Blecthley Park WW2 analyst passes on

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Blecthley Park WW2 analyst passes on

#1

Post by Andy H » 05 Aug 2003, 19:37

Also from the Daily Telegraph
Alec Dakin
(Filed: 26/07/2003)
Alec Dakin, who has died aged 91, worked during the Second World War as a translator at Bletchley Park; in 1944 he was among the first to read a message that Hitler was dead, although the news turned out to be somewhat premature.
Dakin was recruited by Hugh Last, Professor of Ancient History at Brasenose College, Oxford, to join the staff at Bletchley Park in April 1940. A promising Egyptologist at University College, Oxford, Dakin was fluent in German, and was therefore an obvious candidate for recruitment to "Station X".
He was assigned to "Z watch" in Hut 4, the section responsible for translating German naval signals after they had been decrypted by the codebreakers in Hut 8. Dakin became a "sorter", one of those responsible for identifying which signals were of particular importance for rapid transmission to the Admiralty.
There were few Enigma naval decrypts before September 1941, from which date the German naval Enigma cipher was broken daily. Until then, Dakin and his colleagues worked in shifts studying the masses of teleprinted signals, some in code, others in plain language, picking out the ones that seemed significant.
Dakin's colleague Harry Hinsley had worked out a system of evaluating "linkages" - signals which were repeated by German shore stations in the Baltic which could give warning of German ship movements. If Hinsley was off duty and the shift needed to give him a situation report over the public telephone system, Dakin recalled, they worked out a complex way of giving him news disguised as a cricket commentary.
Notable among the signals that passed across Dakin's desk was one from the Bismarck on May 27 1941: "Most immediate. Torpedo hit right aft. Ship unmanoeuvrable. We fight to the last shell. Long live the Fuhrer." But his most vivid memory was of a night in July 1944 when he was on duty with the head of Hut 4, Walter Ettinghausen (a German Jew, later Walter Eytan, who set up the Israeli Foreign Ministry), and a Scottish Muslim colleague known as Daoud.
A signal arrived from Hut 8. "Some Top Secret signals were reciphered by the sender in another setting," Dakin wrote later. "This one was headed nur durch Offizier zu entziffern ("To be deciphered by officer only") with a special setting of the machine that would mean extra work for Hut 8. It began like this:
OKMMMANANALLEXXEINSATZJWALKUEREJNURDURCH-
OFFIZIERZUENTZIFFERNOFFIZIERJDORAJDERFUEHRERJ-
ADOLFHITLERISTTOTXDERNEUEFUEHRERISTFELD
MARSCHALLJVONWITZLEBENJusw.
("Naval Headquarters to all. Operation 'Valkyrie'. Officer only. Setting D (Dora) The Fuhrer Adolf Hitler is dead. The new Fuhrer is Field-Marshall von Witzleben, etc' ").
After sending the message to the Admiralty, Dakin and Daoud walked off to their midnight meal in the canteen: "Daoud said: 'Der Lezte Witz seines Lebens!' (The last joke of his life). How strange that the name of Hitler's successor, Witzleben, should mean 'joke-life'," Dakins mused, "and that the first people to see that signal were a Jew, a Scottish Muslim and a Yorkshire Primitive Methodist."
Although Dakin did not know it at the time, the message he had read was the Stauffenberg plotters' premature announcement of a military takeover, following their assassination attempt on Hitler. Unknown to the plotters, Hitler had survived, and by the time Dakin and Daoud went off for their midnight meal, the attempted coup was over and von Stauffenberg and a number of other senior German officers were already dead.
Towards the end of the war, as German cities came under heavy Allied bombing, Dakin confessed to feeling sympathy for the German naval ratings. "A signal would be sent to a ship or U-boat at sea; name and rank would be given, and then the grim words Total ausgebombt ('[your home] has been completely bombed out')."
Alec Dakin was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire on April 3 1912 into a Nonconformist family; his father was a sawmaker. He won scholarships to Heath School, Halifax, and to Queen's College, Oxford, where he read Greats. After graduation, he began to specialise in Egyptology, and in 1936 became a Fellow of University College.
After the war, he decided against returning to Oxford and became a classics master at Kingswood School, Bath, where he remained until his retirement in 1969. For many years he was a housemaster at the school, and was also in charge of athletics.
After his retirement, Dakin ran a bookshop in Bath, became a Samaritan, worked with autistic children and was the first chairman of the National Patient Participation in General Practice. In the 1970s he returned to Egyptology, running a popular course in the subject at the North Bristol Institute.
Like other Bletchley Park hands, Dakin never spoke to anyone of his work, although with Ernest Ettinghausen, Walter's younger brother, he wrote an account of the work of Hut 4 for Foreign Office files.
When he came to write his chapter for Codebreakers (1993), the inside story of Bletchley Park edited by Harry Hinsley and Alan Stripp, he discovered that his earlier account was regarded as so sensitive that he was not allowed to consult it.
Alec Dakin, who died on June 14, is survived by his wife, Joan, whom he married in 1953, and by two sons.

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Tom Niefer
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#2

Post by Tom Niefer » 12 Aug 2003, 19:01

Andy, I've read about a chap named Jones who worked with radar and infra-ed technology at Bletchley Park. Is he still alive or has he passed on?
I believe he also wrote The Most Secret War.

Cheers,
Tom


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#3

Post by Andy H » 12 Aug 2003, 20:57

http://www.bath.ac.uk/ncuacs/rslp-rvj.htm

Hi Tom

The above link will give you some info on RV Jones who died in 1997 and wrote the book that you described.

Andy H

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Tom Niefer
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#4

Post by Tom Niefer » 12 Aug 2003, 21:42

Thanks for the information, Andy.

Cheers,
Tom

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