D-Day 80 The Last Veterans: Betty Webb
Betty Webb, Age 100, Auxiliary Territorial Service
Interviewed 24 November 2023
Based in a concrete hut at Bletchley Park, Betty Webb was a code breaker who worked on encrypted Japanese and German messages. Intelligence from Bletchley - or Station X - gave the Allies details about the locations of German Army divisions in France ahead of D-Day - and about invasion defences.
She said: "My mother was a linguist herself and she always used to have French or German helpers in the house.
"I have never known life not speaking it. It’s not very technical but I can get away with general conversation.
"I arrived aged 18 in 1941. My work was always clerical. Boring in a way but necessary. Everything that came in from our signals people had to be recorded in date order. It was just a set of groups of five letters and figures and that was all.
"It was then up to the decoders to try to make sense of it. You were not allowed to speak to anyone outside your own office about what you had heard or saw. That we had to keep until 1975.
"At the time we were not told about what was going on. Everything was closely guarded in the way of information. Not until later years have we been able to put the story together."
Some of the information decoded at Bletchley helped Allied planners.
"The codebreakers also discovered that Hitler had fallen for the Allied deception plan and thought the landings would be around Calais and not Normandy. .
Mrs Webb said: "We knew something that was going on. There was an exercise I was involved in.
"I got mumps and had to be driven in an ambulance to hospital once or twice.
"Our chaps were exercising and practising in the area. And I’ll never forget there were a couple of guards officers who stopped my ambulance and they were dressed up as Germans and they wanted a lift.
"I saId ‘You can have one if you want mumps’ which was a bit flippant.
"They were exercising for the D-Day landings."
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