Bletchley Park

March 2018 From the attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944, to orders to shoot dead any German soldier seen fleeing Riga as a cowardly traitor, the Hut 3 Headlines tell a story of World War Two in tiny snippet form. They were succinct summaries of Enigma messages sent by the German army and air force, intercepted and deciphered by Bletchley Park. These messages were then boiled down to the barest essentials to be sent to the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. He’s reputed to have wanted to know everything that was happening, and it’s well established that he was a firm proponent of the power and importance of signals intelligence. But no one man could have waded through the mass of information flowing through the Government Code and Cypher School, let alone a prime minister in the middle of an all-out war. So the Hut 3 Headlines became regular, and sometimes frequent, digests of what he needed to know. Bletchley Park has been digitising these precious documents and now, for the first time, has publishe