Читать книгу Engineering Hitler's Downfall - Gwilym Roberts - Страница 39

The son of a bricklayer, Flowers served an apprenticeship at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich. While there he obtained an electrical engineering degree from the University of London. He then joined the Post Office as an electrical engineer at their Dollis Hill research station, where he explored the use of electronics for telephone exchanges. In 1942 he was appointed to work with Alan Turing to build a decoder for the relay-based Bombe machine that Turing had developed to help decrypt Enigma codes. Although the decoder project was abandoned, Turing was impressed with Flowers' work, and in February 1943 they began working on developing an automated decoding system for Lorenz cyphers. After initial work with a machine called Heath Robinson, Flowers proposed an electronic system (called Colossus), which was successful and had a major influence on the war’s proceedings. Post-war he became the Post Office’s chief engineer and also worked with the National Physical Laboratory in computer development. His vital work at Bletchley Park was not fully appreciated until many years after the end of the war.

The organisational arrangements at Bletchley Park reflected the British approach in successfully harnessing brilliant minds to support the war effort. Turing, Welchman, and their colleagues had the ideas, but they needed sympathetic minders such as Commanders Dennison and Travis, both RN, to make their work effective and to provide the organisational framework. It is doubtful whether anything similar occurred anywhere in Germany during the war.