Churchill's Cabinet War Rooms in London

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During the first months of World War II, with the threat of aerial attack by German forces, the British government established an operational command and control center underneath the Treasury building in the Whitehall area.

The space was built as a heavily protected bunker under "the slab", a layer of concrete 1-3 meters thick. The large space, about 12,000 square meters, housed a staff of up to 528. It because operational in 1939, after Germany started World War II with its invasion of Poland on the first of September.

The space was used as the Cabinet War Rooms through the Japanese surrender in August 1945 (Germany had surrendered in May). They were then closed down until being opened to the public in 1984. In 2005 the space accessible to the public was expanded into the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms.

These are some pictures I took during a visit. For far more detail, see their web site.

Recreation of Winston Churchill speaking to Franklin Roosevelt on the X-System from the Cabinet War Rooms during World War II.

Winston Churchill communicated over secure links between London and Washington.

For text communication, the exchanged messages through what the U.S. called the SIGABA cipher system, also variously known as the M-134-C, ECM Mark II, CSP 888/889, and ASAM VI.

As used on the POTUS-PRIME link between Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it was a much more secure crypto system than the German Enigma.

See my page on the weaknesses in the Enigma design and its use for more details on relative security of World War II cipher systems.

For voice communication, as recreated in this Cabinet War Rooms reconstruction, they used something designed by Bell Telephone Laboratories and called the X-System by its developers and operators and SIGSALY by the U.S. Army Signal Corps.

SIGSALY broke the voice spectrum into six bands and quantized each into six discrete levels. That was then XORed with a random bit stream provided by a specially made recording disk. The receiving end XORed the received data with an identical key stream on a matching record. Each record, containing 15 minutes worth of key data, was used once and then destroyed.

The SIGSALY hardware was so bulky that it had to be located in a subbasement of the Selfridge's department store, a few blocks away. A dedicated line was run from there to a small room in the Cabinet War Rooms.

Other X-System terminals were built in Washington DC, North Africa, Hawaii, Australia, the Philippines, and late in the war after the Allies re-took France, Paris.

For more details on the X-System, see "Secret Telephony as a Historical Example of Spread-Spectrum Communication", William R. Bennett, IEEE Transactions on Communications, vol COM-31, No 1, Jan 1983, pp 98-104.

BBC studio for Churchill's radio addresses.

The BBC had a small studio within the war room complex for the radio addresses Churchill made while there.

Array of telephones in the Cabinet War Rooms.

The map room had an array of telephones for gathering reports and communicating with Allied forces.

Large maps covered the walls of the map room.

Realistic manniquins complete the illusion!

Churchill's office in the Cabinet War Rooms.

Churchill's office was simple but functional.

Also see my picture of his private quarters.

That's it, for far more detail see the Cabinet War Room web site at http://cwr.iwm.org.uk/

Scotland and Orkney

People ascending Ben Nevis near Fort William in Scotland, the highest peak in the Scottish Highlands and in all of Britain.

An ascent of Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Britain, overlooking Glen Nevis just outside Fort William.

The Road to the Isles, over 22 miles (37 km) overland across the high Scottish moors of Lochaber from Corrour Station to Fort William.

Crossing a 3-wire bridge while trekking through Glen Nevis and the Water of Nevis.

A trek through Glen Nevis and the Water of Nevis.

The Brealach Walk out of Pitlochry though the Highlands past megaliths.

The Brealach Walk out of Pitlochry though the southern Highlands and past some megaliths.

Neolithic dwellings exposed on the beach at Skara Brae in Orkney.

Skara Brae, a Neolithic village on Orkney.

Neolithic Orkney: Maeshowe, the Ring of Brodgar, the Stones of Stenness, the Knowe of Onston.

Neolithic Orkney: Maeshowe, the Ring of Brodgar, the Stones of Stenness, and the Knowe of Onston.

Geos and freestanding stone pillars along the sea cliffs of the west coast of Orkney.

West Coast Walk along the sea cliffs of Orkney's Mainland Coast.

Scapa Flow and World War II naval fortifications in Orkney.

Scapa Flow and the Churchill Barriers.

The sousterrain, an underground Pict dwelling in Orkney.

The Sousterrain, an underground Pictish dwelling in Orkney.

Church yard on the Isle of Iona in the Inner Hebrides islands off the coast of Scotland.

The Isle of Iona, and Oban and Mull.

The Grit Boxes of Scotland.

Ordnance Survey map of the peak of Ben Nevis.

Navigating with the UK National Grid system and Ordnance Survey maps.

England

Walking along Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland.	Stonehenge, Woodhenge, and Durrington Walls.	Avebury, with its stone circles, Silbury Hill, the West Kennet Long Barrow, the Avenue and numerous tumuli, a much better collection of megaliths and structures than Stonehenge!
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien at Oxford.	Dover's tunnels in the White Cliffs from World War II through the Cold War.	The Swingate Chain Home radar station near Dover.
The World War II glider base near Harwell, south of Oxford.	Bletchley Park, the secret installation where the British broke the German codes during World War II.	The Cabinet War Rooms, Churchill's emergency World War II government center underground in central London.
You could go to Lee Ho Fook's and get a big dish of beef chow mein.		What's the plumbing like?