Listen up, kiddies. This is history.

AFP: Enthusiasts recreate Britain's WWII Enigma codebreaker

LONDON - A fully-functioning replica of a secret British codebreaking machine which hastened the end of the Second World War more than 60 years ago was unveiled.

Turing Bombe machines cracked some 3,000 enemy messages in the German Enigma code every day and are said to have shortened the war by two years.

Previously, it would have taken weeks rather than minutes to decipher the messages.

After the war, British prime minister Winston Churchill ordered that the machines be destroyed, for fear of them falling into the wrong hands.
But 60 enthusiasts have been beavering away for the past 10 years to recreate them from drawings of the individual parts.

The fruit of their labours was unveiled at Bletchley Park, northwest of London, where up to 10,000 people worked to break codes during the war.
Some of the techniques used are still deployed in counter-terrorism today, the National Codes Centre at Bletchley Park said.

Simon Greenish, director of Bletchley Park Trust, said the reconstruction was an "astonishing achievement".

"What was done at Bletchley has affected all our lives in one way or another because World War II would not have ended when it did if it wasn't for Bletchley," he said.

"I believe that this is one of the 20th century's great stories and the Turing Bombe is part of that great story."

Churchill praised the discretion of the women working at Bletchley, reportedly hailing them as "the geese that laid the golden eggs but never cackled".

Warrior women...