Bletchley Park

Today we went to Bletchley Park. Bletchley Park is a war museum from World War II that shows how England intercepted messages from the Germans. It was called the Enigma cipher machine. It was based on a series of dials and you would enter a certain code. Then you would type a letter from the message and gears in the machine would choose numbers according to the code. The message would come out encrypted and and they would use Morse code to send the numbers to the another person who had an Enigma machine. Those numbers would be the new code, and when you typed in the letters from the message, it would come out the message in English. The Germans thought their code could never be broken. They thought there was a spy among them. The Enigma machine made it possible for England to find out the locations of the Germans next attack and stop them.

There were many other things in the museum other than just that, though. They had rooms showing what to do if you were gassed, bombed, or attacked. There were signs everywhere from the war. They showed what a house might look like and the rations they would get. Eggs would come in a powder! They had rooms showing what living quarters would be like for the soldiers and rooms showing the worlds first programmable electronic computer. Another building was dedicated to Winston Churchill. He was the Prime Minister of England during the war. It had pictures, quotes, statues, figure heads, badges and just about anything relating to Churchill. Another building was the house where Churchill had lived. It was a huge mansion that had a ballroom, living room, dining room, main room and so many other rooms.

Getting to the park itself was an adventure. Andie gets carsick very easily, and of course we were on a windy road, and of course she was looking down. She then said, "I don't feel very good" and vomited five seconds later. Luckily it had just snowed so we washed the car out with napkins and snow. Since we had no extra clothes, we had to go shopping. That was definitely very interesting. Andie was fine for the rest of the day, though. When we got back we didn't do anything interesting. Just hung out. It was very interesting seeing all of the ways England found out the German messages and what the war was like. My Nana was a child during World War II and had actually come home, finding nothing because of bombings. It was very interesting learning what it was like and tomorrow should be another interesting day!