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@tinydude | |
 Raymond ''Jerry'' Roberts - one of the last of a top World War Two code-breaking team at Bletchley Park - has died, aged 93, following a short illness. Captain Roberts, from Liphook in Hampshire, was part of a group that cracked the German High Command's Tunny code at the British listening post. Their decrypts made it possible to read Hitler's own messages during the war. The team is credited with helping to shorten the war by at least two years. Capt Roberts joined Bletchley Park, in Buckinghamshire, as a German linguist and was among four founder members of the Testery section - named after its head Ralph Tester. Their target was to crack a system known as Tunny, which carried the messages of Hitler's top generals and even the Fuhrer himself. The system used four times as many encryption wheels as the famous Enigma machine - which carried military communications. |
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@tinydude | 26 March 14 |
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Reminiscing years after WW2- when he could finally talk about his work - Capt Roberts said he had taken delight in reading Hitler's messages, sometimes even before the intended recipient. He described the intelligence the team had gathered as ''gold dust'' in a 2013 BBC interview. It was ''top level stuff'' referring to the movement of entire armies, he said. This stream of intelligence proved vital in the Allied D-Day invasion and helped save many lives. ''We were breaking 90'/. of the German traffic through '41 to '45'', Capt Roberts recalled in one interview. ''We worked for three years on Tunny material and were breaking - at a conservative estimate - just under 64,000 top-line messages.'' He added it had been ''an exciting time'' whenever the team ''started getting a break on a message and seeing it through''. |
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@tinydude | 26 March 14 |
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Capt Roberts later received an MBE and became a tireless ambassador for the memory of those who had served in secret. He spent years campaigning for greater acknowledgement of his colleagues, including Alan Turing, who broke the naval Enigma code. And he argued the Testery group as a whole should he honoured for its work - including Bill Tutte, who broke the Tunny system, and Tommy Flowers, who designed and built the Colossus - which sped up some stages of the breaking of Tunny traffic. Capt Roberts said the work done at Blechley Park had been ''unique'' and was unlikely to happen again. He said: ''It was a war where we knew comprehensively what the other side were doing, and that was thanks to Alan Turing, who basically saved the country by breaking Enigma in 1941.'' Capt Roberts worked at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, until the end of the war before spending two years at the War Crimes Investigation Unit, and then moving on to a 50-year career in marketing and research. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26759034 |
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@tinydude | 26 March 14 |
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RIP Sir  and thank you 
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@shade013 | 26 March 14 |
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a hero, must of helped save many lives with the war in the Atlantic
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@wettoast | 26 March 14 |
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he looks constipated
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@shrek | 26 March 14 |
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RIP 
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@dodgey | 26 March 14 |
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RIP sir, your time on earth is done. 
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@dre4mz | 26 March 14 |
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R.I.P 
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@shrek | 26 March 14 |
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@bambi60 | 26 March 14 |
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Yes R.I.P ..I read about this yrs ago I think they worked on something called Ultra .That bletchley place was something else .I worked for a guy once who was a russian translator there , he said it was nerve-racking security .
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