How Bletchley Park helped sink The Bismarck
Techniques developed by Codebreakers at Bletchley Park helped locate The Bismarck, where it was sunk by the Royal Navy 75 years ago. This month’s brand new episode of the Bletchley Park Podcast tells the story of how Bletchley Park helped to find the iconic German battleship in the Atlantic.
Some of the pioneering techniques developed as part of the Bletchley Park codebreaking operation, namely Direction Finding and traffic analysis, played a crucial role in locating the flagship of the German fleet.
In the latest instalment in the It Happened Here series, Bletchley Park’s Research Historian, Dr David Kenyon, explains how the ship’s destruction was vital for the Allies, both strategically and symbolically. He says “If it had been allowed to do the job it was built for, it would have been a disaster for the Allies. (Sinking) it was a vital good news story for the British.”
Jane Fawcett worked in Hut 6 from 1940. She recalls “I happened to be on duty. Everybody knew the main part of our fleet was trying to intercept The Bismarck. I worked for 24 hours because I just happened to get (the message showing it was heading for the French port of Brest). We were lucky enough to be here, able to do what may be the most important thing that any of us have ever done in our lives. We didn’t realise it at the time, but we do now.”
Dr Kenyon explains how intelligence alone was not a silver bullet. “You never get a piece of information that’s entirely unequivocal, that says what your enemy is going to do. All you ever get is hints. It was a combination of a whole series of diverse hints and a healthy dollop of luck that made the operation a success. Signals intelligence is one part of that jigsaw which, if you took it away, the outcome might have been very different.”
You can hear more from Dr Kenyon, alongside Hut 6 Veteran Jane Fawcett, in the May 2016 episode of the Bletchley Park Podcast, The Bismarck, out now.