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28 BLETCHLEY PARK AND BEYOND
often had to be coordinated with discreet telephone taps on the
foreign embassies in London. The military side remained at
Bletchley Park. This did not resolve the heated arguments about
who controlled the spoils of GC&CS, but it did address the
immediate accommodation problems, and created two organisations
of a more manageable size. Menzies retained his post
as overall Director, but was a notably absentee landlord. Alastair
Denniston was sent to London as Deputy Director (Civil), while
his talented deputy, Commander Edward Travis, remained at
Bletchley as Deputy Director (Services).39 Travis was now the
rising star. 40
British code-breaking in the early years of the war was not just
about the German military secrets revealed through Enigma.
Even harder to break than the Enigma machine had been a
German teleprinter on-line cypher machine known as 'Tunny',
used by the German High Command to produce 'Fish' messages.
On-line cypher machines were especially challenging because
they were automatic, and sent a continuous stream of text,
much of it dummy material, sometimes offering no obvious start
or end points to each message. This went some way to eliminating
another weakness of the Enigma machine - its operators,
who were prone to human error. To address the problem
of 'Tunny', the British later built 'Colossus', one of the earliest
general-purpose electronic machines, and perhaps the first device
that might be described as a 'computer'. Conceived by Professor
Max Newman and then developed by Tommy Flowers from the
British Post Office research facility at Dollis Hill, this was one
of the supreme technical achievements of the warY
The achievements of the civil side of GC&CS have often been
neglected. By 1940 it was analysing not only the diplomatic
codes and cyphers of the Axis powers, but also those of more
than twenty other countries. These included the Soviet Union,
which did not enter the war until it was attacked by Germany
on 22 June 1941. The diplomatic communications of quarrelsome
allies such as the Free French, or important neutrals such