The Bletchley Park Codebreakers (Dialogue Espionage Classics)
Michael Smith
Language: English
Pages: 560
ISBN: 1849540780
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Bletchley Park was the site of Britain's main decryption center, the Government Code and Cypher School. This extraordinary book includes essays by some of Britain’s foremost historians and academics and traces the legacy of Bletchley Park from the innovative work which led to the breaking of Enigma and other wartime codes to the invention of modern computing and its influence on Cold War codebreaking.
Crucially, it also features contributions from former Bletchley Park codebreakers, whose personal reminiscences and very human stories of life and work in wartime Bletchley make compelling reading.
Michael Smith is the author of Killer Elite.
Ralph Erskine is one of Britain’s leading historians of wartime codebreaking.
reinforcements being sent but agreed to further armaments being supplied to the Croat army, now to be placed under German command. Von Horstenau predicted that German soldiers would be ‘needlessly sacrificing their blood’ unless the Croats proved more capable than they had in the past. Further messages from the German Supreme Command were intercepted, stating that they were putting pressure on the Italians to clean up the Livno area while doubting that they had the means or desire to do so. On 17
had lost command of Herzegovina and probably Montenegro. It concluded that, despite 200 miles of running battle with German forces, the Partisans had retained sufficient vigour and organization to defeat the Chetniks decisively, that the Germans were still trying to complete the destruction of the Partisans, and that Mihailović and his Chetniks were in danger of becoming further identified with the Axis. Decrypts also revealed the details of Operation Schwarz against the Chetniks. On 2 May, a
Intelligence Officer in the Peninsula: the Letters and Diaries of Major the Hon. Edward Charles Coles 1786–1812 (Hippocrene, New York, 1986). Page 5 Just as the Indian government… the Great Game: see, for example, Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game (John Murray, London, 1990). Page 6 Secret Department of the Post Office: on the Post Office see, variously, P. Aubrey, Mr. Secretary Thurloe (Athlone, London, 1990), K. Ellis, The Post Office in the Eighteenth Century (OUP, Oxford, 1958). Page 7 the
teleprinting. We supported each other well, however, in staffing, each recognising that we shared a chronic understaffing problem. There were occasions when we lent strippers (whom we could ill spare) to help the Processing Party to keep abreast of their essential work when the pressure was extreme, and other occasions when they could spare time to help us. Mrs Parsons was happy to recommend some of her particularly able Wrens (whom she had no means of promoting) for a trial run on stripping with
production would be concentrated on making three-rotor bombes, although a further eighteen or so four-rotor bombes were in fact made. The US Navy bombe figures for maintenance and reliability were maintained consistently throughout 1944 and 1945, each being under 3 per cent. Like some British bombes, some US Navy bombes continued to operate after the end of the war in Europe: one Navy bombe was still attacking old wartime ciphers in March 1946. It has even been claimed that some were brought