The Codebreakers: Bletchley Park, Enigma, and the Secret War That Won WWII: Mathematicians, Machines, and the Intelligence Triumph of the Twentieth Century

The Codebreakers. Bletchley Park, Enigma, and the Secret War That Won WWII

In a Victorian mansion forty miles north of London, some of the most brilliant minds in Britain — mathematicians, linguists, chess champions, crossword enthusiasts, and classical scholars — fought a secret war that never fired a shot. Their weapon was intelligence. Their battlefield was mathematics. And their victories, hidden for thirty years under the most complete secrecy oath in history, may have shortened the Second World War by as much as four years and saved millions of lives. This is the story of Bletchley Park, of Alan Turing and his revolutionary Bombe machine, of the Polish mathematicians who first cracked the Enigma code, and of the 10,000 men and women who worked in shifts around the clock to read the most closely guarded secrets of the Third Reich. It is the story of naval Enigma and the Battle of the Atlantic, of Ultra intelligence and the North Africa campaign, of Colossus — the world's first programmable computer — and the Lorenz cipher that gave the Allies access to Hitler's own strategic thinking. The Codebreakers is narrative history at its most thrilling: a story of genius, sacrifice, secrecy, and the invisible war that changed the world.