When
I visited London in April 1999, I was able to arrange a side trip to a
place I have always wanted to visit, but which, until now, had been off
limits. Well, as you can see, I finally got there, and I can report
that the visit was well worth the effort. If you have read any of
the recent histories of the Second World War, you will know that the Allies'
scientific achievements did a good deal to shorten the war. The atomic
bomb, radar and radio communication are the most well known of these achievements.
In this former mansion, Alan Turing and other British codebreakers succeeded
in doing something just as amazing, the details of which had been held
strictly secret for almost forty years. So long, in fact, that many
of the people involved are now dead. Bletchley Park was where the
British read almost every coded radio message sent by the Germans. 
They developed an assembly line process for decoding the thousands of messages
they intercepted each day. They knew where the U-boats and fighters
were going to be and what the German plans were.
The German faith in their cryptographic machine and their lack of discipline in chosing their settings and keys for this machine (and some very clever work on the part of the British) was what made this amazing achievement possible. They actually have a captured German Enigma machine available for you to use at Bletchley, along with radios, exhibits and a free guided tour of the estate (I highly recommend it). There's also a ham radio station (GB2BP) with some very friendly operators.
