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I know Remembrance Day is coming up next week. The last major global conflict ended

over 75 years ago. When do we forget this far back and move on?

My response is never.

For this Blog, I’ve pulled a nugget of lesser-known heroism. I thought it was worth sharing.

William Thomas Tutte, known as Bill to most people who knew him. He was the son of a gardener and a housekeeper and earned a scholarship for his brilliance. He loved finding patterns. No AI to do the work for him. Just his own grey matter.

He worked at Bletchley Park, which was ground zero in England for breaking the German Enigma code.

But a new problem arose in 1941. The German high command was sending coded messages that didn’t seem to use the Enigma machine. A new encryption system was being used by Hitler and his closest associates. There were only lines of letters of the alphabet – meaningless sequences.

Bill and a few of his co-workers were tasked with breaking this new cryptic puzzle. I’ll skip the tedious work of finding patterns from a machine he never saw.

His logic and deductions confirmed that he had broken down the mechanics behind the string of nonsense. They then recreated the machine.

They now had direct, confirmed knowledge of Hitler’s plans, including invasions, troop movements, supply routes, and V2 rocket plans.

Later, when the genuine German coding machine was obtained, it proved to be an exact original of the machines built at Bletchley Park. Incredible.

But another problem remained. It took far too long to decode the German messages, measured in weeks. Not nearly quick enough in a fast-moving war.

Enter Tommy Flowers, an engineer at the post office who liked to experiment. Bill provided the logic, and Tommy provided the speed. The Colossus was born. One of the earliest electronic computers started up in 1943.

These daily messages were highly secret, so secret they were given the name Ultra. General Eisenhower said that Ultra shortened the war by 2 years. The Allies learned that Hitler strongly believed D-Day would be at Paedekal, not at Normandy.

Right after the war, all knowledge of Bletchley Park was effectively a state secret. Colossus was dismantled. After a brief return to Cambridge, he was unknown, unemployed, and unable to explain his wartime work. 

Tutte accepted offers from the University of Toronto and later the University of Waterloo, becoming one of the world’s leading mathematicians.

Meanwhile, books about Enigma and Alan Turing became public knowledge, but Tutte’s work remained classified. In the 1970s, his work was declassified.

He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Society of London. He was awarded the Order of Canada.

He passed away in 2002.

Please give this a bit of a think. Do you see any parallels to our current war with America? Are there patterns beneath the rhetoric that could help us decode the apparent chaos around us?

Please comment: Send me an email with your bit of a think. I am curious about your thoughts.

Photo by Christian Lendl on Unsplash

For more background on Bill Tutte, click the link.

For a video on Bill Tutte, click the link.

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And my thanks to St. Albert’s 50+ Activity Centre for making this Blog possible.

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