BLETCHLEY, ENGLAND — On the grounds of a Victorian mansion in this Buckinghamshire village is a group of undistinguished, barracks-like, 1930s buildings, each of them as shabby as the mansion is grand.
All are showing their age, and some are boarded up. But their appearance belies their historical importance. In these buildings in Bletchley Park, 30 miles north of London, some of Britain`s and America`s best scientific brains were employed from 1938 to 1945 in cracking Nazi German and Japanese military codes and feeding their secret information to Allied leaders.
The leaders later said the operation, which involved the development of the world`s first electronic computer, saved thousands of lives and probably shortened the war by several years.
But the present British government and the privately owned telephone company British Telecommunications, which jointly own the property, plan to offer it for sale and see how much developers bid for it. At least one development plan calls for tearing down the old buildings and replacing them with 400 houses and some retail shops.
A group of Bletchley-area residents, aghast at this plan, organized themselves last October into the Bletchley Park Trust to try to preserve what they regard as a part of England`s national heritage.
They hope to persuade the present owners to turn the 55-acre property over to them to be developed as a museum campus dedicated to the intelligence services, radar and air traffic control, computers and other specialized interests.
`It must be saved`
Intelligence agents at the Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham, a key listening post for communist bloc communications during the Cold War, are working with the trust and helping to uncover some of the fascinating secrets of what went on at Bletchley Park more than 40 years ago. ``Because we now know how important Bletchley Park was, it must be saved,`` said Ted Enever, a former journalist and chief executive of the trust.
``We don`t want to save it to glorify war and to gloat in victory. We want to see it preserved as a monument to man`s intellect, not to guns and bullets.``
The trust`s cause has not been helped by a report from English Heritage, a semi-official body, which concluded that the buildings themselves do not enhance the historic significance of the wartime events, ``which are intellectual activities that could have been carried out in any physical environment.``
``We are totally at a loss to understand English Heritage`s refusal,``
Enever said. ``Somebody somewhere is playing politics.``
If the sale of the property goes ahead, Enever said the trust would try to buy it. A major British bank has agreed to provide 60 to 80 percent of the purchase price, and the trust is trying to raise several million dollars in public donations to finance the rest.
How it came to be
Bletchley Park, the home of a Victorian stockbroker and his family, was acquired by the government in 1938. The mansion was first used for ``Station X,`` a radio room transmitting and receiving coded military signals. Together with the French and the Poles, the government then decided to make it a code- breaking center.
The Germans believed they had an unbreakable code. Their Enigma cypher machine, looking somewhat like a typewriter, was a sophisticated device that allowed 17.2 million possible encoding permutations for every letter typed. The Germans made several modifications over the years that enhanced the machine`s complexity.
In 1934 the French had acquired a spy in the German Signals Service in Berlin, who gave them details on the operation of Enigma. The Poles, using similar information, built 13 Enigma machines, one of which was later turned over to Britain.
In 1939 Britain assembled a brilliant collection of mathematicians, chess grand masters and other experts to try to crack the Enigma code. Their first breakthrough occurred Dec. 24, 1939: After laborious work, they had managed to decode a message that was received Oct. 29.
But techniques rapidly improved, and by the late summer of 1940 the code- breakers were down to just 17 minutes. In 1944, after the Allied invasion of Normandy, they were decoding and relaying to Allied headquarters in London an average of 18,000 messages a day.
Hut 3 on the grounds of Bletchley Park was the nerve center of the operation, where decoded and translated messages were read and relayed to Allied headquarters.
``Virtually nothing happened in the war in Europe or in the Pacific that they didn`t know about in that building,`` said Roger Bristow, general manager of the Bletchley Park Trust, who has done extensive research on the code-breakers` work.