Posted on 11/23/2013 7:29:30 AM PST by NYer
Mavis Batey was a British student of 19, midway through her university course in German Romanticism, when she was recruited for a top-secret assignment during World War II.
“This is going to be an interesting job, Mata Hari, seducing Prussian officers,” she recalled thinking years later. “But I don’t think either my legs or my German were good enough because they sent me to the Government Code and Cipher School.”
In May 1940, Mrs. Batey — then the unmarried Mavis Lever — joined the team of code breakers at Bletchley Park, the British cryptography headquarters. Trained in the enemy’s language and endowed with a facility for words, she became a key contributor to a wartime project that remained classified for decades.
But by the time of her death on Nov. 12 at 92, Mrs. Batey was regarded in England as a national heroine. Working with Alfred Dillwyn “Dilly” Knox and other celebrated code breakers, she learned to decipher what she called the “utter gibberish” of encrypted German communications.
Battling the Enigma
Like many of her colleagues, Mrs. Batey worked on a “need-to-know” basis and did not understand at the time the significance of her efforts. In recent years, with the release of British wartime records, it was revealed that her code-breaking helped the Allies cripple the Italian navy in 1941 and assisted the 1944 Normandy invasion.
Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime prime minister, was said to have called the Bletchley Park code breakers his “geese that laid the golden eggs but never cackled.” Fueled by what Mrs. Batey described as “ersatz coffee,” they toiled in secrecy to decipher the encoded messages spat out by the Axis powers’ Enigma machines.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Have you seen any of "Foley's War?"
All of them!
Series 7 is out... Five ahead of me at my library! Woo Hoo!!!
Oh, are there more? I used to get them on DVD from the library, but then it turned up streaming on Netflix.
Netflix has through Set Six. I can’t remember if I’ve seen those or not. And that reminds me that I haven’t checked for new Midsomer Murders lately.
Thanks for the ping.
There are Enigma machines at the National Cryptologic Museum. It is located next to NSA Headquarters, Ft. George Meade, Maryland, and is open to the public.
Foyle’s War.
ITV, not BBC.
BBC America shows mostly BBC programmes from the UK, but some of its shows are actually from ITV (the BBC’s huge commercial rival in the UK), Channel 4 and Channel 5.
The Poles in recent years have certainly received their rightful praise, albeit too long in the making.
And Enigma has overshadowed other as important British codebreaking of WW2: other German codes, Italian codes and Japanese codes.
RIP.
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