Alan Turing: The Truth

www.americanthinker.com

We all know who Alan Turing is. A major exhibit of Pride Month, the gay world’s pet scientific genius. He invented the computer and built the first one. He won WW II for the Allies by breaking the German Enigma code, and had to fight the entire British establishment to do it. In the end, he was castrated by an ungrateful British government for being gay. It was in the movies, so it must be true.

There’s an annoying but understandable habit among minorities of making extravagant claims for past achievements. Take the 332nd Fighter Group, the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, who fought in Italy during WW II (the same war that Turing was busy winning) The 332nd, we’re solemnly assured, never lost a single bomber in all its missions escorting bomber formations.

None of the Tuskegee pilots ever made this claim. They never made it because it was absurd. They were flying against the Luftwaffe, one of the most experienced and lethal air forces in the world. Everybody lost aircraft against them, and the 332nd was no exception. That claim was made up after the war by third parties who knew nothing at all about the Red Tails.

The problem with this kind of thing is that it degrades the record and stains reputations. People who learn that some claims are false start doubting everything. That’s true of the 332nd, and it’s also true of Alan Turing.

To start with the many claims made about Turing: The “Bombe,” the calculating machine often cited as a proto-computer, was designed and built by a team led by the Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski to break the German Enigma code. Enigma was an encryption device that used a combination of rotors and circuitry to encrypt texts to truly astronomical levels. The Germans believed, with some reason, that it would require millions of years of calculations to break a single day’s coded messages. Most of the Third Reich’s encryption depended on this machine. The Germans were convinced that the Enigma was absolutely impregnable.

Just before war began, the Bombe and relevant material were shipped to Bletchley Park, site of the Government Code and Cypher School, the UK’s code-breaking unit.

Originally a training school for saboteurs, the Bletchley Park manor house became the codebreaking center in August 1939, only two weeks before the outbreak of war. Beginning with a staff of a few hundred, it expanded to nearly 9,000 by war’s end, all devoted to producing crucial intelligence intercepts under the code name “Ultra.”

Already recruited, Turing reported for duty the day after war broke out. In 1936, Turing wrote a paper, “On Computable Numbers,” putting forward his theory of computing. Turing envisioned an endless tape upon which a read/write head could inscribe symbols and then read them off according to set of mathematical procedures which today we’d call “algorithms.” With the infinite “tape” converted to electronic circuitry, the paper became the basis for computer theory and everything that followed.

Turing worked at Bletchley’s Hut 8, upgrading Rajewski’s Bombe in order to break German naval codes, a crucial effort due to the U-boat threat. The Poles had some success with German codes, but the Germans were constantly modifying the Enigma machines. Eventually, Hut 8 could consistently decrypt German messages, sometimes within hours. This effort played a key role in winning the Battle of the Atlantic, the years-long campaign against the Nazi U-boat fleet.

It’s often forgotten that Bletchley Park was a team effort. The romantic cliché of the lone genius battling establishment indifference seldom fits the facts. The truth is that Bletchley Park was packed with geniuses.

Two of the most important figures in the decryption effort were Dilwyn “Dilly” Knox, a classics scholar who had a parallel career as a codebreaker beginning in WW I. At Bletchley, Knox broke the Italian Enigma naval code and later the Abwehr (German intelligence) code. Gordon Welchman was a mathematician specializing in traffic analysis, tracking where, when, and how many messages were sent to particular stations. Welchman worked closely with Turing on the Bombe, developing the “diagonal board” that increased the machine’s effectiveness. He played a key role in breaking German army and air force codes.

Neither Welchman nor Knox received the credit they deserved, with many of their accomplishments credited to Turing. The same is true of Conel Hugh O’Donel Alexander, a chess master (Bletchley recruited many chess experts), who worked under Turing on naval codes before taking over in 1942. Stuart Wilner-Barry, another chess master, worked in Hut 8 on stereotype patterns in codes, called “cribs.” One German operator, for instance, prefaced each message with “Heil Hitler.” Margaret Rock was Bletchley’s senior cryptologist, considered among the top five in the UK, who made critical breakthroughs against German and Russian codes. (In fact, 75% of the personnel were women. Dilly Knox believed that women would prove superior at codebreaking. The record suggests he was right.)

Like many geniuses, Turing was a world-class eccentric, with peculiarities that proved trying to both his coworkers and British intelligence. He tended to interpret situations in his own unique fashion, with little connection to the world as it actually existed. Given a gas mask at the outbreak of war, Turing took to wearing it while riding his bike around the grounds, with the kind of results that might be expected. Later, convinced that the Germans would immediately confiscate his money in the event of an invasion, he converted it to silver and hid the silver in the woods behind the manor. He then forgot where he buried it, requiring a mine detector to locate it.

As for his sexuality, this is not quite as clear as many people would like to believe. Though there is little doubt that he was attracted to men and plenty of them, Turing was not “gay,” which didn’t take on its current meaning of homosexuality crossed with New Left politics until the 1970s.

But that’s not all there is to it. At one point, he was caught having it off with a female staffer in a Bletchley office. How often this happened is anybody’s guess. But it does raise the possibility that Turing was as much highly sexed as anything, turning to men during a period in which women were far more careful about their sexual dalliances than is the case today.

There also exist darker possibilities. While researching a biography of Stewart Graham Menzies, MI 6’s legendary “C,” British intelligence historian Anthony Cave Brown discovered that a man had been sought for molesting schoolboys at libraries near Bletchley Park. The description was a ringer for Alan Turing. Furthermore, when local police investigated, a couple of nondescript but imposing men appeared, informing them that the case was being taken over by higher authorities and they needed to hand over their files, thank you kindly. That was the last anybody heard of the phantom molester.

Could it have been Turing? At this point, it’s impossible to say. But Cave Brown, nobody’s fool, certainly suspected as much.

As for Colossus, the actual first computer in the sense that we understand the term, Turing’s role was less than major. Colossus was designed by mathematician Max Newman and telephone engineer Tommy Flowers. It was, of course, based on the principles developed by Turing, and he acted as an advisor during its construction. The Colossus computers entered service beginning in December 1943, and targeted the German high command, generating critical decrypts in the last year of the war.

After the war, Turing worked on computer design for the British government. He also published speculations on artificial intelligence, proposing the Turing test as a method of establishing whether a computer exhibited intelligent behavior.

He continued his sexual escapades. Some evidence exists that this included a growing interest in teenage boys.

It was this, coupled with his complete unworldliness, that led to his downfall. Many of his pickups were rough trade – working-class types who tended toward the criminal. In 1951, one of these helped himself to valuables in Turing’s flat. An indignant Turing, ignorant of possible consequences, went to the police. He was arrested, tried, found guilty of indecent behavior, and sentenced to what amounted to chemical castration (a Labour social-engineering project that represented an attempt to control sexuality the same way they did everything else.) Less than two years later, he was dead by suicide.

Much is said about how Turing was persecuted despite the role he played during the war. But nobody knew about that. The entire Bletchley Park operation – Enigma, Ultra, Colossus – was still top secret. (Astonishingly, considering the thousands of people involved, it remained that way up until the 1970s, when F. W. Winterbotham published The Ultra Secret.) To the legal system, Turing was simply another academic with weird tastes that went over the line into criminality.

But why did the British elite in intelligence and government fail to come to his aid? It’s possible that the old pedophilia accusation had come back to bite him. Certainly, the officials who had protected him in 1943 were not happy about the role they’d played. A decade later, they may have decided it was time to wash their hands of him.

Given the facts, it’s impossible to hold up Turing as a historical figure to be admired and imitated. Gay hagiography surrounding Turing is just as dishonest – and maybe even as harmful – as the judgmental moralism of the pre-Stonewall era. At his best, Turing was a world-class mathematician and a scientific pioneer whose work helped lay down the blueprint for our own century. At worst, he was a confused, unbalanced, and foolish man whose out-of-control behavior was a threat to both himself and the people around him, and that may well have played a role in his own destruction. Pedophilia is all too common among gay idols. Harvey Milk liked his young – one teenage boy killed himself after being involved with him. The same is true of gay rights pioneer Harry Hays. This tendency toward child abuse is something that gays will have to come to terms with. Turing’s story demonstrates that as yet they’ve done no such thing.