The Organisation of the Government Code and Cypher School

Abstract

The Government Code and Cypher School underwent considerable change during the Second World War. The agency left the interwar period built on a collegiate model, but over the course of the war GC&CS mechanised and bureaucratised its processes and increasingly came to resemble a factory operated on production-line principles. The problem of attacking mechanised cipher systems required a mechanised cryptanalytic approach. The wholesale incorporation of machines fundamentally altered the agency. The machine sections operated on factory principles, far removed in both organisational and operational terms from the cryptanalysis sections which operated on collegiate principles. Mechanisation allowed GC&CS to process vast numbers of Axis wireless transmissions. The scale of the agency’s success necessitated the incorporation of a vast index and catalogue of information derived from those transmissions, which itself demanded a dedicated mechanised section. The addition of these sections, and with them numerous new staff members, increased the administrative and clerical demands on the agency and new sections emerged to address these problems. The result was that numerous new sections were incorporated into the agency over the course of the war and that the mandate of pre-existing sections changed.