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After many years cloaked in post-war secrecy, the unique story of Bletchley Park’s wartime work has gradually emerged. Through numerous books and films, as well as the Bletchley Park Museum, Churchill’s ‘goose that laid the golden egg’ is now a household name. Bletchley’s unremarkable location buried within military encampments midway between London, Cambridge and Oxford provided ideal cover for codebreaking work, and throughout the war the Germans never suspected what was happening there. Even the local community was kept in the dark, believing Bletchley’s work to be mainly clerical; keeping a single guard on the rear gate was a masterstroke, as was the blackout on the use of radio transmission. Above all though, the Bletchley Park staff were drilled in secrecy, and most never told their families of their secret work until it became public some 50 years later. However, the secretive wartime life of the Bucks/Beds borderland extended far beyond Bletchley Park’s codebreaking efforts. With a relatively flat landscape and proximity to Europe, many of the fields from Bletchley to the North Sea coast were given over to military airstrips from which the war was taken to the enemy. Not all the aircraft leaving these fields carried bombs though. The United States Army Air Force (USAAF), American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and British Special Operations Executive (SOE) mounted their own secret war with numerous operations behind the enemy’s lines in Occupied Europe. Its personnel were mainly based at safe houses in and around Bedford, flying resistance members and weapons across the narrow strip of water to harass the occupiers and help prepare for D-Day and beyond. Around the clock, there were numerous sites involved in covert operations, espionage and subterfuge. Hundreds of brave secret agents flew out from fields such as Tempsford, and all too many of them would never return to these shores. After Pearl Harbour, Japanese decoders were trained at Ardor House in Bedford before going to Bletchley Park, and the listening station at Chicksands (prominent after the war for its huge antenna array known as the Elephant Cage) intercepted many of the radio messages that needed decoding and translation. Meanwhile, the RAF based its own communications centre at Leighton Buzzard. Even the Meteorological Office moved from London out to Dunstable, its own staff joining the Home Guard to help protect it. In addition to all this intelligence and spying work, some of the first irregular weapons of war were commissioned by the MoD. Codenamed Churchill’s toy shop, they were developed and tested in Bedfordshire. One example was the very effective limpet mine developed at Clarke’s factory in Bedford. Although patently not a secret activity, Bedfordshire also played a key role in the propaganda campaign, used to undermine the morale of German troops and disrupt their will to fight. The two main methods were leaflet drops by aircraft and so-called black propaganda radio broadcasts. At the small village of Milton Bryan nestling on the edge of the Woburn Estate, an undercover recording studio was built to transmit 'black propaganda' into Europe. 'Black propaganda' was so called because it hid its British origin to give the impression that it was being broadcast from inside Germany or elsewhere in Europe. Like the Met Office, to protect itself from air raids the BBC secretly moved much of its live broadcasting to Bedford while pretending that programmes were being made in London. With activities ranging from codebreaking, radio surveillance through to the training and delivery of secret agents, is no wonder that Bedfordshire and its surrounding region has been called the World War II spy capital of Britain.
Article Source: http://www.gambling-articles.org
It cannot be guaranteed that spies and espionage will feature in Bedfordshire’s local news as much as they have in the area’s history. However, anyone looking for the most recent Bedford news, the Bedfordshire on Sunday is the best place to find it.
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