Eileen Younghusband, author of One Woman’s War, joined eighty of her fellow veterans at Bletchley
Park this week to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of operations beginning at
the site. The code-breaking
and intelligence operations conducted at the mansion are credited with
shortening the Second World War by ‘two to four years’.
For many decades after the end of the war, employees of
Bletchley Park were so tight-lipped about their top-secret work that Churchill labelled
them ‘the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled’. However, with a major
new film on their operations soon to be released, recognition for, and interest
in, the team that cracked the enigma cipher is at an all-time high.
Eileen herself joined the war effort when she was nineteen,
in 1941, and served as a Filterer Officer on RAF bases across the country. Her own story went untold for years, she, like
her colleagues, having signed the
Official Secrets Act; it is now available in One Woman’s War, an autobiography that is a testament to the
invaluable work of the WAAF in the fight against fascism.
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