From The Telegraph:
Mavis Batey - obituary
Mavis Batey was Bletchley Park codebreaker whose Enigma breakthrough proved crucial to the success of D-Day
Mavis Batey with the Abwehr Enigma machine in 2004 Photo: IAN JONES
Mavis Batey, who has died aged 92, was one of the leading female codebreakers at Bletchley Park, cracking the Enigma ciphers that led to the Royal Navy’s victory at Matapan in 1941.
She was the last of the great Bletchley “break-in” experts, those codebreakers who found their way into new codes and ciphers that had never been broken before.
Mavis Batey also played a leading role in the cracking of the extraordinarily complex German secret service, or Abwehr, Enigma. Without that break, the Double Cross deception plan which ensured the success of the D-Day landings could never have gone ahead.
Mavis Lilian Lever was born in Dulwich, south London, on May 5 1921, the daughter of a postal worker and a seamstress. The family always went on holiday to Bournemouth, but after passing her German O Level, Mavis persuaded her parents to take her to the Rhineland.
It was this that encouraged her interest in the German Romantic poets. She was reading German at University College, London, when war broke out, and decided to break off her studies and become a nurse; but she was told that the country could make more use of her as a German linguist.
“So I thought, great,” she recalled. “This is going to be an interesting job, Mata Hari, seducing Prussian officers. But I don’t think either my legs or my German were good enough because they sent me to the Government Code & Cipher School.”
She initially worked in London, checking commercial codes and perusing the personal columns of The Times for coded spy messages. After showing promise, she was plucked out and sent to Bletchley to work in the research unit run by Dilly Knox.
Knox had led the way for the British on the breaking of the Enigma ciphers, but was now working in a cottage next to the mansion on new codes and ciphers that had not been broken by Hut 6, where the German Army and Air Force ciphers were cracked.
Mavis Batey and her husband Keith (ANDREW CROWLEY)
“It was a strange little outfit in the cottage,” Mavis said. Knox was a true eccentric, often so wrapped up in the puzzle he was working on that he would absent-mindedly stuff a lunchtime sandwich into his pipe rather than his tobacco: “Organisation is not a word you would associate with Dilly Knox. When I arrived, he said: 'Oh, hello, we’re breaking machines, have you got a pencil?’ That was it. I was never really told what to do. I think, looking back on it, that was a great precedent in my life, because he taught me to think that you could do things yourself without always checking up to see what the book said.
“That was the way the cottage worked. We were looking at new traffic all the time or where the wheels or the wiring had been changed, or at other new techniques. So you had to work it all out yourself from scratch.”
Although only 19, Mavis began working on the updated Italian Naval Enigma machine and, in late March 1941, broke into the system, reading a message which said simply: “Today’s the day minus three.” “Why they had to say that I can’t imagine,” she recalled. “It seems rather daft, but they did. So we worked for three days....MUCH MORE
Just prior to the Battle of Cape Matapan the British had to disguise the fact that Mavis had broken the Italian code so the Commander of the fleet sent out a plane to do the most ostentatious reconnaissance of the war, one of the stories has it wagging its wings so there was no doubt the Italians saw it and assumed that was why their flotilla was spotted, intercepted and sunk.
That commander, Andrew Browne Cunningham, was one of the great sailors of the last couple hundred years and retired as a five-star, Admiral of the Fleet.
Still, I don't know if he was at the intellectual level of the Bletchley girls.
HT: naked capitalism
