HELLFIRE https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/02/bletchley_webb_obituary/ Obit Betty Webb MBE, one of the team who worked at the code-breaking Bletchley Park facility in England during the Second World War, has died at the age of 101. “On Monday 31 March 2025 we lost a proud ATS and Women’s Royal Army Corps veteran, Bletchley code breaker, Knight of the Légion d’Honneur, WRAC Association member, and President of our Birmingham Branch,” the Women’s Royal Army Corps Association (WRAC) said in a statement. “Betty inspired women in the Army for decades and we will continue to take pride in her service during WWII and beyond, and as a champion of female veterans.” Charlotte Elizabeth “Betty” Vine had a middle-class upbringing in Worcestershire. Her mother was a teacher and was a big believer in her child learning foreign languages, so the family always had a Swiss or German au pair. … She joined up with the Auxiliary Territorial Service in 1941 and was assigned to Bletchley almost immediately, she guessed because of her language skills. There she was tasked with putting German messages in order as they came in, some 10,000 of them a day. In 1943 she moved to a new role in the Japanese section. Her new job was to take decoded transcripts and paraphrase them, so that if they were ever intercepted, Japan’s forces wouldn’t realize that their codes had been broken. … Yet when she began trying to get a job after the war was over, there was a problem - she couldn’t tell anyone (not even her parents) what she’d been doing, since the work was classified under the Official Secrets Act, as she recounts below. [YouTube video] … For 30 years she never told anyone about her wartime experiences and it wasn’t until the mid-1970s that she ran into a former member of her team, who informed her that the prohibition on discussing Bletchley had been lifted. … Regards
egeezer HELLFIRE She was one of the Greatest Generation who protected freedom. Her story and those of all those who served must be remembered and never forgotten or swept into oblivion.