D-Day 80 The Last Veterans: Ruth Bourne

Ruth Bourne, Age: 97, Women’s Royal Naval Service 

Interviewed 7 March 2024

Working at sites around Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, Mrs Bourne was a Bombe machine operator and checker.

After joining the Wrens she was chosen to work at the secret site set up to decode intercepted Nazi messages.

Bletchley had been compiling intelligence for the Allied High Command for well over a year before D-Day.

"I am not really sure why it happened," said Mrs Bourne.

"But we went to our training camp as normally we all did and when we were all given categories I was put into a category called SDX special duties.

"There were maybe half a dozen of us and we said 'what's that?' And we were told 'We don't know.' That's all we were told."

Ruth Bourne was chosen to work at the secret site set up to decode intercepted Nazi messages. Credit: ITV Meridian

The monumental task was to decode messages that had been encrypted via the Enigma cypher device.

According to Bletchley Park's website: "These devices typically changed settings every 24 hours and with 159 quintillion possible combinations every day, the staff at Bletchley Park worked around the clock to break the settings by hand."

The Bombes were designed by Alan Turing and were electro-mechanical machines helping to speed up the process.

Mrs Bourne said: "It had all the components of an Enigma machine, the drums, the wheels and the plugs.

"It was searching for the reasonable possible answer to any of the paired letters of an Enigma machine. There were three banks of wheels replicating the drums on an Enigma machine...we put the drums onto rows of rods, being extremely accurate.

"Then we went round the back of the machine and were plugging in pairs of letters.

"One of the difficulties of breaking Enigma was the pairs of letters on the Enigma machine that were very complex.

"Then we set the machine going."

Ruth Bourne was a Bombe machine operator and checker at Bletchley Park. Credit: ITV Meridian

Mrs Bourne remembers only a handful of Bombes when she arrived. Eventually there were more than 200.

The work was so intensive that at first she didn't appreciate how much the Bletchley codebreakers had helped with the planning of D-Day.

"I didn't really comprehend the enormity of what was going on. I believe now that the information that was given from Bletchley was invaluable.

"We knew where ten or twelve of Hitler's divisions were. We did our best to make it very favourable for the invasion."

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