Hut 3 was a section of the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park during World War II. It retained the name for its functions when it moved into Block D. It produced military intelligence codenamed Ultra from the decrypts of Enigma, Tunny and multiple other sources. Hut 3 thus became an intelligence agency in its own right, providing information of great strategic value, but rarely of operational use. Group Captain Eric Malcolm Jones led this activity from 1943 and after the war became deputy director, and in 1952 director of GCHQ. In July 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower Supreme Commander of Allied forces wrote to Sir Stewart Menzies, Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) saying inter alia: "The intelligence that has emanated from you before and during this campaign has been of priceless value to me. It has simplified my task as commander enormously. It has saved thousands of British and American lives and, in no small way, has contributed to the speed with which the enemy was routed and eventually forced to surrender."
Development The "German Army and Air Force Enigma Reporting Section" was set up in January 1940. That name, however, was soon dropped in favour of "Hut 3" as a description both of the location and of the functions and this was retained when, in February 1943 it moved into Block D. These became very much more than just the translation, interpretation and distribution of German Army and Air Force Enigma messages deciphered by Hut 6. As F. L. 'Peter' Lucas saidIt was not a matter of receiving messages and translating them; it was a matter of receiving material which was nearly always more or less imperfect, often incomplete, rarely intelligible with ease, and at its worst totally meaningless to even the best German scholar. By the time of D-Day in June 1944 Hut 3 was synthesising a torrent of signals intelligence ("SIGINT") data from multiple sources and producing an outgoing flood of useful intelligence. David Kenyon, Research Historian at Bletchley Park has been able to access a number of unpublished sources, in particular "The History of Hut Three", a GCHQ document in The National Archives (HW3/119) for his 2019 book "Bletchley Park and D-Day: The Untold Story of How the Battle for Normandy Was Won". Initially, there were serious personal frictions between the four main people. They were the original leader, Lieutenant-Commander Malcolm Saunders, Squadron Leader Robert Humphreys (senior liaison officer with the Air Force), Captain Curtis (senior liaison officer with the War Office, who knew no German), and Cambridge academic F. L. Lucas who had been in the Intelligence Corps in World War I. Humphreys was “an excellent German linguist, but no team player”. He wanted to get his own way and found this difficult to do, if only because Saunders had a mind of his own. Nigel de Grey described the situation as "an imbroglio of conflicting jealousies, intrigues and differing opinions". Early in 1942 the Air Ministry sent Squadron Leader Eric Jones to investigate the problem. He had worked as a businessman in the textile industry in Cheshire (speaking with "Cheshire vowels") for 20 years before joining up in 1940. His report so impressed the Director of GC&CS Edward Travis that, in July 1942, Saunders, Humphreys and Curtis were moved out of Hut 3, and Jones was promoted to Group Captain and put in sole charge. Just over a year later, H. S. Marchant was made deputy to Jones, and the pair were in charge until the end of the war. There were a number of sections: Air Section "3A", Military Section "3M", a small Naval Section "3N", a multi-service Research Section "3G" and a large liaison section "3L". The name “Hut 3” was retained when its functions and those of Hut 4, Hut 6, Hut 8 and the Signals Intelligence and Traffic Analysis group – known as "SIXTA" – moved to a new brick building, Block D, in February 1943. The decoded messages from Hut 6 for Hut 3, which previously had been sent in a tray via a wooden tunnel between the huts, were then sent by a conveyor belt that “never stopped”.
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