alt Hacker NewsOnly about a dozen years ago Bletchley was inviting former codebreakers back for an annual reunion. I used to go along to hear the talks, meet some of them and get books signed, including by Betty Webb. I'm glad they eventually got the recognition they deserved.
We have almost lost the chance now to hear personal testimony of WWII. I've met several Battle of Britain pilots too, but the last died in Dublin recently:
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2025/0318/1502596-hemingway/
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Two years ago my mother's memory care home had an American Battle of the Bulge veteran and Bronze Star winner who was sharp as a tack.
He was 99 and said he just wanted to live to be 100, but sadly he didn't make it.
I remember my late grandmother telling us they had made mittens for my great uncle, but he died in that battle before the mittens arrived.
Crazy to think I passed up my chance to have a cup of coffee with a man who might have fought beside my great uncle.
Most of them were told "Never, ever speak about any of this".
And they didn't.
Like the Zanryu Nipponhei [0], they were loyal to the last. Even my own father kept things about his airforce days way too tightly wrapped up long, long after the official secrets sell-by date. I have some admiration for this, but in the end it's a loss to historical record.
It's insane how the largest conflict in human history is just now passing out of living memory. It's also insane how 1 in 4 Americans under 40 believe the holocaust is a fabrication or exaggeration.
In 2001 in the small town of Hartsville SC, one of the youngest code breakers gave his last two public talks. He had been hired by Turing because he was one of the few studying both math and German at the start of the war.
Besides being very interesting it felt odd to hear all this in such an out of the way place. Well after the war he collaborated on some books with a professor teaching at the college there.