Capt. Roberts is the last surviving code breaker from World War II and has been honored by the Royal Mail, not to mention Her Majesty who awarded him the MBE:
A 92-year-old World War II Bletchley Park codebreaker has had a set of commemorative stamps issued in his honour.The BBC link has quite a good short video segment. Here's a longer one, on how he and his comrades broke the Lorenz cipher (code name: TUNNY) used by the Wehrmacht High Command:
Raymond "Jerry" Roberts, from Liphook in Hampshire, is the last survivor of a four-man team that cracked the German High Command's Tunny code.
The stamps feature Capt Roberts receiving his MBE from the Queen and his wartime photo.
The first programmable computer was designed and built to crack Tunny messages. The program was so secret that it was only recently declassified (in the last ten years or so) - as opposed to the Enigma program (ULTRA) which was declassified in the early 1970s. Giants truly strode the earth in those days: beating down Hitler's cryptographers and giving birth to the computer age. And while Colossus never broke Tunny, Capt. Roberts' work led to this:
Alas, I fear that I must redouble my blogging efforts to get regular readers in Milton Keynes.
Just so happens that one of my best "mates" lives there, in MK. Town was designed by a devotee of new urban design guru Melvin Webber, an American, believe it or not. It's a nice place, different than a lot of towns in England.
ReplyDeleteBletchley Park is very cool, and you almost expect "Q" to pop up when visiting.
www.bletchleypark.org
If you'd like, I'll ask my friend to pick that up.
-Mike
I've got a really good book called "The Secret Wireless War" that covers the "radio" side of Bletchley Park.
ReplyDeleteI have a cousin who lives there. Or rather, my dad's cousin's kid (Karen: adult older than me).
ReplyDeleteI've visited Bletchley Park. Fascinating place. I have several books about its activities in my collection, from the earliest to more recent works. It's sometimes over-hyped, but its work on 'Enigma' and the US work on 'Magic' undoubtedly shortened World War II by a matter of years, and probably saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Allied lives.
ReplyDelete