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48 BLETCHLEY PARK AND BEYOND
Assault Units were moving into Germany alongside the fighting
elements of Allied formations, looking for all kinds of top-secret
German experimental weapons. Bletchley Park despatched its
own Target Intelligence Committee teams, known as 'TICOM
teams', made up of a mixture of British and American personnel,
to seek out cryptographic equipment and sigint personnel from
Germany. The whole TICOM programme was run on what
Commander Edward Travis called 'an entirely inter-allied' basis. 2
Suddenly, boffins in glasses and cardigans found themselves
turned into amateur commandos. Whisked away to a quarry
near Bletchley, those selected for this task were given a short
course in the use of sub-machine guns and hand grenades. They
began on the Thompson sub-machine gun, but soon found the
lighter Sten gun to be an easier weapon to handle. None of
them performed well, but nevertheless they were soon on their
way to Hitler's 'Alpine Lair' at Berchtesgaden. Major Edward
Rushworth, one of the senior British officers from Hut Three,
led a TICOM team of a dozen officers, accompanied by Selmer
Norland, an American stationed at Bletchley Park. They arrived
at the major Ger:rnan headquarters at Augsburg on 8 May,
VE-Day. Augsburg had been home to the famous German 'Fish',
or Geheimschreiber, the encyphered teleprinter which Bletchley
had eventually defeated with the mighty 'Colossus' computer.
Sadly, all these beautiful machines, lovingly manufactured by
Lorenz, had been smashed and the cypher wheels had gone.
The dejected team surveyed the debris. However, a day later
their spirits rebounded when they gleefully recovered a single
intact late-model 'Fish' from a town on the Austrian border. 3
On 12 May 1945 they reached Hitler's Alpine retreat. The
Fuhrer's accommodation had been heavily bombed, but a
hundred feet below ground was a maze of bunkers and tunnels
to explore, including an emergency power station and a complete
telephone exchange. No more cypher machines seemed to be
in evidence, and the mission was tailing off when, as a last task,
Rushworth set off for nearby Rosenheim on the Austrian border,
to question a cryptographer who had been working for the