Bletchley code breaker Betty Webb dies aged 101
105 comments
·April 1, 2025icosian
zeke
In 2001 in the small town of Hartsville SC, one of the youngest code breakers gave his last two public talks. He had been hired by Turing because he was one of the few studying both math and German at the start of the war.
Besides being very interesting it felt odd to hear all this in such an out of the way place. Well after the war he collaborated on some books with a professor teaching at the college there.
sys32768
Two years ago my mother's memory care home had an American Battle of the Bulge veteran and Bronze Star winner who was sharp as a tack.
He was 99 and said he just wanted to live to be 100, but sadly he didn't make it.
I remember my late grandmother telling us they had made mittens for my great uncle, but he died in that battle before the mittens arrived.
Crazy to think I passed up my chance to have a cup of coffee with a man who might have fought beside my great uncle.
nonrandomstring
Most of them were told "Never, ever speak about any of this".
And they didn't.
Like the Zanryu Nipponhei [0], they were loyal to the last. Even my own father kept things about his airforce days way too tightly wrapped up long, long after the official secrets sell-by date. I have some admiration for this, but in the end it's a loss to historical record.
andrepd
It's insane how the largest conflict in human history is just now passing out of living memory. It's also insane how 1 in 4 Americans under 40 believe the holocaust is a fabrication or exaggeration.
wil421
Do you have a source or are you flamebating[1]?
The myriad of trash google results on the topic aren’t even close to 1 in 4. Even an Israeli tabloid says it’s 1 in 10.
chgs
Was widely reported but was discredited.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/12/07/one-in-fi...
louthy
> It's insane how the largest conflict in human history is just now passing out of living memory.
Don’t worry, there will be another one along any minute now.
slg
It seems more than coincidental that global fascism started to rise as soon as the generation that last defeated it had mostly died off.
slavik81
The American Revolution was 240 years ago. The US Civil War was 160 years ago. The Second World War was 80 years ago...
dylan604
the power of disinformation on social media platforms is apparently stronger than classroom teaching. it doesn't help that what is taught in classrooms is just getting worse for $reasons which is only going to get worse now that states are going to do whatever they want with schools now.
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tehjoker
social conditions are deteriorating so people are reaching for alternative explanations. you want people to reach for true history? then you have to show them true history will benefit them. fortunately, there is a way to do this, but powerful people hate it and prefer patriotic history and disciplined workforces instead. then they blame minorities for the problems they cause.
aaron695
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throw7384849
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kitd
> She and her guests were treated to a fly-past by a Lancaster bomber. She said at the time: "It was for me - it's unbelievable isn't it? Little me."
That's fantastic! RIP.
juliangamble
I did the tour of Bletchley Park today and my Tour Guide said he'd met Betty Webb, that he mourned her loss, and that when he had met her at a reunion, she had remained tight-lipped about what her work had been on.
toomuchtodo
tocs3
From wikipedia:
some tasks performed include registering messages on little cards, which Webb believes totaled 10,000 a day in the whole park, and organizing the cards into shoeboxes according to a strict order so they could be retrieved efficiently when called for.
I suppose times have changed.
eitland
More interestingly IMO:
> In Block F, she worked on intercepted Japanese messages, something she excelled at so much that she was later sent to Washington to support the American war effort.[6]
dylan604
they called them computers for a reason
hermitShell
Technology has changed for sure. Is our usage of human capital any better as a whole? Probably not. So many BS jobs out there.
cguess
tech has changed, but it's fundamentally doing the exact same job. GCHQ/NSA is still using the techniques pioneered at Bletchley.
linsomniac
Somewhat unrelated: I'm hoping to go to Bletchley Park this summer, any recommendations?
cjs_ac
The main 'Bletchley Park' exhibition is good, but it focuses on the human experience of the code breakers. Head around the corner from the car park to the National Museum of Computing (also on the Bletchley Park site) to see more technical exhibitions: they give proper demonstrations of the machines invented at Bletchley, as well as the oldest working computer in the world (which was computing prime numbers when I visited).
tialaramex
Also, and not obvious, because these two entities are distinct despite occupying the same site: they're not always open at the same time. So if you want to see both, even if you plan to spend more time at one than the other, check they're both open.
Whether something is the first computer is - inevitably - a definitional argument, but TNMOC has several candidates (though not all of them) including (a modern reproduction of, the original was destroyed as a secret) Colossus which is famous because of its involvement in the war.
Bletchley Park is also still an actual stateley home, all the war stuff was built on somebody's grounds - there's a good chance you either don't care about stately homes or you're intending to visit a more interesting one (or indeed one of the Royal Palaces), in which case no need to care, but that's a third distinct thing on the same site.
[Edited to make clear there is no original Colossus, we destroyed it because it was a secret]
xnorswap
We have a few such odd arrangements, such as the "London Bus Museum", which isn't in London but is in fact entirely within a completely different museum, the Brooklands museum.
Operationally independent, although they have been considerate enough to synchronise their opening hours.
If you're interested in London Buses however, I'd actually recommend the (also unrelated) London Transport Museum, as this one is located in the tourist heart of central London in Covent Garden.
( NB: Brooklands is itself a great museum, but more for the aviation history )
whyage
I wouldn't skip the main exhibition area. In an era where people were called computers, the human experience was at the heart of the Bletchley Park machine. In the main area, you learn about the makeup of this apparatus: the different roles people had, how information flowed within and between the huts, and much more. There's also a little museum with fascinating artifacts and an area dedicated to Turing. Don't miss it.
hermitcrab
Agreed, it is well worth visiting both.
icosian
I don't know if they are still in print but Bletchley Park Trust published a great series of monographs on particular aspects of the codebreaking story there. Highly technical, written by specialists, sometimes by people who had worked there. I picked up a load of them when I was there and can recommend.
easterncalculus
Definitely enjoy the scenery. I've done Bletchley and the National Cryptologic Museum, the former is in a genuinely beautiful location, especially if you have sun.
7373737373
This book, written by the man who created and ran the organization responsible for distributing the decrypted messages to political and military leaders: https://archive.org/details/ultrasecret00wint/
Really shows the extent and impact of this knowledge - they virtually sat at the same table as the Nazi high command.
nemo44x
They have a neat computer history museum there so make time for that too.
damnitbuilds
Did her colleagues use to say "My first computer was a ... Betty Webb" ?
billfruit
Any good book that delves into the detail of the code breaking done at Bletchley park?
jefc1111
This is a great book and touches on the subject you mention https://simonsingh.net/books/the-code-book/
hermitcrab
Having read this book, I set some codes for my son to break. Each code, once broken, told him the location of the next coded message. And they got progressively harder. It was a fun challenge.
hermitcrab
The author of this book also runs an excellent weekly maths newsletter/quiz for 11-16 year olds, and it's free:
cguess
If you want a book in the same vein, and contemporary with Bletchley "Turning's Cathedral" by George Dyson is about the Institute for Advanced Study and the Manhattan Project. Needless to say there's a lot of overlap and it really defines the culture of computer engineering at the time.
AndrewOMartin
The Hut 6 Story, goes into enough detail that Gordon Welchman (Simply put, Turing's boss) lost his security clearance. If you care about the human side, but are keen to take on the details there's no better book possible.
hermitShell
If you would enjoy loosely related fiction, Neal Stephenson Cryptonomicon is an option I would personally recommend. You must have some tolerance for his particular style and content…
rjsw
Or Enigma by Robert Harris.
jtcond13
"The Theory that Would Not Die" by Sharon McGrayne has a good chapter on this, book is a more general history of Bayesian statistics.
MrMcCall
I really like the four-part documentary series called "Staion X" which was all about Bletchly Park. It has numerous interviews with the folks that worked there -- they were a bunch of excellent oddballs, for sure.
It's a really fascinating perspective on WWII and how crap Monty was at being a general; he was reading the Germans' messages and still couldn't defeat Rommel. Only when the Med fleet intercepted and sank all his resupply ships did Rommel's crew finally lose.
The Germans' overconfidence in the Enigma machine was a big part of their downfall, especially once America's resources came to bear. Of course, that's what they deserved for having a leader speedballing meth and morphine.
All that said, the interesting historical twist is that no WWII history before the 1970s is accurate because all the Bletchly work was completely classified until one of their officers wrote a book about it. They cover that in the documentaries, too. There were men and women who had never told their families about what they did during the war, until the news finally broke. One mentioned how her daughter wondered why her mom knew that 'M' was the 13th letter.
hermitcrab
>It's a really fascinating perspective on WWII and how crap Monty was at being a general; he was reading the Germans' messages and still couldn't defeat Rommel.
He did defeat Rommel though, didn't he?
hermitcrab
And he defeated him twice. In the desert in 1942 and in France in 1944. Not bad for a crap General.
MrMcCall
Eisenhower defeated Rommel, my friend, with Patton's brilliant help, dragging a limping Monty along by the hair. He was nearly sacked for insubordination.
The Germans only feared one Allied General, and it wasn't Monty (it was Patton).
If fact, Patton being relieved of command for slapping his soldier allowed him to serve as the uber-decoy in Great Britain to distract the Germans from being ready for a Normandy landing. God works in mysterious ways, indeed.
The Germans thought Patton's sacking for slapping a soldier was a ruse; that's how much esteem they had for him.
jimnotgym
Yes, by rather a masterstroke of deliberately extending Rommels supply lines and fighting a giant staged battle at Rommels limit. By doing so he destroyed or captured much of Rommels men and material, rather than just pushing him back. All of which he did after a string of other Generals failed on the same front.
MrMcCall
"They" defeated Rommel. No one can say whether he would have done so without Bletchley. Personally, I doubt he would have done so without the Med fleet utterly destroying all of Rommel's resupply train, but that's just my opinion.
peterburkimsher
@dang For the sake of Dave Täht and Betty Webb, I believe a black bar is justified even on the 1st of April.
hhhcard
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lenerdenator
It hurts to see the generation that won WWII pass, not the least bit because we seem to have forgotten the lessons from their struggle.
0xEF
Indeed, it is very easy to forget the struggle when one has sacrificed nothing to achieve it.
At least WWII, unlike those preceding it, has a vast well of literature to draw those lessons from. The trouble, however, is not just getting younger people to sit, read and analyze it, but also to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, with all the propaganda and misinformation to be had these days about the events of WWII, the Holocaust, Hiroshima/Nagasaki and so many other things that would make this list exceptionally long.
Books, are not the same as having lived it, of course. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it best in The Gulag Archipelago.
“If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people's bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: 'It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.'
Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.”
tialaramex
Ha, maybe I should read (in translation) some Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I recognised his name having never seen it in print but only heard it repeatedly in that episode of Game Changer where it's a loop and the same questions are asked repeatedly.
0xEF
There's an audiobook these days too, but the short clip I listened to was pretty rough because the narrator (Frederick Davidson's) voice is very pinched and nasal, with the audio quality sounding like it was recorded in a tin can. I'm on the hunt for a better copy to add to my library, but yes, I think a re-read at this time sounds pretty good.
Tainnor
> all the propaganda and misinformation to be had these days about the events of WWII, the Holocaust, Hiroshima/Nagasaki and so many other things
I'm curious as to what sort of propaganda or misinformation you're referring to. I'm in Europe and I haven't seen much of it, but maybe it's different in the US.
cguess
Sadly go look at the "masculine" channels targeting young men on YouTube (Tate and his compatriots). There's a LOT of holocaust denial, rewriting of Hitler as misunderstood etc. We're both lucky to not be exposed to it regularly, but unfortunately in my work it's a thing I have to be aware of.
Worse, an entire generation of young men especially are being told that WWII wasn't what it really was. You see the results of this in the US but also eastern Germany, Poland, Hungary, across Europe where right wing parties are on the rise substantially supported by these young men.
fsckboy
it's not different in the US, there is not a market of misinformation about WWII here. There is the the anti-war left alleging that that the allies committed war crimes and their opponents rejecting those arguments, but it's easy to find what happened in Dresden, Holocaust, etc, the disagreement is on interpretation.
rjsw
There are several downvoted comments from butthurt Nazis in this thread.
deadbabe
In their prime, they too forgot the lessons of their own ancestors struggle.
potato3732842
One of the films in the Why We Fight series opens by following a handful of very old men attending the 1941 Independence Day, or perhaps it was Memorial day, parade in Washington DC. The narrater later informs the viewer that these men are veterans of the Civil War.
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hhhcard
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GcryptUser
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dranke8
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Only about a dozen years ago Bletchley was inviting former codebreakers back for an annual reunion. I used to go along to hear the talks, meet some of them and get books signed, including by Betty Webb. I'm glad they eventually got the recognition they deserved.
We have almost lost the chance now to hear personal testimony of WWII. I've met several Battle of Britain pilots too, but the last died in Dublin recently:
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2025/0318/1502596-hemingway/