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| Yes, they really did! |
First we visited Chicksands, Britain's Defence Intelligence and Security Centre (DISC). Within this high-security establishment are both the Intelligence Corps Museum and the Medmenham Collection. As a member of the Medmenham Club, I was pleased and proud to show our tour members this collection of aerial photo reconnaissance artefacts. The exhibits range from 19th Century balloons and kites to modern imagery.
Of particular interest is the unque 'Wild' (pronounced 'villt'). In 1940, Britain had only one working Wild-A5, the sole machine capable of extracting vital information from high-flying Spitfire sorties. So, a further two machines were acquired from Switzerland, smuggled through Germany to Sweden, dismantled, and flown to Britain in Mosquitos. On one of the last trips, the aircraft was almost bounced by a German fighter and very nearly needed to dump the bomb-bay cargo, including the engineer!
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| WILD A-5 |
Next stop Duxford. There is so much to see there, it is no surprise that two-day tickets are increasingly popular. As an Army group we started at the Land Warfare Hall.
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| Chrysler A57 Multibank 445 hp (Sherman M4A4) |
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Sturmgeschütz III |
But of course as an active airfield the main theme of Duxford is aviation-related.
Lastly we spent a full day at Bletchley Park, 'Station X'. Here the German codes were famously broken, and radio intelligence intercepted by the 'Y Stations' (including Chicksands) interpreted. The 'Bombe' machine broke the ENIGMA code with its 156 million, million, million variations; and 'Colossus', the world's first semi-programmable computer broke the output of the high-level Lorentz coding machine. Rebuilt and functioning, Colossus can be viewed today, its hundreds of valves glowing and its paper tapes spinning around at 30 miles-per-hour! Here, the war was shortened by, quite possibly, a full two years.
