On this day in 1954, Alan Turing took his own life. He must never be forgotten.

[NIrishGuy]

On this day in 1954, University of Manchester hero Alan Turing took his own life, two years after he was prosecuted for gross indecency during a time when homosexuality was illegal in the UK. He was chemically castrated for his sexuality just a few short years after his groundbreaking ingenuity and determination saved tens of millions of lives during World War II. He must never be forgotten.

[Lonnie]

Alan Turing: The codebreaker who saved 'millions of lives'

 

 

Alan Turing - the Bletchley Park codebreaker - would have been 100 years old on 23 June had he lived to the present day.

To mark the occasion the BBC commissioned a week-long series of articles to explore his many achievements. This second essay examines the impact the British mathematician had on the outcome of World War II.

image captionTuring's Treatise on Enigma helped break Germany's encrypted messages

Germany's Army, Air Force and Navy transmitted many thousands of coded messages each day during World War II.

These ranged from top-level signals, such as detailed situation reports prepared by generals at the battle fronts, and orders signed by Hitler himself, down to the important minutiae of war like weather reports and inventories of the contents of supply ships.

Thanks to Turing and his fellow codebreakers, much of this information ended up in allied hands - sometimes within an hour or two of it being transmitted.

The faster the messages could be broken, the fresher the intelligence that they contained, and on at least one occasion an intercepted Enigma message's English translation was being read at the British Admiralty less than 15 minutes after the Germans had transmitted it.

 

image captionTuring helped adapt a device originally developed by Poland to create the bombe

On the first day of war, at the beginning of September 1939, Turing took up residence at Bletchley Park, the ugly Victorian Buckinghamshire mansion that served as the wartime HQ of Britain's top codebreakers.

There he was a key player in the battle to decrypt the coded messages generated by Enigma, the German military's typewriter-like cipher machine.

Bletchley's bombes

Turing pitted machine against machine. The prototype model of his anti-Enigma "bombe", named simply Victory, was installed in the spring of 1940.

His bombes turned Bletchley Park into a codebreaking factory. As early as 1943 Turing's machines were cracking a staggering total of 84,000 Enigma messages each month - two messages every minute.

Turing personally broke the form of Enigma that was used by the U-boats preying on the North Atlantic merchant convoys.

It was a crucial contribution. The convoys set out from North America loaded with vast cargoes of essential supplies for Britain, but the U-boats' torpedoes were sinking so many of the ships that Churchill's analysts said Britain would soon be starving.

 

"The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril," Churchill said later.

Just in time, Turing and his group succeeded in cracking the U-boats' communications to their controllers in Europe. With the U-boats revealing their positions, the convoys could dodge them in the vast Atlantic waste.

image captionThe bombe's operators read decrypted German messages by marking the position of its drums

The Turingery

Turing also searched for a way to break into the torrent of messages suddenly emanating from a new, and much more sophisticated, German cipher machine.

The British codenamed the new machine Tunny. The Tunny teleprinter communications network, a harbinger of today's mobile phone networks, spanned Europe and North Africa, connecting Hitler and the Army High Command in Berlin to the front-line generals.

Turing's breakthrough in 1942 yielded the first systematic method for cracking Tunny messages. His method was known at Bletchley Park simply as Turingery, and the broken Tunny messages gave detailed knowledge of German strategy - information that changed the course of the war.

"Turingery was our one and only weapon against Tunny during 1942-3", explains ninety-one year old Captain Jerry Roberts, once section leader in the main Tunny-breaking unit known as the Testery.

 

"We were using Turingery to read what Hitler and his generals were saying to each other over breakfast, so to speak."

Turingery was the seed for the sophisticated Tunny-cracking algorithms that were incorporated in Tommy Flowers' Colossus, the first large-scale electronic computer.

With the installation of the Colossi - there were ten by the end of the war - Bletchley Park became the world's first electronic computing facility.

Turing's work on Tunny was the third of the three strokes of genius that he contributed to the attack on Germany's codes, along with designing the bombe and unravelling U-boat Enigma.

Ending the war

image captionTuring and Bletchley Park's other cryptologists helped counter the threat posed by Germany's U-boats

Turing stands alongside Churchill, Eisenhower, and a short glory-list of other wartime principals as a leading figure in the Allied victory over Hitler. There should be a statue of him in London among Britain's other leading war heroes.

Some historians estimate that Bletchley Park's massive codebreaking operation, especially the breaking of U-boat Enigma, shortened the war in Europe by as many as two to four years.

If Turing and his group had not weakened the U-boats' hold on the North Atlantic, the 1944 Allied invasion of Europe - the D-Day landings - could have been delayed, perhaps by about a year or even longer, since the North Atlantic was the route that ammunition, fuel, food and troops had to travel in order to reach Britain from America.

Harry Hinsley, a member of the small, tight-knit team that battled against Naval Enigma, and who later became the official historian of British intelligence, underlined the significance of the U-boat defeat.

Any delay in the timing of the invasion, even a delay of less than a year, would have put Hitler in a stronger position to withstand the Allied assault, Hinsley points out.

image captionThe UK government did not disclose details of the efforts to crack the Enigma machine until 1974

The fortification of the French coastline would have been even more formidable, huge Panzer Armies would have been moved into place ready to push the invaders back into the sea - or, if that failed, then to prevent them from crossing the Rhine into Germany - and large numbers of rocket-propelled V2 missiles would have been raining down on southern England, wreaking havoc at the ports and airfields tasked to support the invading troops.

Saved lives

In the actual course of events, it took the Allied armies a year to fight their way from the French coast to Berlin; but in a scenario in which the invasion was delayed, giving Hitler more time to prepare his defences, the struggle to reach Berlin might have taken twice as long.

At a conservative estimate, each year of the fighting in Europe brought on average about seven million deaths, so the significance of Turing's contribution can be roughly quantified in terms of the number of additional lives that might have been lost if he had not achieved what he did.

If U-boat Enigma had not been broken, and the war had continued for another two to three years, a further 14 to 21 million people might have been killed.

Of course, even in a counterfactual scenario in which Turing was not able to break U-boat Enigma, the war might still have ended in 1945 because of some other occurrence, also contrary-to-fact, such as the dropping of a nuclear weapon on Berlin. Nevertheless, these colossal numbers of lives do convey a sense of the magnitude of Turing's contribution.

[NIrishGuy]

Sad mind you that even writing that excellent piece above that the BBC still couldn't bring themselves to inform people of the terrible homophobia that Alan Turing faced during his career which lead to him being castrated no less and his feeling that he would have to end his own life because of it !!!

And people ask us why we need "PRIDE"  - it's to remind others ( and the BBC it seems) that LGBT DO actually exist and shouldn't and CANT be treated like that any longer !  

[Lonnie]

2 hours ago, NIrishGuy said:

BBC still couldn't bring themselves to inform people of the terrible homophobia

I agree 100%!

GCHQ apologises for 'horrifying' treatment of Alan Turing and discrimination against other LGBT people

 

'Their suffering was our loss, and it was the nation's loss too'

After being chemically castrated, Mr Turing killed himself by eating an apple laced with cyanide

(Susannah Ireland)

 

GCHQ chief has apologised for the espionage service's "horrifiying" treatment of Alan Turing and historic prejudice against LGBT people.

The pioneering mathematician, whose code-breaking skills are said to have shortened World War Two by two to four years, lost his job with the secret service following a conviction for indecency and was forced to undergo chemical castration.

 

Robert Hannigan is the director of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the successor to the Government Code and Cypher School which first employed and then summarily fired Mr Turing.

 

LGBT individuals were banned from joining the espionage organisation until the 1990s, because of what Mr Hannigan referred to as "completely archaic rules on sexuality".

 

 

Speaking at a conference hosted by gay rights charity Stonewall, he said he had been asked to apologise and added: "I am happy to that today and to say how sorry I am that he and so many others were treated in this way, right up until the 1990s when the policy was rightly changed.

"The fact that it was common practice for decades reflected the intolerance of the times and the pressures of the Cold War, but it does not make it any less wrong and we should apologise for it.

 

"Their suffering was our loss, and it was the nation's loss too, because we cannot know what [those] who were dismissed would have gone on to do and achieve. We did not learn our lesson from Turing."

Mr Turing received an OBE in 1945 for his work during World War Two, when he and his colleagues in Bletchley Park's Hut 8 constructed code-breaking devices that cracked German ciphers.

Imitation Game Featurette Cracks the Code of Benedict Cumberbatch

By decoding messages from the Nazi Enigma Machine, Mr Turing helped Britain to reverse its fortunes in the Battle of the Atlantic, locating German U-Boats anHowever, in 1952 he pled guilty to a charge of public indecency, admitting he was in a homosexual relationship with Arnold Murray. Offered the choice between prison and libido-reducing injections, he opted for the later.

 

[PeterRS]

Alan Turing was one of the true heroes of the 20th century. His accomplishments were so significant it is appalling what his government then forced him to do. What makes it even more so is that Turing had discovered there was a Soviet spy working in his group at Bletchley Park. He planned to expose John Cairncross but was told by Cairncross that if he did so he would then be outed for being gay. Turing elected to remain silent, partly because the Chief of his Section knew about Cairncross and wanted him to continue leaking documents to the Russians who were by then the UK's ally in the war against Hitler. This decision was to return to haunt the UK government.

For those unaware of the Cambridge Spy Ring that rocked both the UK and the USA in the 1950s and later, in 1951 two high ranking UK diplomats fled to the Soviet Union. Donald Maclean and the notoriously gay Guy Burgess  had been converted to communism whilst studying at Cambridge in the 1930s. There were always rumours of a "Third Man", but nothing - despite a mass of evidence - was proved. Eventually, following the defection of a Soviet KGB officer to the USA, Kim Philby, a former diplomat and then a journalist, fled from Beirut to the Soviet Union. He had been the notorious Third Man.

But then there were rumours of yet a Fourth and perhaps a Fifth spy as part of that Ring. A closeted gay, Sir Anthony Blunt had recruited spies for the Soviet Union. After the war, he held high positions in the art world, notably working at Buckingham Palace as the Surveyor of the Queen's Art Collection. He received a knighthood for his work. He was unmasked in 1964 but that was kept secret. In return for his confession, he was given immunity for 15 years, a guarantee of secrecy during that time and he was able to continue with his high society art work. In 1979 he was finally outed as the Fourth Man by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in a speech in parliament. He was stripped of his knighthood and all his art positions.

The identity of the Fifth Man remained uncertain until another KGB defection in 1990. Finally  John Cairncross, Alan Turing's colleague at Bletchley Park, was unmasked. His later autobiography is titled "The Enigma Spy." One wonders what might have happened had there been no anti-gay law at that time and Cairncross had been unmasked. Many UK and US secrets might not have found their way to Moscow.

While Turing's life was cut so desperately short, his life is finally being recognised in some ways. He had received a Royal Pardon in 2013, a relief to surviving members of his family. After much delay, in 2017 the British government abolished the law that had punished gay men under the Offences Against the Persons Act of the 1860s. Some 50,000 men, including Oscar Wilde, were pardoned. That law has become known as the Alan Turing Law. Ridiculously, the mandarins in Whitehall rather emasculated the original Bill by adding pardons would not be given to those who had importuned sex in public places. So Sir John Gielgud, one of the nation's greatest ever actors, was denied a pardon.

Importantly for those who believe Turing must be remembered, his face and the detail of some of his work are featured on the nation's new £50 note that enters circulation on June 23.

[vinapu]

In few days Bank of England will issue new polymer 50 Pounds note with Alan Turing face on reverse so at least he is commemorated.

(it looks that PeterRS and I posted about that at the same minute )

[PeterRS]

It is well worthy of two mentions!

[Lonnie]

6 hours ago, PeterRS said:

pardons would not be given to those who had importuned sex in public places. So Sir John Gielgud, one of the nation's greatest ever actors, was denied a pardon.

Prigs to the end...a disgrace.

[PeterRS]

Although we may all rightly despise the law passed in the 1860s that condemned known homosexuals as criminals, the fact was that many so-called upright [sic] Victorian, Edwardian and later gentlemen were up to their necks in homosexual activity. That they came from privileged backgrounds and were married with children meant that their 'misdemeanours' were passed off as mere uncharacteristic incidents, assuming, that is, that others in 'society' were aware of it - as indeed many were. 

Had Alan Turing come from the upper classes with friends in high places, it is highly unlikely he would have been charged with anything. If a long-standing member of Parliament, Lord Boothby, was known by many - although not publicly, for the media gag laws in those days were draconian - not only to have engaged in numerous scandalous homosexual affairs, but also enjoyed a multi-decade romance with the wife of the soon-to-be Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, to the extent that many believed Macmillan's youngest daughter had been sired by Boothby, many blind eyes should have been turned in Turing's case. Regrettably his arrest and subsequent conviction were a result of several extremely unfortunate occurrences.

First he had only recently commenced a romantic affair with a 19 year old youth. One evening he returned home to find that his home had been burgled. His emotional boyfriend admitted to Turing that he knew the name of the burglar but informed Turing that if he told the police, he would 'out' him as gay. Since nothing of significant value had been stolen, Turing should just have let things be. But he refused to be threatened in such a way and did report the robbery. As the police were searching his home and realised that he was gay, his legal position was untenable. Any other man with such wartime achievements could have called on his wartime superiors to speak on his behalf and mitigate whatever the Court's sentence might have been, if anything. But Turing has signed the Official Secrets Act in order to get into Bletchley Park. Everything he did there was covered by the Act. Officially he had never worked there. As I think he is informed in the film on his last day, officially you do not exist! Had he chosen to go public and broken the Secrets Act, he could have been sentenced to up to 14 years in jail. Despite his wartime successes, he would essentially have been regarded as a traitor.

Finally, it was his solicitor who advised him to plead guilty rather than try to fight the charge in the hope of getting a reduced sentence. Had Turing just had someone to advise him not to report the burglary, it is extremely likely that he could have enjoyed many more years of life, as well as the gratitude of hundreds of millions as his exploits were eventually declassified.

[a-447]

It's difficult to believe that the hatred and fear of homosexuality could override Turing's enormous achievements - that they were considered secondary to his "gayness."

 

And given that the judiciary at the time came from the upper classes (and probably still do), whose gay activities are legendary, I wonder if any of his accusers and judges were themselves guilty of the "crime" of being gay? 

 

I had never heard of Turing until I saw the movie. I remember walking out of the theatre feeling disgusted at what had happened to him. What a bunch of ungrateful bastards! 

 

Turing's treatment was a product of the times in which he lived and we've come a long way since then.  I'm very happy to see that he is now on a banknote, which will keep his memory alive.

[PeterRS]

1 hour ago, a-447 said:

It's difficult to believe that the hatred and fear of homosexuality could override Turing's enormous achievements - that they were considered secondary to his "gayness."

I agree, but as I stated in the earlier post, the Court could not be told about Turing's achievements. To the judge he was merely someone who had broken a long standing law which had convicted tens of thousands before him. We really must also recall the times. Britain - and I believe the USA, Australia and other countries - were extremely homophobic in the early 1950s.

In the thread related to Movies about Maurice, I write about the first mouth on mouth male kiss in British movies in the 1971 Sunday Bloody Sunday. I see that there is a youtube clip in which one of actors, Murray Head, looks back a few decades to the times when they made that movie. Although the actors thought nothing of it, many of the technicians working on the film were all but horrified. As they were filming the scene, the cameraman suddenly put his hand in front of the camera and asked the director, John Schlesinger, "John, is this really necessary?" And for weeks afterwards, technicians working on the movie would go up to Head and say something to the effect, "We know your are an actor but that moment when you kissed Peter Finch - ughhh!"