E56 - Enter Japan

March 2017

This month’s It Happened Here story is a truly global one. It’s about what happened when the war was no longer just in Europe.

In December 1941, Japan entered World War Two. This meant intelligence gathering and processing became a far bigger and more complex task, which brought about the need for a significant expansion of the top secret operation at Bletchley Park.

We'll hear from two of the women who worked on Japanese codes at Bletchley Park, Betty Webb and Mary Every, who had never met until they were interviewed together for a Japanese newspaper. We look back at this seismic change with Bletchley Park's Research Historian, Dr David Kenyon. As well as all that, Podcast Producer, Mark Cotton, was allowed privileged access to the Bletchley Park Archive to look at flash cards used to help hapless Codebreakers learn Japanese in double quick time.

Also this month, we bring you a sneak preview of an exciting new exhibition opening soon at Bletchley Park, Off Duty. Although few official records remain of what people did in their spare time, this exhibition will use stories pieced together from letters, diaries and surviving wartime documents from Bletchley Park. Off Duty will feature a number of Veterans’ memories gathered by the Oral History Project, which help us understand what it was like, in their own words.

Image: ©Bletchley Park Trust 2017

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