Hello Natasha & Debbie, hope you are keeping well. I live 10 minutes from Bletchley Park and have been there many times. I can honestly say that this place is amazing. Since this video was made there have been a few changes. Some new areas have been renovated so there's even more to see. Too much to write about here. It's a lot to take in for just one visit. You do tend to miss things. For instance, the entrance as you walk in from getting your tickets is actually make to look like a train carriage. this gives you the impression that you've just got off the train from Bletchley train station where many codebreakers traveled to, to get to Bletchley Park. I do hope when you go on your holiday, sorry vacation :p that you will let us know when you're visiting Bletchley Park as it would be great to meet up maybe. One thing about the National Museum of Computing. If you are planning to visit there I would highly recommend visiting their website. www.tnmoc.org/days-open They are only open on selected days and and they prefer you to book your tickets online. Thanks for the great video, take care.

My aunt worked there briefly. She never said what she did, not even to my dad.

Natasha & Debbie. When you expressed surprise that the Bombe is not a computer, you may be confusing this machine with the Colossus computer. The Bombe was developed from the Polish Bomba, and was used to decipher Enigma codeded messages. Collosus was the world's first programmable computer and was developed to decipher German High Command signals that had been encoded in the Lorenz cipher Geheimschreiber (Secret Writer), which has been described as fantastically difficult to crack. A modern replica of a Collosus computer is at Bletchley Park.

Great video girls THANK YOU so much. As a Brit I think “most” Brits have heard of Bletchley Park but did not understand the details of the code breakers. It’s UNFORTUNATE that 99.9% of Americans have never even heard of this place and the complex work accomplished there. The very first fully electronic computer was built there called Colossus after Bombe.

Hi from the U👑K… a snippet of info. Catherine. Princess of Wales grandmother ( Valerie Glassborow )was a code breaker at Bletchley… ❤️

Totally agree. Bomb was a mechanical decoder, but Tommy Flowers really did build the world's first all electronic, programmable computer.

Agreed - He is mentioned quite a lot at Bletchley, although the computing side of things is not a huge part of the site.

Tommy Flowers used his own money to fund the building of the first computer nearly bankrupting himself and destroying his marriage only to be written out of history in favour of a Phd who was later hounded into committing suicide by an elitist homophobic British establishment. And being totally honest all that has changed in the last 80 years are the names of the elitist bigots and their victims.

@@davidfoster8503 Electro-mechanical

Britain got involved in two wars that had nothing to do with them all Europe does is send Britain illegals migrant criminals & freeloaders

Britain got involved in two wars that had nothing to do with them all Europe does is send Britain illegals migrant criminals & freeloaders

Yes it’s good to see Tommy not entirely forgotten

An London Eastender

I remember reading that he spent £400 building the colossus machines out of his own pocket. After the war, he was given a cah prize for designing and building it, of you guessed it £400 There was also something about it being moved from the Post office Laboratories where it was made, to a secret location by truck. This location was so secret, that they loaded it onto a trailer, drove to a roadside junction where a lorry came along from the secret location hooked it up and drove off with it, and where it was going nobody was told. That place was of course |Bletchley.

Jeremy Clarkson made an excellent documentary on Tommy Flowers, it's well worth looking for.

There was an argument between the brits and yanks over the 4th rota where because the brits couldn't solve it, the yanks threatened to take the enigma files to america.

@@barbaradyson6951 bullshit

@@barbaradyson6951 Another Fantasy about America,

Likewise … as a Brit who’s lived and worked in the US for most of my adult life, its nice to see a celebration of sorts of the brainpower and creativity of the people who helped defeat Hitler.

Bill Tutte (W.T. Tutte). And in the general team, we could add Gordon Welchman and John Tiltman, plus a host of others, including Joan Clarke.

My mother in law worked a "radio station " in Yorkshire she never said what she did

@@geoffpriestley7310 that generation were fantastic, I think the attitude was definitely ' were all in it together' at that time.

My father knew an elderly couple who both were at Bletchley during the war, but in different parts who never met till after the war. neither told each other what they had done during the war till the 1970's when security was dropped.

FGor those interested, there's a DVD called 'Bletchley Circle' about some ex-Bletchley girls after the war getting involved in modern crime-solving. Worth a watch!

Hi, if you go to Manchester, there's a statue of Alan Turing sat on a bench in Sackville Gardens. It is part of the gay village and worth a visit.

That's amazing. Goes to prove how seriously people took the official secrets act back then. On fear of death, but mostly patriotism, pride and honour. My relative worked their too. She never mentioned it until after it was declassified. Unfortunately I never got to meet her, but family passed the stories down.

That's incredible! It goes to show how far everyone there took their secrecy.

@@matteusmaximus1895 My Grandmother and Great Aunt also worked in munitions factories and the steel factories in Sheffield UK. Another Great Aunt worked in the WRAC, driving military vehicles, plus my male relatives who weren't in the military worked in the North Derbyshire and South Yorkshire coal mines or on the railroads. Also essential workers.

Also british gov threw away their lead in computing by keeping it so secret they did want anyone developing it.

I think like most people, the name Bill Tutte doesn't immediately jump out, ive heard of Gordon Welchman and Tommy Flowers. To be able to envisage a machine of such complexity is extraordinary, with 12 rotors the permutations were mind boggling. What a group of the most amazing people, who when the war ended went back to normal lives and couldn't talk about it. They must have smiled when they saw war films in the coming years and thought, what little do you know.

@@pauldurkee4764 The machine you mention here is the Bombe, which was used to crack enigma and was electro-mechanical. The machine Tommy Flowers designed and built was far more sophisticated. It was entirely electrical and was called Colossus and was used to crack the Lorentz cipher which Bill Tutte had worked on a methodology for. My own view is that much as I like Alan Turing I actually think Bill Tutte's mathematical job was the greater work, I am not saying Turinng couldn't have done it, I think he could have.

@@MsPaulathomas Thanks Paula, I get very confused working out whats a bombe, and what is Colossus.😂

@@MsPaulathomas This comment means a lot to me, Bill Tutte was my Great Uncle, a wonderful man who together with Aunt Dorothy, stayed with us every Christmas and regularly in Summer holidays. He never spoke of his War work until after the statute of limits on official secrets, then he did lectures on the subject. We are very proud to have a monument to him in Newmarket.

I was born near there woburn sands mum worked in the town of bletchly.

a temporary measure

Doesn't looked like it saved anything looking at the state of the world today, all it done was secure our enemy the West today. Germany wasn't the enemy.

What democracy would this be. The only democracy & freedom you have in this world ,depends on the size of your Bank balance & the amount of people you know in positions of power to pull strings for you .

@@maskedavenger2578 that's more like securing 'justice' for yourself. Democracy is about representative government, which, in the USA, is as you said above...powerful Lobbyists paying Reps election costs and funding projects in Reps constituencies etc. The Swamp as Mr Trump called it.

Britain got involved in two wars that had nothing to do with them all Europe does is send Britain illegals migrant criminals & freeloaders

By way of contrast with Blenheim Palace, Sir Winston Churchill is buried in the humble local churchyard.

You can visit. I've been. It's an amazing place

Absolutely!

@@TheNatashaDebbieShow These are not near Bletchley, but they are in Kent so handy for your base of ops. Chartwell (Winston Churchill's house) and Leeds Castle, a castle with a really over-achieving moat.

@@TheNatashaDebbieShowAlso at Bletchley but separate is the National Museum of Computing which has a recreation/restoration of the colossus machine and other apparatus used for breaking the Lorenz/Ultra codes as well (this might only jog memories of Brits that went to school in the mid-eighties ) 3 working original BBC Domesday systems.

Honestly go to see this. The volunteers are amazing and you get to decrypt a message.

Trained on Jersey? That was occupied from 1940, she must have been an early recruit. Most of a certain type of training took place on the Isle of Man.

@@etherealbolweevil6268 Might have been there then, It was one of the islands. I do remember Bedknobs and Broomsticks showing the occupation.

@@nicholasgarratt5646 My mother was trained on the IoM, then went to 'Harrogate' and 'Woodhouse Eaves'. It was decades later I found out where exactly at Harrogate and Woodhouse Eaves, i.e Forest Moor and Beaumanor, from a colleague of hers who was an affiliate at Bletchley museum.

Our pleasure!

One of my family members was a part of this operation. Sadly I never got to meet her. I've only heard handed down stories. But they're still amazing.

Jenkins' Churches is notorious for the exclusions rather than for the buildings he describes. I paid £4 for my copy and that is just about what it is worth...

Tommy Flowers is disgracefully under acknowledged. Everyone seems to know about Alan Turing and think he was responsible for the entire code breaking effort. In fact he was only one in a very large multi talented team. Flowers was a GPO telephone engineer and was responsible for developing Colossus, the computer, and it was a computer, that was used to break the Lorenz high level codes that were used by German high command to send messages across occupied Europe. It was orders of magnitude more complex than Enigma. WW2 British code breaking is a huge subject that is well worth diving into.

Well, the Americans ''did'' have to invent it for themselves, even if it wasn't the first. Though presumably they would have read Turing's pre-war theoretical papers so that would have helped.

To be fair it evolved over time, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace did the ground work back in the 1830s.

Exactly disgusting.. saved there asses , and the way he was treated...

Unfortunately, the law is the law and that's how it stood at the time Turing lived. You cannot ignore the law for one man, especially as at the time the work he had done during the war was not known and could not be made public knowledge by law. Yes, he was treated terribly but at that time, under law, he was just a common man and thereby prosecuted as such.

Absolutely! My cousin worked in Hollywood and made the furniture for some popular films & shows. It makes sense to use sets financially. Of course, the original buildings would be so much cooler! What kind of work do you do in film? And thanks so much for watching ❤️ -Natasha

I was born near Bletchly, mum worked there but not on anything secret.

The Western Approaches Tactical Unit (WATU) was set up in 1942 to help increase the number of U Boat kills and reduce the frankly appalling losses within the merchant marine. Gilbert Roberts was the first commanding officer of it and it had the capability to train about 50 Destroyer Captains, Commanders and ASDIC (Sonar) operators a week over a1 week intense course. Over the time it ran from mid 1942 until late 1945 over 5,000 personnel went through what was the worlds FIRST wargaming studio. Just off the Scottish coast It also involved hands on actual vessel attacks on a "pet" U boat operated by the Royal Navy, which received daily updates from Convoy vessels reporting upon what tactics the U boats were using daily to keep it relevant. Inside wargaming was carried out upon a large "graphed" board that covered the entire floor of very large rooms To mimic the restricted vision of convoy vessels the commanders and convoy escort personnel were only allowed partial vision of the graph through "letterboxes" in moveable large wooden screens as they played what was 3 dimensional chess against the U boat movements. The Wrens (Womens Royal Naval Service) personnel carried out the convoy and U boat board movements of both sides, which allowed them to get insights into human psyche. This meant upon occasion when they were allowed to "game" the system themselves, they could achieve U Boat success embarrassingly claiming torpedo success against Convoy commanders. Roberts said "that's when we realised we were onto something" Wrens with no seagoing experience could develop tactics that saw them win against actual convoy commanders by using their intuition honed by multiple exposure to the wargames. Now all it needed was the training to flourish and then employ it upon the oceans. By mid 1943 the WATU trained Commanders and Captains of vessels that started as a trickle was in full flow and using the better H2 Radar and Huff/Duff (High frequency Direction finding radar) was causing carnage amongst the U boats in the previously "Black Area" of mid Atlantic. The longer range B24 Liberators with radar, now gave the U Boats nowhere to hunt without interdiction, and Sunderland Flying Boats and PBY Catalina flying boats now hunted the U Boats at night, when they travelled upon the surface using their faster speed there, and ventilating the boat through the Bay of Biscay which they used to travel to the mid Atlantic convoy passage battlefields. Doenitz saw the writing on the wall, where once the U Boat could roam without hindrance, and the Convoy escorts were just relieved if they could drive them to submerge, now the Allies hunted them down mercilessly. Actually engaging a U Boat for hours until it either was destroyed by depth charging or by exhausting their batteries (they couldn't use their diesel engines submerged if no "schnorkel" could be used), and their crew, forced to the surface and then destroyed by surface guns or it capitulated. Due to Doenitz withdrew the U Boats from the Atlantic, and they never again threatened the Allied forces in Europe and beyond with cutting the flow of supplies and war materials being supplied by the US. The WATU programme was a development which was a lifetime in front of it's time, and is used in various forms today throughout the world. When WATU was shut down at the cessation of hostilities in 1945, over 500 ex attendees from all the various Allied navies of the world sent thankyous, and congratulatory telegrams to Gilbert Roberts for his leadership and the tremendous support of his staff, not forgetting the Wargaming Wrens who developed the systems together with him. There's an excellent detailed write up on Wikipedia about it along with photos of the personnel.

Glad to hear it!