WWII Code-Breaker Dies At Age 95 (washingtonpost.com)

An anonymous reader quotes an article from the Washington Post: Jane Fawcett, a British code-breaker during World War II who deciphered a key German message that led to the sinking of the battleship Bismarck -- one of Britain's greatest naval victories during the war -- died May 21 at her home in Oxford, England. She was 95... Fluent in German and driven by curiosity, Mrs. Fawcett -- then known by her maiden name, Jane Hughes -- found work at Britain's top-secret code-breaking facility at Bletchley Park, about 50 miles northwest of London. Of the 12,000 people who worked there, about 8,000 were women. Bletchley Park later became renowned as the place where mathematician Alan Turing and others solved the puzzle of the German military's "Enigma machine," depicted in the 2014 film "The Imitation Game"...

The sinking of the Bismarck marked the first time that British code-breakers had decrypted a message that led directly to a victory in battle... Mrs. Fawcett's work was not made public for decades. Along with everyone else at Bletchley Park, she agreed to comply with Britain's Official Secrets Act, which imposed a lifetime prohibition on revealing any code-breaking activities.
Meanwhile, volunteers from The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park finally tracked down an original keyboard from the Lorenz machine used to encode top-secret messages between Hitler and his general. It was selling on eBay for 10 pounds, advertised as an old machine for sending telegrams.

Comments

Propaganda

[Anonymous Coward]

Greetings from Poland. Our enigma clone and hard work of our best code breakers is yours for free. You can forget us later. Or better still, make us the bad guys when you make a film about all this.

Re:Propaganda

[GrahamCox]

Please ignore the movies. There are many excellent books about the work of Bletchley Park, and while I can't claim to have read the majority of them, the ones I have read do acknowledge the Polish debt, and it's pretty clear that the personnel of Bletchley were extremely grateful for the head-start.

A good book for example is "The Secret Life of Bletchley Park" by Sinclair McKay

ROT13

[BlackPignouf]

EVC

Really??

[Feral Nerd]

...that led to the sinking of the battleship Bismarck -- one of Britain's greatest naval victories during the war...

Really? Sinking one dreadnought, that was one of the highlights of British WWII naval operations? I realise that there wasn't much traditional dreadnought on dreadnought action for the British surface fleet in the European theatre of operations during WWII since the Germans hardly bothered to build any dreadnoughts but the importance of the hunt for the Bismarck has quite frankly been blown up to quite ridiculous proportions. This epic conflict between the Bismarck and the Royal Navy is a bit like the epic football rivalry between Germany and Britain, it's very important to the British while the Germans hardly know it exists (They are obsessed with beating the Dutch). To the Germans the Bismarck was just another warship that was sunk during WWII albeit a pretty big and expensive one but it's not the national trauma that you'd think given what an epic status the Bismarck hunt has attained in the UK. The Norwegian campaign proved once and for all that he who rules the seas is he who can project the most air power over strategic distances, not he who owns lots of battleships because aircraft will slaughter dreadnoughts in the absence of carrier cover; so why build dreadnoughts? Germany, with a tiny surface navy, occupied Norway in a series of amphibious and airborne operations that left it painfully clear that even if the British fleet had the firepower to intervene they were not able to do so because the fleet lacked even the airpower to simply figure out what was going on let alone challenge the Luftwaffe for air superiority over the battlespace. Even if the Royal Navy had had a couple more carriers available during the Norway campaign the Germans still would have swept their aircraft from the skies because the Luftwaffe would still have outnumbered the Royal Naval Air Arm by 5:1, they could project way more airpower over strategic distances. If there was anybody left who believed that dreadnoughts were still part of the future of modern navies (Ronald Reagan was one of the last hold-outs I think) then that illusion was dispelled by Pearl Harbour, Midway and other carrier battles in the Pacific. The Bismarck was just one more nail in the coffin of the dreadnought and the death of the big battleships hit the British quite a lot harder than the Germans if only because they had invested ridiculous amounts of money in them. The Americans on the other hand quite matter of factly phased the dreadnought out in favour of carriers and, apart form Reagan bringing the USS Missouri out of mothballs for a while in a fit of romanticism and nostalgia, they never looked back. Of course the Americans could afford that in the aftermath of WWII while the British could not afford to modernise and transition to a carrier navy that could hold a candle to the old dreadnought navy in terms of size and relative firepower.

Re:Really??

[FlyHelicopters]

I don't think you quite understand what the Bismark was meant to do...

By itself, it might not have been successful, but it would have been very painful had they not stopped her.

Germany came very close to cutting the convoys off from Britian, a few more U-Boats, the Bismark and Tirpitz, and she might have done it.

Re:Really??

[serviscope_minor]

Really? Yes really.

I don't think you've understood the conditions of the time nor the battle of the Atlantic very well.

The problem wasn't the Bismark being some big super-weapon on the loose. Yes, everyone knows that carriers, especially now and even then to some extent are a better projection of power. But that wasn't the point. The UK is an island nation, and part of Germany's tactics was to cut off shipping to the UK, and additionally cut off supplies to Russia which didn't really have it's act together.

The role of the Bismark was commerce raiding. It was large enough to deal with just about any convoy escort (though the good guns on otherwise obsolete WWI era ships like the Ramilles were often a sufficient deterrent), fast enough to chase down any convoy and had better endurance and was substantially faster than the then state of the art aircraft carriers, so it could stick around sinking convoys far longer.

Also, the sea is big, really big. And back then with the state of the art locating tech, a small commerce raiding party could hide very well in the Atlantic. Merchant ships were not designed to hide and gave off smoke, making them much easier to find. But land based aircraft didn't generally have the range to find and attack a distant battleship, leaving it only open for aircraft carriers. The North Atlantic is also much harsher than the Pacific theatre, and there were a lot of very long nights, providing excellent cover for ships.

The Bismark would likely have been very dangerous if it had had escaped to be able to perform commerce raiding, as such the Bismark was a big threat.

While it's true that WWII was the clear end of the battleship as the top dog of the sea, most of WWII was not fought top-dog to top-dog. Much of the battle of the Atlantic was U boats and commerce raiders versus merchant ships, merchant ships armed with guns obsolete in WWI and outdated warships. The UK couldn't afford to commit new capital ships to escort duties, so it hardly matters what the best capital ship was.

As for the other comment, neither side in the war had a carrier planes that were anything like a match for the land based fighters of the time.

When it came down to actually hunting a capital ship it was different. There, the British Navy could afford to deploy serious force. And naturally enough, the the fatal blow to the was in fact dealt by an aircraft carrier.

Re:This is all well and good

[Sique]

See, and I come from a slightly different social background, and here, women especially in computer science, physics and math are much more common. So apparently, you raise your daughters so differently from us, that you don't have that many women in STEM. And here is the point: What are you doing differently, and why do you think your way of doing things is somehow normal?

Re:Stunning news!

[jitterman]

Maybe history, codebreaking, and the passing of a generation of people who did amazing things seems neither interesting nor worthy to you, but trust me, your needless bitching is much less so.