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EVERY WAR MUST HAVE AN END 63
the listening units of the armed forces, known as the Y services.
Although these fed high-grade material to Bletchley Park,
they also worked on low-grade material for their own purposes.
Often considered 'poor relations', they derived their intelligence
either from listening in to low-level tactical communications
that were not encrypted, including clear voice traffic, or by
simply analysing the flow of traffic. Analysing the patterns of
radio traffic, including volume and direction, even without
breaking the codes, could reveal a great deal of information
about the enemy, and GC&CS worked closely with the armed
services to develop what were known as the 'Y stations'. Bill
Millward, who continued to serve long after the war, recalls
that Bletchley Park's relationship to the Y services was to become
'a sort of university of signals intelligence, developing techniques
which all might share' .46 The Y services had been largely
responsible for deducing the enemy 'order of battle', the structure,
strength and location of the units of the German armed
forces. The Navy ran intercept sites at Scarborough and
Winchester. The Army ran a site at Fort Bridgelands near
Chatham, and later opened a station at Beaumanor Hall near
Loughborough in Leicestershire. The RAF were located at
Cheadle in Cheshire, and developed a large new site at
Chicksands near Baldock in Bedfordshire. Many of these locations
would continue as sigint sites after August 1945. 47 All of
them were symptomatic of an industrial revolution in secret
intelligence: both Bletchley Park and the outstations operated
like factories, with three gruelling shifts each day.
At a deeper leveL there had also been a social revolution in
British intelligence. Brilliant individuals who only a year before
had been members of international chess teams or wrestling
with obscure mathematical problems in Cambridge colleges,
were now focused on intelligence. Remorselessly logical, they
could see that Bletchley Park was the intelligence machine of
the future. Moreover, they were outsiders, with no sense of
bureaucratic anxiety and no fear of the 'Establishment'. They
fearlessly articulated what to them was self-evident. GC&CS,