Bletchley Park Tour

Huts 6 and 8

Hut 6 was the centre of operations to break the Enigma cyphers used by the German Army and Air Force. It was possibly the busiest hut of all, dealing as it did with two sections of the German military machine.

Hut 8 was allocated to the team, led by Alan Turing and chess grand master Hugh O'Donell Alexander, that attacked the Naval Enigma keys used by the German U-boat and surface fleets. It was to this team that an Enigma code book, captured from U-boat 110 in May 1941, was duly delivered, helping greatly in the breaking of the Naval Enigma. The naval codebreakers provided vital day-to-day intelligence in the desperate battles between the Allied convoys and the U-boats determined to cut Britain's lifeline across the Atlantic.

Codebreaking in Huts 6 and 8 was organised into the following sections:

• Registration Room - traffic analysis
• Intercept Control Room - liaison with intercept stations
• Machine Room - finding cribs, generating menus, and finding the keys
• Decoding Room - decyphering the messages

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