Bletchley Park & Eisenhauer's Command Center for the D-Day Invasion

To get in the mood for today's visit to Bletchley Park last night I watched "The Imitation Game" movie on my phone.  It came out a few years ago and was about Alan Turing; the genius behind the first computer.  As so many inventions were born due to the war, this one was created to help break the codes the Germans used to command their attacks.  The machine used was the Enigma machine.  

Early in the war the Brits managed to get their hands on a German Enigma machine.  The hard part was decoding the cyphers as they were changed daily by the Nazis.  Amazingly enough the Germans never found out that they had the machine all throughout the war.  If they had things might have turned out differently.  

The Bletchley Park complex housed the Government Code and Cypher School and the nature of the work remained secret until many years after the war.  According the British Intelligence the "Ultra" intelligence produced at Bletchley shortened the war by two to four years.

The mansion was the main building but spartan huts were constructed for the codebreakers.  Turing's computer was made in a small brick building.

It forever changed the world beyond the war.

Turing had a tragic life.  Ridiculed in school because he was a genius, on the spectrum of autism and a homosexual.  Illegal in those times.  He committed suicide after the war.

After a long ride through the English countryside we arrive at Eisenhauer's command center for D-Day.

We stood in the room where he made the fateful decision to go forward with the invasion.  They said by D-Day the stress was making him  smoke 6 packs of cigarettes a day; vs his usual 4.

There was some ego drama the day before he decided to go ahead with the landing,  DeGaule was quite an arrogant man and was very put out that Ike and not he was going to make the final decision.  Since his country was to be invaded he thought he should get the honor.  He stormed out of the room and made it all about him.  

If they didn't go on June 6 the next opportunity would have been June 19.  Every day lost there was a chance the Nazis would figure it all out and the two years of planning and deception on our part would have been a failure.  

They thought we were going to invade Calais in the North of France.  The most direct route across the choppy English channel.  They never thought the beaches in Normandy were the objective.  

The Enigma machine was able to break a message confirming the Germans were poised in Calais and although the Normandy Beaches were fortified; they were not nearly the obstacle they could have been.

See how it's all connected?

Tomorrow we cross the channel into France.