World War II Code Used By British POW In Letters Home Cracked

In an achievement that may have longstanding implications for World War II historians, a group of researchers at a British university has cracked the code used by a British soldier imprisoned in Germany.

Mathematicians, historians and geographers from Plymouth University in England worked together to decipher the 70-year-old coded letters sent home by Sub-Lieutenant John Pryor.

The project was spearheaded by Barbara Bond, a pro-chancellor at the university, who is working toward a Ph.D. on MI9 (a section of British military intelligence) subterfuge and escape plans during World War II. She learned of the letters through university Governor Stephen Pryor, John Pryor's son, according to a Plymouth press release.

“I had known for 30 years that my father had these letters, but he could not remember the full code and so their contents lay hidden," Stephen Pryor said in the statement. "My father was among the tens of thousands of young men who as PoWs lost the best years of their youth and could never hope to regain them. But I can now see that despite their plight, he and his peers took incredible risks and it has only made me admire their resilience and ingenuity even more.”

Bond, together with Pryor, history professor Harry Bennett and mathematics professor David McMullan, eventually was able to crack the coded letters, translating mundane anecdotes about things like vegetable patches into information on the enemy.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Bennett said the project was "an incredible achievement" that reveals surprising details about the operational role of prisoners of war behind enemy lines.

"Suddenly, [we see that] POWs are not only trying to get out of war camps, they are also sending back information of a sensitive nature, almost becoming a kind of eyes and ears on the ground," Bennett told HuffPost.


In his letters, Pryor gave information that could help the Royal Navy prevent submarine attacks. He also identified a German weapons dump for British bombers, Bennett said.

The fact that POWs could have played a major role in the war effort is "actually quite fascinating when you think about it," Bennett added. "I don't think historians have really woken up to significance of this."

The coding was complicated, according to Bennett, who described the process as "crosswords or puzzles –- a form of super-Sudoko for the 1940s generation" in an interview with the Daily Mirror.

- huffingtonpost.com