BLETCHLEY MYTHBUSTERS Michael Smith asks... Did Churchill tunnel his way to Bletchley Park, and did he really l eave Coventry to burn?
Top: Michael Smith Below: Prime Minister Winston Churchill surveys the damage to Coventry Cathedral in an official war photograph, 28 September 1941
No one man is associated with more myths surrounding Bletchley Park than Winston Churchill. His association with the British Codebreakers began at the start of World War One when, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he ordered the creation of a naval codebreaking unit, known for reasons of secrecy as Room 40. The far-fetched stories include one that as Britain’s World War Two Prime Minister he visited the Codebreakers so often that there was a tunnel built from Bletchley Junction station into Bletchley Park so that he could arrive as and when he liked in order to find out the latest intelligence. It is, of course, complete nonsense. He visited just once, on 6 September 1941, and he certainly didn’t have to make the trip to see the intelligence – all the important documents were taken to him every morning by Stewart Menzies, the head of MI6.
The worst myth is the suggestion that he ordered the RAF to ignore Bletchley Park’s warning that Coventry was to be bombed on 14 November 1940 because he wanted to prevent the Germans realising Enigma had been broken. Once again, it’s nonsense. Every day around lunchtime, one of the Enigma cyphers revealed which town or city in Britain the Luftwaffe would be bombing that night, allowing the RAF and the air raid wardens to prepare for the attack, and thus save thousands of lives. But there was no warning for Coventry. Some 600 people were killed and a substantial part of the city, including the cathedral, was destroyed. This had nothing to do with Churchill protecting the Enigma secret, or why would other cities have been warned when it was their turn? The truth is that around the time of the Coventry raid, the Codebreakers were unable to crack that particular Enigma cypher and simply did not know that the city was about to be attacked. The final myth is that at the end of that visit to Bletchley Park in September 1941, the great man was so bemused by some of the idiosyncratic personalities he had met that he turned to Menzies, who controlled the unit, and said: ‘I know I told you to leave no stone unturned to get staff, but I didn’t expect you to take me literally.’ I say it’s a myth, but I can’t tell you for sure that it isn’t true – and there’s a part of me that really wishes it were.
© Crown Copyright. IWM.
Michael Smith is the author of The Debs of Bletchley Park, The Secrets of Station X and co-editor with Ralph Erskine of The Bletchley Park Codebreakers. He is a Trustee of Bletchley Park and Chair of the Trust’s Historical Advisory Committee.
Bletchley Park Magazine
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