Decipherer played key role in sinking of battleship Bismarck

Jane Fawcett, a British codebreaker during World War II who deciphered a key German message that led to the sinking of the battleship Bismarck — one of Britain’s greatest naval victories during the war — died May 21 at her home in Oxford, England. She was 95.

Her death was first reported by the Telegraph newspaper in Britain. The cause was not disclosed.

Fawcett was still in her teens when she received a letter from a friend in February 1940, in the early months of the war.

Fluent in German and driven by curiosity, Fawcett — then known by her maiden name, Jane Hughes — found work at Britain’s top-secret code-breaking facility at Bletchley Park. Of the 12,000 people who worked there, about 8,000 were women.

Bletchley Park later became renowned as the place where mathematician Alan Turing and others solved the puzzle of the German military’s “Enigma machine,” depicted in the 2014 film “The Imitation Game.”

Turing worked in Hut 8 at Bletchley Park, while Fawcett was assigned to Hut 6. She was part of an all-female team whose job was to monitor messages from the German army and air force.

Conditions in the single-story wooden buildings were hardly ideal.

“It was just horrid; there were very leaky windows,” Fawcett recalled in a 2015 interview with the Telegraph, “so it was very cold with just a frightful old stove in the middle of the room that let out lots of fumes but not much heat, and just one electric bulb hanging on a string, which was quite inadequate. We were always working against time, there was always a crisis, a lot of stress and a lot of excitement.”

In May 1941, the British navy was searching for Germany’s most formidable battleship, the Bismarck, which had last been seen near Norway.

Fawcett was transcribing an intercepted message from the headquarters of the Luftwaffe, when she noticed a reference to the French city of Brest.

In a reply to a Luftwaffe general whose son was aboard the Bismarck, a German officer noted that the battleship was headed to Brest for repairs.

Fawcett relayed her discovery to her supervisors, and within a day the Bismarck was spotted by the U.S. Navy in the Atlantic Ocean, about 700 miles off the coast of Brittany. British warplanes and naval vessels descended on the Bismarck, which was sunk on May 27, 1941. More than 2,000 German crew members were killed.

Fawcett’s work was not made public for decades. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that her role in the sinking of the Bismarck began to come to light.