Talk:Arthur Thomas Hatto

Which landings?
Flood (2014) says the Sicily Landings, I can't check Flood (2011) due to the paywall. The description certainly seems to indicate the earlier date, can someone with access to the Flood book please check? Thanks. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 08:59, 12 April 2018 (UTC)


 * , looks like I may have erred in saying the Normandy landings. Here's what Flood 2011, pp. 177–178, says about Hatto's wartime service:

"Scarcely had he taken up his lectureship, however, than he was recruited on Norman’s and Sir Frederick Maurice’s recommendation in February 1939 to work in the cryptographic bureau in Admiral Hall’s Room 40 at the Foreign Office, where two other professors of German, Walter Bruford and Leonard Willoughby, had already gained experience before 1918. Now, even before war was declared, Norman was steering able young linguists into war work of this kind. Hatto, in fact, found himself working under Norman in the Air Section. On 3 September 1939 they were seconded to the British monitoring and cryptographic centre at Bletchley Park to work under the cryptographic genius Captain (later Brigadier) John Tiltman (1894–1982). Hatto was thrilled when Tiltman succeeded in cracking the German ‘stencil’ cipher which no less a mathematician than Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, alias Lewis Carroll, had once declared to be unbreakable. George Steiner has opined, ‘It looks as if Bletchley Park is the single greatest achievement of Britain during 1939–45, perhaps during this century as a whole.’5 Whether or not that is so, ‘BP’ has been rightly called a ‘nursery for Germanists’, for among its denizens were many Germanists, several of whom would become professors after the war. Besides Hatto, they included Walter Bruford and Leonard Forster (both Fellows of the Academy), Kenneth Brooke, the lexicographer Trevor Jones, C. T. Carr, D. M. Mennie, R. V. Tymms, Dorothy Reich, William Rose, K. C. King, F. P. Pickering, and H. B. Willson (the last three distinguished medievalists).

But for the fall of France, Hatto might have been sent to the Continent to serve as a wireless operator in a cryptographic unit. As it was, he was set on decoding tasks at Bletchley Park, one of which was to produce the first report on the Luftwaffe’s operations in France. He also worked successfully on Gestapo ciphers, German weather ciphers and others, and soon attracted attention—standing out from the largely Oxford-trained specialists in Classics, English, and Statistics—through his rare ability to (p.178) interpret even corrupted messages thanks to his philological training and his now excellent command of German. Unfortunately, his skill in such matters was regarded with envy by Oliver Strachey (the brother of Lytton6) who apparently believed that the war would and should be won without the help of London University, which did not make for a harmonious working relationship. However, Strachey had appointed the Classicist L. R. Palmer (1906–84), a man who, as a pupil of the legendary Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, had excellent German, and Denys Page (1908–78), later Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, to his section, and these recognised Hatto’s considerable abilities. They gave him the task of trying to gather advance information on impending changes within existing ciphers, on the introduction of new ciphers, and on changes in German cipher personnel. In this role he had a major success, on the eve of the Allied landing in Sicily in July 1943. Despite being highly distrustful of their own cipher security and observing the strictest discipline in their communications, the Germans were let down by one of their own communications officers who broke the golden rule of not referring in a current cipher to any element of a new cipher it was proposed to introduce. Hatto discovered that, by foolishly revealing the three-letter call signs from the preamble to messages, this officer had inadvertently published the key to one of the Germans’ most secret communication routes, and since the various networks were linked, this gave Bletchley Park access to communications to German land, sea and air forces before the Allied landings took place.

After the defeat of Germany, part of Hatto’s section at Bletchley Park was to transfer to Ceylon en route for Tokyo. Although Denys Page invited Hatto to join his team there, he somewhat reluctantly declined since his wife had recently given birth to their daughter, Jane."


 * I've changed the sentence to "...thereby aiding the Allied forces before the Allied invasion of Sicily." Please feel free to make other changes as you see fit, however; it's not a subject about which I know much. --Usernameunique (talk) 15:41, 12 April 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks, I probably know less than you about Hatto, but have read a bit about BP - hence my suprise. Regards, Martin of Sheffield (talk) 16:51, 12 April 2018 (UTC)