The shocking life of Betty Webb, the last survivor of the experts who cracked the Nazi codes

The last survivor of the group of people who secretly worked for the Allies deciphering the coded messages of Nazi Germany and Japan during World War II, she has just written a memoir about her extraordinary life.

Betty Webb was recruited at the age of 18 by the British intelligence service to work at Bletchley Park, a military installation located in Buckinghamshire, England, some 50 miles north of London, where enemy communications were decoded, and then she went to the United States to collaborate with the Pentagon in their war in the Pacific that ultimately resulted in the surrender of Japan.

Her new book “No More Secrets” tells the story of her childhood, how she was recruited by the British service to do vital intelligence work, her subsequent trip to Washington, and how she felt when she finally he was able to speak publicly about the experiences he had to keep secret for so long.

In recognition of her service, Webb was invited to the recent coronation of King Charles III and marks her 100th birthday this May 13 with a party at Bletchley, where else?, with relatives and friends.

Charlotte Elizabeth “Betty” Webb, was born in 1923 and spent her childhood in the rural county of Shropshire during the 1920s, without heat, electricity or running water. As a schoolgirl, she had a German nanny and because her mother wanted her to learn to speak German fluently, she participated in an exchange program and spent time in Nazi Germany.

It was 1937 and Germany was on the brink of war, so he returned to England to finish school. After graduation, Betty Webb faced the usual limited employment opportunities offered to women at the time.

However, with World War II raging and most of the men on the front lines wanted to do their part in the war effort and in 1941 she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service (Women's Army ATS).

In “The Invisible Army”

After completing her basic training, her superiors found out that she spoke German, so they sent her to London to meet with an intelligence officer who interviewed her in German.

“The colonel who was interviewing me said 'here's an order for you to travel by train, go to Bletchley,” Betty told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. “I had never heard of that site, I had no idea what was going on there, just like the rest of the public, because it was so secret that no one could even mention it.”

She was 18 years old and had just been recruited into the invisible army of enemy communications decryptors. She only realized the transcendence and importance of her mission until the next morning, when she was given the Official Secrets Act that she had to read and sign.

“It was a tremendous document and you realize, as soon as you sign it, that you are completely isolated because I was not allowed to tell anyone where I was and what I was doing. My parents didn't know where I was and I could never tell them because they died before the veil of secrecy was lifted,” she explains. “I used to say that I was doing a boring secretarial job and nothing more.”

I was with a group of people who had to record all the messages that were coming in. He kept a very strict catalogue, with dates, times, signals and other details. He cannot say exactly how many communications passed through his hands, but later he learned that about 10,000 were coming in a day.

Work, theater and tennis

Living conditions were very basic. They worked and slept in cabins with little heating. At night, the windows had to be sealed to keep out the light, so air circulation was very poor. “It wasn't nice at all,” she said.

That environment, combined with what he called the “hush, hush” culture ( “shut up, shut up” ) in which nothing he saw, read or heard could be repeated generated a lot of tension and anguish. There was a time when she suffered a crisis and she had to be sent to a rehabilitation center.

“I didn't know where it was, because at that time they had removed all the signs on the roads. But the irony was that there I heard the buzz of a doodlebug (a German V-1 drone bomb) and I had to run to put on my helmet and hide under the bed,” he expressed.

However he found the atmosphere very friendly at Bletchley Park, particularly socially outside of work hours.

“There were people of all classes. If homework allowed it, you could go to concerts, be part of choirs,” he described. “Every once in a while they put on a good play. I don't know how they managed to set it up and work at the same time, but they did, once every three months. We worked intensely but we also had intense fun.

On one occasion, he says, Prime Minister Winston Churchill visited the secret center and asked about the recreational aspect. “When he found out we didn't have tennis courts, he immediately ordered them installed.”

the end of the war

In her interview with the BBC, Betty describes her job as 'clerk', but in reality, the dedicated and complex project at Betchley helped shorten the war by at least two years and saved thousands of lives.

Only in recent years has the extraordinary work of experts such as mathematical genius and computer pioneer Alan Turing, who helped accelerate Allied efforts to read encrypted German naval messages with the Enigma machine, been recognized.

“They would disappear into their respective cabins and that's all you knew about them. The cabins had no names, just numbers and we didn't know what happened behind closed doors,” Betty Webb acknowledges, but added: “I think they were extraordinary and I'm very proud to have been involved in a limited way with that.”

There was a great sense of relief when the end of the war in Europe came with the surrender of Germany in May 1945. People all went to London to party in the streets and shout for joy “although there was a touch of sadness for the ones that weren't there,” he says.

But for Betty things did not end there. After working four years at Betchley, she was sent to the United States to continue the same task at the Pentagon “Which was to paraphrase and transcribe already decoded Japanese messages,” she said.

She was the only woman from the Auxiliary Territorial Service to go to Washington, which she described as “a tremendous honor”, ​​although due to secrecy protocol she was not very aware of what was happening.

When Japan finally signed the surrender a few months later, “Washington went completely nuts,” he recalls. He was helping to order a British Army facility in the American capital when the news broke.

“I've never seen so many people come out and blow their car horns as loud as possible,” he says, describing how people tried to climb the fences of the White House in the hope of seeing President Harry Truman.

Later came the news of the tens of thousands of people killed and maimed by the atomic bombs dropped on Japanese cities to end the conflict that were, he says, “absolutely horrifying.”

“We were delighted that the war was over, but then we began to realize how horrible it was,” he said in an interview in 2020. “It is a terrible thing that one human being can do to another.”

Honors, memories and 100 years

After the war, it took him three months to arrange passage back to the UK, aboard a military transport ship on a four-day voyage he described as “very tricky” because of all the mines left in the Atlantic.

She returned home and managed to find a job as a primary school secretary in Shropshire County, thanks, according to her, to knowing the principal of the institution, who had also worked at Bletchley Park.

But due to the Official Secrets Act, not only could they not mention a word of what they had done during the war, but they couldn't even acknowledge that they knew each other.

All that changed, when in 1975 the veil of secrecy was lifted. But it wasn't easy for Betty to suddenly be free to talk about it.

“My mind was completely blank, I didn't want to talk about it for years. When you have kept something locked in your soul for so long, it is not easy to open up.

It was long afterward that someone suggested that she should give talks, which led to her writing the book Secrets No More, where she looks back at key moments in her life and tells the incredible stories of her time at Bletchley Park.

Charlotte “Betty” Webb has been awarded the Order of the British Empire (MBE) and the Legion of Honor from the French government. She, however, confesses that she was "shocked" when she received an invitation to the recent coronation of King Carlos III.

“I am completely overwhelmed by the honor. The invitation card is beautiful and I am going to frame it.”

This Saturday, May 13, Betty turns 100 and will celebrate it in the place that was so transcendental in her life. “I have been given the privilege of renting the event hall at Bletchley Park and I am having a party with 60 people, friends and relatives, who are coming.”

The date coincides with the launch of his book, which he will be autographing. And without a doubt she will be wearing the insignia of the Auxiliary Territorial Service that she always has pinned to her lapel with the motto: “We also serve”.