not to diminish Turing's importance – he was the most influential thinker and team leader at BP – but onlybto put him in perspective. Churchill said that Turing made the biggest single contribution to Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany.

Given the innacuracies, I won't spend time here discussing the more theoretical question of whether encrypting and decrypting by crptographers can be considered a form of translating. Just one remark. The film does mention that a test for potential recruits at BP was speed at solving crossword puzzles. Some people are good at it; I for one am not in spite of my wide reading. This leads me to suspect that there is specialised wiring for it in the brain as there is for translating, and that its implantation precedes education.

Anyway I'm not the only one to condemn the film as history. An article in today's Guardian Unlimited concludes:

Historically, The Imitation Game is as much of a garbled mess as a heap of unbroken code. For its appalling suggestion that Alan Turing might have covered up for a Soviet spy, it must be sent straight to the bottom of the class.

So by all means go and see IG; but bear in mind that films are entertainment, biography is speculative, and even history can only attempt to tell the truth.

Sources
Tommy Flowers. Wikipedia. 2014.

Bletchley Park, Home of the Codebreakers: Guidebook. Bletchley Park Trust, 2005. 48 p., many illustrations. Available through Amazon.

Turing machines. Wikipedia, 2014.

Bombe. Wikipedia. 2014.

Alex von Tunzelmann. The Imitation Game: inventing a new slander to insult AlanTuring. Guardian Unlimited, 20 November 2014.
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/20/the-imitation-game-invents-new-slander-to-insult-alan-turing-reel-history or click here.

Image
Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game
Source: www.thetimes.co.uk

Medical Interpreting: the Ideal and the Reality

My own experience as a medical interpreter was brief and limited to a single patient. To find out about it, enter cullera in the Search box on the right.

The organizations of professional medical interpreters always emphasize the dangers of translation errors between patients and their doctors. They often cite the tragic case of Willy Ramirez, an American Latino baseball player who was left paralyzed because of a misunderstanding over the Spanish word intoxicado. (It means poisoned and may have nothing to do with alcohol.) When children are pressed into service, it may become even more dangerous as well as very stressful for the kids. Well, those organizations are right.

"A study by the American College of Emergency Physicians in 2012 analyzed interpreter errors that had clinical consequences, and found that the error rate was significantly lower for professional interpreters than for ad hoc interpreters 12 percent as opposed to 22 percent. And for professionals with more than 100 hours of training, errors dropped to 2 percent."

Hardly surprising. Ad hoc here means untrained and inexperienced. In some countries, like Britain and the United States, training is now available to those who have the time and money. What should the training cover, assuming the students are already competent as general interpreters?

1. Medical terminology and phraseology. Everyone thinks of this first, but there's more to it than they usually realize. There are different levels of medical language. There's the technical level used by health professionals between themselves; then there is the level they use to communicate with lay people who only know a popular 'register' of it or don't know it at all. Take the following example.

Technical: coronary thrombosis
Popular: heart attack
Uneducated and children: sharp chest pain.

A friend of mine at the University of Valladolid has just co-authored a paper about how medical language uses metaphors to translate between the technical and popular levels.
Expert Interpreters should know all the registers and how to use them. Many local health administrations now issue glossaries in the languages most spoken in their communities.

2. Basic knowledge of medicine, first aid and anatomy in both languages at Wikipedia or nursing level. If the doctor says, "I think your meniscus is torn. Does it hurt?" the patient will likely not know where the meniscus is, but the interpreter must.

3. Dealing with people (and with oneself) in stressful and even dangerous circumstances. Patients mustn't be made more nervous than they already are. Quite the contrary. Sometimes it's the medical personnel who are the problem, because they won't listen quietly and with an open mind for example. (In my own case I had trouble convincing the doctors that the patient wasn't drunk but suffering from dementia.) And of course we can't have the interpreer fainting at the sight of blood.

4. Medical ethics. The interpreter is part of the medical team and must respect the same rules about, for instance, what can or cannot be revealed to a patient's family.

Ideally, therefore, most medical interpreting would only be done by trained and qualified interpreters. But there are some 'flies in the ointment'. Where do you find such interpreters speaking the required languages, and how do you ensure they're available when and where needed?

Here's where we hit the reality.

"Thirteen years ago, the state of Oregon recognized the problem and required doctors and hospitals to start using professional interpreters. The Affordable Care Act also has expanded the kinds of materials that hospitals and insurers are required to translate for people who don't speak English. But more than a decade after its state law passed, Oregon still has trouble getting all patients the medical interpretation help they need."
"Eby [Helen Eby a certified medical interpreter in Oregon] says Oregon has about 3500 medical interpreters [i.e, interpreters who can be called in on medical assignments]. But only about 100 of those have the right qualifications. So, you have a 3 percent chance of getting a qualified or certified interpreter in Oregon right now,' she says, 'That's pretty low in my opinion'"

This comes in a report not from some underdeveloped country lacking medical infrastructures but from an American state with a highly developed hospital system.

Nor will the situation improve any time soon. I'm a supporter of telephone interpreting, which ought to make the limited supply of EMIs more widely available. But it turns out telephone interpreting has its own problems for medical interpreting: read the full report referenced below. Another solution ought to be to train more EMIs. However,

" She [Eby] says it takes a long time and costs a lot of money to become certified. And after going through all that training, a person may find that he or she can make more money or have a more stable lifestyle in another career – like being a translator for court reporting. That's because medical interpreters tend to be [classed as] consultants and don't get paid to travel. The hours can also be sparse and sporadic."

So part of the problem and its potential solution is financial. Upgrading courses should be directed first to working interpreters who already have general experience, and they should be low-cost and subsudized. EMIs need to be better paid, and there should be a large difference between their tariff and that of untrained interpreters so as to provide an incentive for the latter to upgrade.

Meanwhile I contend that the mass, the other 97%, must be recognized, studied and incorporated, not ignored. At very least, MS should be kept informed and given advice. Something along these lines:

"The interpreter assigned to you for this case is a competent general interpreter but has not qualified as an Expert Medical Interpreter (EMI). [Or in some instances, "The interpreter… has little or no experience of interpreting and has not qualified…] Be aware that the danger of mistranslations is substantially greater when the interpreter is not an EMI, just as the danger of misdiagnosis increases if the physician is not a specialist.

Here are some things you can do to help.

If you have a bilingual glossary or patient information material about the medical condition, get it to the interpreter as soon as possible.

Does what the interpreter is saying make sense and does it fit the clinical picture? If not, ask the interpreter to repeat, and if the inconsistency persists ask for an explanation of the translation.

Is the interpretation much shorter than the original? If so, check with the interpreter that nothing has been left out.

Do not use close relatives of the patient or children unless there is absolutely no alternative. Their translations are likely to be affected by their emotional involvement.

Interpreting is very tiring. Try to give your interpreter a break from time to time.

If the interpreter continually makes mistakes, ask for another.

And to the interpreters themselves:
You are a member of the medical team, subject to medical ethics. Do not attempt to intervene in the treatment or contest the doctors.

There are surely some things I've left out. But if the above advice were taken, it would at least be better than leaving the MS and the interpreter to sink or swim.

Sources
Kristian Foden Vencil. In the hospital, a bad translation can destroy a life. Shots, Health News from NPR, October 2014. http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/10/27/358055673/in-the-hospital-a-bad-translation-can-destroy-a-life?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=health, or click here.

Beatriz Méndez Cendón et al. On the comprehension of common medical metaphorical terms / Las metáforas médicas: Un recurso para la comprensión de conceptos para el lego. Publication pending, 2014.

Image
Doctor, patient and Spanish interpreter. Source: Shots, Health News from NPR.

Belgian Nuns and Chinese Students as Wartime Interpreters

This year being the centennial of the outbreak of World War I (the 'Great War') in 1914, there has been an abundance of articles about it. Not to be outdone, my favourite language magazine The Linguist devotes a section of its current issue to Languages at War. One of the articles is Emerging from the Great War by Sandrijn Van Den Noortgate. As Sandrijn is Belgian, it's natural that some of her article is about Belgians. However, she also produces a surprise: the interpreters of the Chinese Labour Corps. The British army recruited this corps to relieve the workload for the fighting troops on the Western Front, and estimates of its size range from 92,000 to 200,000. Some 40,000 were also recruited by the French.

But first the Belgians.

"As the Germans advanced through Belgium, people fled with around 250,000 crossing the North Sea to England. Very few knew any English, so help was needed, and this was often found with women's organisations… They organised themselves into volunteer groups, such as the Women's Emergency Corps and Women's Catholic League and took care of refugees by providing lodgings, healthcare and interpreting services. As well as interpreting, these volunteers were cultural brokers…
Some were Belgians or had spent time in Belgium. The congregation of the Ursuline Sisters of Tildonk, for example, originated in Belgium, coming to the UK in the 1850s. It was a very international community and, from 1895 onwards, all novices spent a year at the convent in Haacht, Belgium [see image]. Many of them therefore knew at least some Flemish. As the Ursulines wished to propagate the Christian faith through community service, it is likely that some of the nuns volunteered as interpreters. Belgian priests were also a good source of interpreting."

So here we have an example of a religious order producing Native Interpreters because it was an international organisation – as are, of course, many religious organisations of all faiths. Also of how the contexts in which the organisations work draw them to interpreting. Religion has been a great stimulus for interpreting as it has been for written translation, and it still is. See the numerous mentions of church interpreters on this blog.

The very different story of the Chinese Labour Corps takes us to the other side of the globe and of humanity. But there are connections. First the Churches. Many of the labourers were Christians and were recruited by missionaries. And then much of what we know about the labourers' sufferings comes from the diary of Father John Van Welleghen, a Belgian parish priest in Flanders who kept a diary throughout the war. His entries reflect the sympathetic attitude of the local people towards victims of the abysmally racist British Army's harsh methods. Though volunteers, they had signed contracts committing them to three years of military discipline and they were segregated in camps under armed guard. The French behaved slightly better; they at least allowed many Chinese to stay on in France after the armistice. A Chinese phrase book prepared by the British Army is suggestive: Less talk, more work, Why don't you eat this food, This is a bad business.

Which brings us to the language problem.

Most of the labourers were illiterate peasants. One solution might have been to teach some of them basic English or French, but it would have been slow. Then the recruiters in China hit on an unexpected pool of ready-made Native Translators. English and French were being widely taught in Chinese universities and missionary colleges.

"Along with the mainly illiterate peasants came a few hundred ambitious Chinese students to act as interpreters, keen to discover new ideas and European culture. They found themselves interacting with a class of Chinese they had not encountered before. In Chinese society of the time… an educated person would have no contact with the illiterate masses. Yet the war threw them together, and with lasting consequences."

Since those consequences were social and political, they are beyond the scope of this blog. However, they constitute an interesting example of the effects of interpreting on the interpreter.

One interpreter stands out as a particularly valuable source, because he later published his memoirs. His name was Gu Xingqing.

"Gu's book is the only book-length account of the First World War by a Chinese national known to exist… Gu tells the story of his journey from his home village in China to Europe, his work in France and Belgium and his return home. Although published nearly two decades after the events, Gu's account proves to be highly accurate in terms of dates and events. His main source… were the notes he had taken in Europe but which he lost during a Japanese raid… in Shanghai in 1932."

Unfortunately it's not available in English. But it stands alongside Mantoux's account of the Paris Peace Conference or the Barón de las Torres' report on the Hitler-Franco meeting at Hendaye as a case where the most reliable source for historians is the notes taken by the interpreters.


Correction
Sandrijn's article starts off with an important error. Her subtitle reads, "The professionalisation of interpreting began during WW1." The statement only makes any sense if all interpreting is equated with conference interpreting; and we may observe that Sandrijn, according to her profile in the magazine, is herself a conference interpreter. Professional Conference Interpreters tend to be dismissive of other branches of interpreting. The facts are that the French had professionalised trade interpreting in the Levant and in Canada (les Interprètes du Roy) by the 17th century; that their army had a corps of interpreters for its North African campaigns in the 19th century; that the British had professionalised their diplomatic interpreting in the Middle and Far East by the mid-19th century (see my article on Ernest Satow); that Mr Melas in the Sherlock Holmes story The Greek Interpreter was a professional court and tourist-guide interpreter in late Victorian London; and that even Paul Mantoux, the father of modern conference interpreting, was a wartime Professional Military Interpreter before he was assigned to the Paris Peace Conference. There are photos of him in his army uniform. And so on.

Sources
Sandrijn Van Den Noortgate. Emerging from the Great War. The Linguist, vol. 53, no. 5, pp. 10-11, 2014, The Linguist is published by the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIoL), London. Go to http://thelinguist.uberflip.com/t/34433 or click here.

Helen Fitzwilliam. First World War: China's forgotten foreign legion. The World Today, vol. 70, no. 3, 2014. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publication/first-world-war-china%E2%80%99s-forgotten-foreign-legion or click here.
There's a short documentary film attached to the article.

Gu Xingqing. Wikipedia, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu_Xingqing or click here.

Images
1. Tildonk Ursuline Convent. Source: Deelnemers, Tildonk.
2. British officer with CLC labourers. Photographer: 2nd Lt. David McLellan. Source: Ministry of Information Official Collection.

At the Gateway to Spain: Hitler, Franco, Pétain and their Interpreters

October 23 marks the anniversary of the famous meeting between Hitler and Franco in the railway station of the strategic French frontier town of Hendaye (Spanish Hendaya) in 1940. Hitler came as conqueror of most of Western Europe and most recently France. Franco was the victor in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. Both were members of the alliance of fascist dictators called the Axis. Yet despite their initial cordiality and nine hours of talks, neither of them got what he'd come for.

There was a post on this blog about it in 2010. Since neither dictator spoke the other's language, the meeting could not have gone ahead without interpreters. Three interpreters were involved, two German (Gross and Schmidt) and one Spanish (the Barón de la Torres), but only Gross and the Spaniard actually interpreted that day. The single Professional Expert, Schmidt, was sidelined because he didn't work in Spanish, but he was there to supervise and observe. De las Torres was an Advanced Native Translator who had learnt German well as a foreign affairs official. As for Gross, we know about him only that he wasn't an Expert and was not really up to the task.

The post was well received; one comment described it as "like looking at a film." But 2010 is already a long time ago. So this year, with some additional information at my disposal, I've retrieved the post from where it's buried in the blog and worked it up into a full article. And for good measure, I've thrown in the post from 2012 about Hitler's subsequent meeting immediately afterwards with France's Pétain, likewise interpreter mediated.

So if you're interested in the history of diplomatic interpreting, or in Spain's ambivalent role in World War II, or in spying, get over to my page on academia.edu (https://independent.academia.edu/BHARRIS, or click here) and open or download the article At the Gateway to Spain.

Ninth of October — Work in Progress

Having more or less recovered from the tiredness that beset me after the journey to Ireland and England, I can now foresee regular resumption of this blog no later than October 23. That's the anniversary of the interpreter-mediated meeting between Hitler and Franco in 1940.

Meanwhile I'm preparing my survey and taxonomy of interpreting for publication. A Spanish translation was published some 20 years ago, but for some reason the English original has lain gathering dust. Unfortunately part of the file has been corrupted in the meantime and has to be reconstituted.

I want to thank all the people who made my Ireland-England trip possible and turned it into a happy memory. The cheerful staff of Dublin City University and the COLING conference, my fellow members of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL), my kind English cousins who drove me around and the staff at Bletchley Park. And last but not least the ground staff of Ryanair.

Ryanair is a very successful low-cost Irish airline. Not only are their flights dirt cheap if you fly on the right days, but they operate services that nobody else does. Non-stop flights from Valencia to Dublin for example. But they don't have a good reputation for customer service. Well, I too have had a moment of anxiety with them and it's no joke navigating through their online reservation system, But I must say that on this occasion their ground service for passengers with a mobility problem was impeccable at every airport: efficient and friendly.

Incidentally, we decided in Dublin that the next COLING will be held in Osaka, Japan, in late 2016.

I break silence today because it's another anniversary. El Nou d'Octubre (Ninth of October), the national day of Valencia. For earlier posts about it, enter octubre in the Search box on the right. It's the day when King James I of Aragon entered the city, making it finally Christian. He'd arrived nearby with his army a little earlier, on September 28, 1238, and he used the intervening days to negotiate, with the aid of Jewish translators, a bloodless rendition by the Moors. Meanwhile he camped his army on the stretch of Mediterranean seashore where I now live and which is today called Pinedo. It's five km south of the city centre. There's a stone cross to mark the site, but it's had to be moved inland because of coast erosion. James wasn't only a formidable warrior, he was also a very able administrator and there are still vestiges of his administration. Hence the Valencian College of Notaries is the oldest professional association of notaries in Spain; their current building is a landmark.

Want to celebrate it with me? There's a rousing performance of the Valencian national anthem on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esDfiT4H_XM or click here.

But if you fancy something less political, go to YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXHcc12kWYY or click here.

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The Senyera, the Valencian flag.

My Pilgrimage to Bletchley (conclusion)

This post is the conclusion of the preceding one, which please read first.


Japanese
When I was a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London in the late 1940s, my best friend was a linguist named Peter Judd. He was a Natural Bilingual: mother French, father English. But his mother had died while he was very young and he'd been educated in England. So his English was dominant and he'd also learnt the usual grammar school languages: French and Latin, and perhaps Greek or German. By the time I met him, he was doing a PhD in phonetics under the influential linguist J R Firth. But during WWII he was called up for service in the Royal Navy. However, to his surprise, the Navy didn't send him to sea; instead it sent him on a crash course to learn Japanese. He never told me what he did with his Japanese. In the 1940s and for long afterwards it was still secret. Now, at BP, I began to understand.

"After Pearl Harbor… the need for Japanese linguists for military and intelligence work became acute… The War Office [which had previously refused funding for Japanese courses] clamoured for Japanese speakers and SOAS set up a special course for grammar school boys in their last year at school… But SOAS was bombed and the course did not start until May 1942... They also ran a 10-week course in Japanese radio signals."

I used to think that all the work on breaking the Japanese codes had been done by the Americans. While the Germans were developing Enigma, the Japanese had been developing their own machine for their diplomatic codes. The US Army code-named it Purple. The Americans broke into its code by 1940, and the intelligence obtained from it, which they called Magic, became the equivalent of the British Ultra. However, the Japanese used many more totally different codes and ciphers than the Germans during the course of the war, probably 55 in all. The most important of them operationally was their naval code JN25. It was decrypts of JN25 that enabled the Americans to prepare for the Battle of Midway and to shoot down Admiral Yamamoto's plane over the Solomon Islands – this last exploit a terrible blow to Japanese morale.

But the British too worked on JN25, and Hut 7 at BP also had a section that worked on Japanese Army Air Force Codes. The British had their own reasons. Large pieces of what was then still the British Empire lay in the Pacific theatre of war. Thus it was JN25 decrypts that gave them warning of a Japanese attack on the British fleet at Colombo, which was intended to be another Pearl Harbor.

"HMS Anderson was the Intelligence Unit of the Eastern Fleet's Headquarters at Colombo, linked to Bletchley Park. They were working one sultry afternoon in Colombo on a message that described plans for a massive attack somewhere. Then they spelt out the name of the place that was to be clobbered – KO-RO-N-BO. An electric shock ran through the up-to-then relaxed office."

Admiral Somerville moved his fleet out of Colombo in time.

The intercept stations

Most of the enemy communications traffic was transmitted by shortwave radio. That was the Achilles heel that made it possible to intercept it. But shortwave has serious limitations, not only in its geographical range but also because its quality varies according to the time of day. To maintain constant surveillance, many radio monitoring posts were needed and some of them had to be moved around as the Japanese advanced. Thus, as we have just seen in the Colombo example, BP was more than BP itself. It was the coordinating centre of a far-flung web of outstations and listening posts. There was more to BP than meets the visitor's eye.

Having absorbed as much as we could of BP in one day, we pilgrims retired to a good meal at the Three Trees in Milton Keynes. It's typical of a current trend in England: an old pub turned comfortable restaurant. Seventy years on and no reminder of the astute heroism we had been witnessing down the road. To sum up, if you're in London with a day to spare and you're interested in the history of cryptology, computers, translation or WW2, don't miss Bletchley Park.

References
Sue Jarvis. Japanese Codes. New Edition. Report 6. National Codes Centre, Bletchley Park Trust, 2009.

Hugh Denham. Codebreakers. Edited by F. H. Hinsley and A. Stripp. Oxford University Press, 1993.

Michael Smith. The Emperor's Codes: Bletchley Park's Role In Breaking Japan's Secret Cyphers. Penguin, 2010.

Image
Flowerdown, Hampshire, UK listening station. It was linked to BP and was bombed twice in one week.
Source: www.alanturing.net

My Bletchley Pilgrimage

On my way home from Dublin to Valencia I stopped off in England. There the help of a younger relative enabled me to fulfil a long-cherished ambition. It was to make a pilgrimage to Bletchley Park (BP). BP is one of the places where programmable electronic computers were invented as a by-product of the Second World War (WW2). It is also where the father of computer science, Alan Turing, worked during that war. I saw his office, now stripped bare, and the little house in the stables area where he also worked. One guesstimate has it that the work accomplished at BP shortened the European war by two to four years and that without it the outcome would have been uncertain.

BP is at Milton Keynes, about an hour by car or by train (from Euston station) north of London. It was originally a fine country mansion in its own park before it was taken over by the British government for its Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) on the eve of WW2. For a long time the work done there was kept secret even after the war. Churchill didn't want the Russians to know about it. He even had its early computer, the Colossus, dismantled; though a replica has been rebuilt in recent years and is on view. Like many others, I first learnt about it with the publication of Winterbotham's book The Ultra Secret, in 1974 (see References). Since then numerous other books and articles have been published about it, Nevertheless I learnt many things on my visit and had some surprises. Here are my impressions.

Scale
Clearly BP needed a large and varied staff of cryptologists, translators, engineers, etc. However, the way the temporary wartime 'huts' were disposed throughout the grounds without ruining the park-like environment makes it difficult to imagine. In fact "in January 1945, at the peak of codebreaking efforts, some 9000 personnel were working at Bletchley." They used some 400 teleprinters. One wonders where they put them all.

Preparedness
The fact that the BP site was taken over on the very eve of the outbreak of war might lead one to think that the British were poorly prepared for the cryptology tussle. There was, however, a long continuous history behind it that went back to the First World War. The GC&CS began in 1919 in a room, Room 40, at the Admiralty in London. Three outstanding personalities symbolise its continuity. One of them was Commander Alistair Denniston, who was its operational head from 1919 to1942. As such he initiated and supervised the move to BP. It was also Denniston who realised that the enemy's use of electromechanical cipher machines meant that formally trained mathematicians would be needed to decode them. Another was Dilly Knox, a papyrologist who turned cryptographer back in Admiralty days and became BP's head cryptographer until his very untimely death in 1943. And the third was none other than Winston Churchill, who was First Lord of the Admiralty when Room 40 was established in WW1 and continued his support as Prime Minister into WW2. When a group at BP complained about insufficient resources, he wrote a typical minute on their letter,

"Action this day make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done."

Enigma and Lorenz
Enigma is the German coding machine that everyone has heard of. It had a long history, starting as a commercially available device in the 1920s. However, the German army also came to have another, equally important machine, the Lorenz. It was important because once it was brought into service in 1942, it was used for high-level communication between the German High Command in Berlin and army commands throughout occupied Europe. It was therefore imperative to do the reverse engineering of it. BP cryptographers succeeded in deducing its workings without ever having seen one; which has been described as "one of the greatest intellectual feats of World War II." So I learnt at BP to distinguish between the Enigma and the Lorenz, each with different workings and a different target.

Between the wars: the Poles
One of the surprises at BP is the monument to three young Polish cryptographers.

The first to discover the wiring plan of Enigma were not the British but the Poles. The Polish equivalent of GC&CS was already intercepting German Enigma traffic throughout the period 1930-1938. In 1928 an alert Polish customs officer had intercepted an Enigma that was being shipped to the German embassy in Warsaw, and that enabled the Polish Cipher Bureau to examine it. A team of brilliant mathematicians was recruited at Poznan University to work on its cryptology. Most of their work was based on a branch of pure mathematics known as permutation theory. They succeeded, and in 1938 they made a generous gift of their findings to French and British delegations. The British one included Turing and Knox. Their contribution to the British side of the cipher war was invaluable.

The translators
Once the wireless traffic was decrypted, it was still in German. For it to be useful to British intelligence, a large staff of specialised German to English translators had to work in shifts around the clock. There were nothing like enough Professional or Expert Military Translators available to meet the demand. But fortunately there was a good supply of Advanced Native Translators, because German language and literature was still widely taught in British secondary schools. (That's how I learnt it myself, even while the Germans were bombing us!) So graduates from the 'grammar schools', having learnt one foreign language and probably more, were considered prime candidates for further training.

The situation was not so favourable for other languages except French. Among the languages needed was Italian. Though the use of Italian was not comparable to that of German, it was Italian decrypts that enabled the British to win the Battle of Cape Matapan in 1941. The British fleet commander came personally to BP to thank the cryptographers.

I'll deal later with Japanese.

To be continued.

References
Group Captain F(red) W. Winterbotham, CBE. The Ultra Secret. New York, etc.: Harper & Row, 1974.

Bletchley Park official website. www.bletchleypartk.org.uk.

Bletchley Park. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bletchley_Park or click here.

John Pether. The Post Office at War. Bletchley Park Reports 11. Bletchley Park Trust, 2011.

Frank Carter. The First Breaking of Enigma. New edition. Report 2. Bletchley Park Trust, 2008.

The Bletchley Park Reports are available on site at BP.

Battle of Cape Matapan. Wikipedia, 2014.

There are good videos, some of them complete BBC documentaries, about BP on YouTube.

Image
The Mansion at Bletchley Park. Source: www.english-heritage.org.uk