Book Claims Bletchley Park’s Contribution to WWII is Vastly Overrated

John Ferris’s recently published book, Behind the Enigma: The Authorized History of GCHQ, Britain’s Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency, reveals the inner workings of one of England’s least understood and secretive intelligence agencies, the Government Communications Headquarters or GCHQ.

Ferris was given access to the vault at GCHQ to sift through papers, many of which are still classified, to write this hundred-year-old intelligence agency’s authorized history.

Professor John Ferris lives in Calgary, Canada, and is a history professor at the University of Calgary. He received his Ph.D. from King’s College in London and is the author of numerous academic articles on military history, contemporary military intelligence, and history.

The BBC interviewed Professor Ferris on his new book and some of the surprising claims made in it.

One of those surprising revelations is the claim that the contribution made by Bletchley Park to the Allies efforts in WWII is often overrated, and the center was not the ‘war-winner’ that many people believe it is, though he did say that it did play an important role.

GCHQ was set up on the 1st November 1919 and was established as a cryptanalytic unit during peacetime. When WWII broke out, GCHQ staff were moved to Bletchley Park to decrypt radio communications between Nazi entities. The most famous of these was cracking the Enigma communications, giving the Allies insight into classified German orders. It is estimated that this work shortened the war by as much as four years, and if it had not been done, the outcome of the war would not have been certain.

Bletchley Park remains firmly fixed in the minds f the British public as the most notable success of British intelligence gathering, but Prof. Ferris’s book slays some of the myths surrounding this famous institution.

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/news/bletchley-park-2.html