10 things you need to know about Bletchley Park and VE Day

What did the end of WW2 look like for the Codebreakers?

As the war in Europe drew to a close, the Codebreakers’ work at Bletchley Park was far from over. As we approach the 75th anniversary of the end of World War Two in Europe, here are 10 things that you need to know about Bletchley Park and VE Day.

1. First to know

Staff working the night shift in Hut 6 (the name of a department then based in Block D) were amongst the first people in the world to learn of the formal surrender of Germany in the early hours of 7 May 1945.

Head of Hut 6, Stuart Milner Barry, wrote in the Hut 6 History:

Hut 6 was responsible for decrypting German Army and Air Force Enigma messages. Very few photographs of Bletchley Park were taken during WW2 but this is a rare photo of staff working in Hut 6 (in Block D) taken towards the end of the war in 1944.

The UK Government made plans for Victory in Europe Day, when it came, to be marked with a national holiday. Allied leaders planned to mark VE Day on 9 May, but when news of the German surrender became known, a BBC Broadcast late on the 7 May announced VE Day would be marked on 8 May.

This year’s early May bank holiday will be moved back by four days for the whole of the UK to coincide with the 75th anniversary of VE Day.

May Day is traditionally held on a Monday but will be put back to Friday 8 May 2020. The holiday will form part of a weekend of national commemorative events, some mirroring the scenes witnessed across the UK in 1945.

On 6 August 1945, the US detonated an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, followed by the dropping of a second atomic bomb over Nagasaki three days later. Japan surrendered to the Allies on 15 August 1945, today marked in the UK as VJ Day.

8. Mixed Emotions

For many of those working at Bletchley Park, this was their first job after leaving school or university, and they had formed strong attachments to the people they worked with, and to the important work itself. Hugh Norris worked on Japanese naval messages:

“It was hard to keep up the frantic pitch of war-fever [after VE Day], but the Japanese were still fighting in the Far East; their messages still needed attention, so our section carried on working as before…In retrospect, Bletchley did not seem to us at the time to be at all strange, once we had experienced a few weeks of indoctrination; it very soon became part of our lives; it was normality itself, and it seemed as if it was set to go on for ever. What was unnerving was when everything stopped so abruptly: it was the world outside, to which we now had to adapt, that was strange and foreign; it felt as if part of our own being had suddenly died, and the mental shock was probably akin to that experienced by a hospital patient following an amputation.”

In Hut 6, relief was mixed with a sense of anti-climax. As Milner-Barry wrote:

“In the first three weeks of March, the last preparatory phase before the crossing of the Rhine and the final battle, we were going as well as we had ever done. April, by contrast, was rather an anticlimax…the advance of the allied armies overran and destroyed a number of old favourites among our keys. Others simply disintegrated in the general mêlée. Traffic fell off very sharply, and in the lovely April weather there was nothing to do but sit about and pray that the end would not be long delayed.”

9. Post-war work

After VE Day and VJ Day, some Bletchley Park went on to work in other government departments and were employed in poignant post-war work. Joan Joslin nee Glover had worked in Block C as a Hollerith operator during World War Two. She recalled in her Bletchley Park Oral History interview that after she had finished at Bletchley Park she:

“…had been transferred to the War Office in London. I was working on the repatriation of Japanese Prisoners of War, which was very harrowing. My boss was Major Bonham-Carter. I stayed there two years but of course did not have the same sense of achievement as at Bletchley, it was much sadder work.”

Kenneth Rich served in Brisbane, Australia, with a Special Liaison Unit (SLU), deciphering coded messages that came in for distribution to senior Allied Commanders. He recalled in an interview with the Bletchley Park Oral History team that he came back to the UK in December 1946, and before being demobbed was working:

“…in the Missing Research and Enquiry Unit, which scoured Europe to find out what had happened to the missing crew members of downed RAF aircraft.”