As We Approach Armistice Day And Remembrance Sunday.............

[10ClarionSt]

......here is a sad story of two forgotten men from Bletchley Park. All the history books tell us about Enigma, Alan Turing, Harry Hinsley etc., but Tommy Flowers and William Tutte broke the German coding machine known as Lorenz, which the Germans thought was more difficult to break than Enigma. The Lorenz was only used by high ranking military and government officials, including Adolf Hitler. Tommy Flowers and William Tutte masterminded the construction and programing of the worlds' first programable computer, which did break the Lorenz machine. For achieving this amazing feat, Flowers and Tutte were never recognized officially. The only memorial to either of them is a street named after Tommy Flowers in his home town. After the war, it's a common conception that Churchill ordered the destruction of all computer equipment at Bletchley Park in order to maintain the secret forever, but that isn't true. The Colossus was kept in use by GCHQ until 1961. The link below contains the BBC documentary, Codebreakers, and tells the true story of Tommy Flowers and William Tutte. Two amazing men. We will remember them.
https://ciceros.org/2020/11/10/tutte-and-flowers-bletchley-parks-lost-heroes/

[Redhelen72]

Tomas Harold (Tommy) Flowers (22 December 1905 - 28 October 1998) was a British Electronics Engineer. During WWII, when he worked for the General Post Office (GPO), later British Telecom (BT), he designed and co-developed Colossus , the first programmable electronic computer that was used to break the German Lorenz SZ-40/42 cipher machine .

Not really forgotten - the information is easily found

[10ClarionSt]

I bet you didn't know about him. He received nothing from the government.

[Redhelen72]

Bet all you want mate

[10ClarionSt]

You still didn't know about him till I posted this. I'm glad that you are now aware of him. Others should be too.

[rowanwitch]

The truth is so many people were involved in secret behind the scenes work which we will never know about, or be able to honour. People whose work took them away from their families yet were not treated as combatants by the communities they came from. Never treated as heroes because their front line was so very different.

[Redhelen72]

I was certainly aware of him!
He also received an OBE so the government did recognise his efforts

[Redhelen72]

Yes Rowan, my 'aunt' worked there and she hasn't been named, so many people were involved that not all will be as famous as others.

[AuntPG]

Most, if not all people, who worked at Bletchley signed the Official Secrets Act. My oldest friend (she's well into her '90's) worked there and no one knew, not even her parents. I had heard of Flowers and Tutte though.

[10ClarionSt]

Thanks Rowan. I do realize that. I've always thought that there must be many instances of heroism and bravery that we are still unaware of; many things about WW2 that we will never know. But this goes right to the top, surely? Being able to read messages from the highest levels of the German command due to the cleverness of two men? Takes some beating that. But like all service and government personnel, they signed the Official Secrets Act didn't they? Which meant the work they were doing would never be disclosed. But at least they could have received a medal for their service, surely? They didn't even get that.

[rowanwitch]

Redmans grandfather was at another site in North Wales, he knows it was war work but he couldn't say what it was other than the island he went to was heavily guarded. By profession he was a headmaster but also involved in a lot of Welsh cultural stuff. Red thought it might also be codebreaking or translating intelligence stuff

[10ClarionSt]

Yes, they were all brilliant people, but they had to have the tools to work with, as provided by Tutte and Flowers.

[AuntPG]

OP // But at least they could have received a medal for their service, surely? They didn't even get that.//

Yes they did. I've seen one.

[AuntPG]

https://www.gchq.gov.uk/information/bletchley-park-commemorative-badge

[Peter Pedant]

EXCUSE me !
they arent forgotten

wrong war if you dont mind me saying

BOTH are recognised for their contributions - Flowers being a non grad was especially remarkable - didnt the prototype run perfectly?

Tutte became a prof of pure maff - isnt it waterloo ontario ?

(Shaun Wyllie, pure maff Cge) none of the became winos

One became a spook in America ( NSA = GCHQ Albany) and got fired because he wrote an unintelligible tell all book when he was told not to.

Remember one later - Jocelyn Bell Burnett ( Quasars) - I havent had a bad career as ' the one who should have got a Nobel Prize!'

None of them got knighted - none got anhanced pensions unlike the civil servants who were above them and all of them showed PTSD

[Peter Pedant]

I think all of them would resist the comparison with the massacre of their fathers' generation in the Great War

[Peter Pedant]

Wodger mean no one knows about FLowers?
regular code breaker progs on PBS and Smithson

How long have you got?
Flowers looked at the electromechanical enigma and soon realised that the job could be much more effficiently done with valves and also knew how to optimize valve life ( keep it on 24 h a day). The only thing was it involved 1000 valves and most radios had one or two

Tutte realised that one message commenting - oops send that again - was identical but varied after the xth ( 54th ) character. He correctly divined that 'nummer' jad been shortened to nr
BUT - adding the two together would give a mixed character set which could be winkled apart - - both pieces would be german a few letters apart
Hence the x-word emphasis in all this
And he ( they ) did it - The Germans later built Lorentz.... without reset buttons....

Tutte's break gave the solution to the first wheel and part of the second ( of eleven)

The colossus ( tiddly pong tiddly pong) compared two data streams and if there was a 2.5% correlation - the a message "Proceed immediately....". exactly overlay another " the weather report......"

but the advantage in the winkling is that the successful result was that the two messages needed to be German - so you had a clue - two actually

( I mean there were 26 000 at the end) They had clerks reading German novels to do word counts and likely context words.

only about 10% messages were ever read.

a complete solution ( all messages read ) was only acheived by the americans in the pacific in .... April May 1945 - and that was JN 25 which was a hand code.

so there

This was also done in America with the Russian one time pads which were recycled (!) two times !! Venona project. 1945-52
and that led to a Russian data stream which Meredith cd split. He was watched in his work by Monsieur X who later turned out to be - - a kremlin spy !

honestly the truth is out there

https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/about/cryptologic-heritage/historical-figures-publications/publications/coldwar/venona_story.pdf

[10ClarionSt]

Thanks PP. Apart from that, what did they REALLY do? :o)