Wartime Britain - Dogfights & Double Agents

Summary

The inside story of the code-breakers and the Battle of Britain

Much of the Second World War was fought on the Home Front, whether it was protecting the skies during the Battle of Britain or fighting the much more covert war of espionage and code-breaking.

This tour explores nerve centres of the Battle of Britain, at the headquarters of RAF Fighter Command, Bentley Priory and the Uxbridge Bunker from where Air Vice-Marshal Park controlled the fight to protect London and the South-East of England. But we start with the ultra-secret Government Code and Cypher School on our Bletchley Park tour to learn how German agents were turned to double-cross their paymasters in Berlin. These ‘doubles’ then sent radio messages to Berlin with only information that Britain’s Security Service, MI5, wanted the Germans to know. Nothing more. Their success was measured by Bletchley Park’s code breakers as the Germans crowed about their agents’ successes often to Hitler himself.

Bletchley Park not only confirmed that the false stories had swallowed whole by the Germans but by cracking the German top-secret codes allowed British intelligence to have advance warning of German strategic intentions. The work at Bletchley saved thousands of lives. Your expert Guide Lecturer will also recount the amazing story of double agents. Without these brave people and their imaginative controllers in MI5, the D-Day Landings would have been much harder and may not even have happened at all. For decades, the heroics of double agents and code-breakers were unknown and went unrecognised. Now we can tell their story.

Tour highlights:

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• Guided tour of Bletchley Park grounds where the ‘huts’ used by the code-breakers have been reconstructed and the captured code machines, such as Enigma, are on show
• Visit Air Chief Marshal Dowding’s office at Bentley Priory from which he masterminded the air defence of Great Britain in the dark days of 1940
• See the deep underground bunker at RAF Uxbridge where the plotting table is set up to recreate the friendly fighters and vast enemy formations on 15 September 1940