Cracking the secret Nazi code

Gerald Openshaw, aged 78, was one of the hundreds of civilians drafted in to help intercept radio messages because of his keen interest in radio communications and Morse code.

Gerald, from Broadhead Road, Edgworth, spent time at Bletchley Park - an old country house in Milton Keynes which became one of the most significant intelligence sites of the war.

It was there that some of Britain's best brains worked round the clock trying to crack the Enigma Codes - the allegedly impenetrable codes the Germans used to send all secret messages. The odds against breaking the Enigma codes were said to be 150 million, million, million to one. But the Germans were careless and left open clues for the British team to work on.

Once they were broken, the workers in hut 6 - including Gerald - could crack the Germans' Enigma messages and pass them to their airforce every day for the rest of the war.

Gerald became involved in the top secret operation because there were not enough operators in the forces to cope with all the messages. The forces then had to rely on a reserve of civilian "radio hams" - all experts in their own right - to help out.

Each one, including 20 from Bolton, was carefully vetted before they were approached and when Gerald got a visit at the Post Office where he worked in Wigan Road from the Secret Service, they knew everything about him. "MI5 knew my mother and father and everything about me," he said. "They even told me things I didn't know myself. I was made an undercover secret agent as part of the Radio Security Service. I had my operating licence cancelled and my equipment confiscated and was given a receiving set.

"And through all this I couldn't tell anyone - not even my parents. We were responsible to PO Box 25 at Barnet - the cover address for sending intercepted messages to Bletchley Park and no one even knew."

When the time came for Gerald to be called up for service, he was taken to Bletchley Park and became a full time operator as well as being sent to other secret stations between Penzance and John O'Groats.

"I am very lucky and I have been forever conscious of the fact that my war service was spent in comparative comfort and safety - not like my friends who went into the RAF and were lost in the bomber squadrons," he said.

"I will always remember that and that is one reason why I want to tell the story, as a tribute to my friends Bob West and Cliff Jackson.

"It is hard for me to realise that the younger people haven't got the same kind of knowledge about the war as we have, simply because they didn't live through it. It is important to pass on the information to the next generation."

Gerald, still a keen radio ham, has equipment in a specially converted room in his home. He regularly chats to people as far afield as Canada and Russia through Morse code and has made many friends via the airwaves over the years. "Bletchley Park was one of the most important things to us during the war. We were always dependent a great deal on knowing what the Germans were up to so we listened in. When the code was cracked for the Enigma we could interpret anything," he said.

"When we first started to translate the messages it could vary from impossibility in the early days to two years, or with a bit of luck a week - and with some extra special luck a day or so."

But when Alan Turing invented the Colossus machine - the first ever electronic computer which was kept a secret and destroyed after the war - the Enigma messages could be interpreted quite easily. It was thought by many to be the turning point of the war.

When the war finished Sir Winston Churchill decreed that any information relating to Enigma and the several Colossus machines built should be destroyed.

All radio operators were forbidden to tell anyone about their work because they had signed the Official Secrets Act which bound them to silence for life. But two years ago, the silence of the Radio Security Service was lifted and Gerald could talk about his experiences for the first time.

"I believe I may be one of the few surviving members of the Radio Security Service in the Bolton area," he said.

"Almost every town and city in the UK had at least one RSS listener and it may surprise Boltonians to know that there were 20 radio hams in this area doing the work throughout the war.

"We listened in to the Gestapo, the Abwehr, the diplomatic services between Berlin and overseas embassies, the German Post Office and railway systems - all of whom used the Enigma machine in their radio communications."

Once the war finished, operating licences were re-issued and since then Gerald - call sign G2BTO - has kept up a regular weekly meeting on the air with the many friends he made.

Bletchley Park, which was featured in a television programme Station X recently, is now a museum devoted to the work that took place during the war, and The Bletchley Park Trust, of which Gerald is a member, was formed to make sure that the history of these vital operations is not forgotten.

Gerald has compiled many notes and stories about the service and is proud holder of the Imperial Service Medal.

"Bletchley Park was Britain's best kept secret," he said. "But it isn't any longer and everyone should know about it."

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