Short description
The complete story of how the German Enigma codes were broken, reissued for the 70th anniversary of the event.
Long description
Breaking the German Enigma codes was not only about brilliant mathematicians and professors at Bletchley Park. There is another aspect of the story which it is only now possible to tell. It takes in the exploits of spies, naval officers and ordinary British seamen who risked, and in some cases lost, their lives snatching the vital Enigma codebooks from under the noses of Nazi officials and from sinking German ships and submarines. This book tells the whole Enigma story: its original invention and use by German forces and how it was the Poles who first cracked and passed on to the British - the key to the German airforce Enigma. The more complicated German Navy Enigma appeared to them to be unbreakable.
Review
The author is the great-great-grandson of a former owner of Bletchley Park, when it was simply a country house, before it was bought by the secret service and became the centre where the Germans' supposedly unbreakable Enigma cipher machine was often broken and read. Most books on the subject so far have covered the enormous strategic, and occasional tactical, roles of ultra secret decrypts, but Sebag-Montefiore concentrates on the naval aspects of the story, attempting the difficult task of explaining to a lay readership exactly how the process of decipherment worked. The trickiest mathematical passages come in appendices; the main text is enlivened with numerous tales of naval gallantry, as U-boats were captured and boarded at sea, and of horror, as merchant ships were sunk without warning. An exceedingly complicated subject provides the background for a stirring book. (Kirkus UK)