American 6813 Division History October 1945 Page 25

Tony Sale's Codes and Ciphers

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his turn on a week of research thinking up new ideas.


The idea of rotating jobs although it required a high class of

personnel has many points ib its favour. Everyone had an oportunity of
experiencing the workings of the section. The culmination of various
views on the work led to greater progress, and the complete understanding
of the entire problem by everyone concerned made it possible to keep work
going from shift to shift without delays. If anything should be attributed
to the organisation, it is the unusual measure of proximity that was found
between theory and practice.


The structure of the organisation was built on the concept that

the male members should carry the responsibility for any decisions and the
work should be reduced to a routine so that the Wrens were able to do it.
Every responsibility was defined as well as the person who was to carry
that responsibility. It was understood that a man was expected to do his
job and he was left alone to do what he thought best.


Perhaps the main fault of the organisation was that the primary

principle of the difference between a man's work and that of a Wren was
overdone. It was true that the selection of personnel did make it possible
to draw such a distinction, but later when the section grew to such an ex-
tent that ther was a shortage of males some of the Wrens did wheelbreaking
jobs and other tasks requiring technical knowledge which were previously
thought possible only by a man. A programme of training Wrens in theory
and the work began in ernest but if this change in policy had started
earlier greater dividends would have been noticed in the results.


Remarks. In conclusion some words should be said about decibans,

a word which was pronounced in the section more often than any other. Al-
though the term had been used in other sections of Bletchley Park, it be-
came such a necessity in Fish statistics that the theoretical unit was the
main building block of the section. The word simply means ten times the
log of the odds, but its application to the calculation of the probability
of two or more independent events substitues the process of addtition instead
of the normal multiplication and therefire becomes a handy unit for speedy
statistics
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