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Enigma: The Battle for the Code
Enigma: The Battle for the Code
Enigma: The Battle for the Code
Ebook696 pages10 hours

Enigma: The Battle for the Code

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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"cracking stuff . . . vivid and hitherto unknown details."-Sunday Times (London)

The complete untold story of the cracking of the infamous Nazi code

Most histories of the cracking of the elusive Enigma code focus on the work done by the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, Britain's famous World War II counterintelligence station. In this fascinating account, however, we are told, for the first time, the hair-raising stories of the heroic British and American sailors, spies, and secret agents who put their lives on the line to provide the codebreakers with the materials they needed. Noted British journalist Hugh Sebag-Montefiore tracked down many of the surviving players in the Enigma drama, and these witnesses-some of them speaking on record for the first time-provide unforgettable firsthand accounts of the courageous men and women who faced death in order to capture vital codebooks from sinking ships and snatch them from under the noses of Nazi officials. In addition to these gripping stories, we learn fascinating new details about the genesis of the code and the feverish activities at Bletchley. Enigma is a spellbinding account of the brilliant feat of decryption that turned the tide of World War II.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 18, 2009
ISBN9780470468845
Enigma: The Battle for the Code

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Rating: 3.661290262365591 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Before WWII started the German military build several cipher computing devices. These devices had wheels within them with letters and number and you could type in your plain text and the machine would code your text for you and then that could be sent to other members of the military with the machines and as long as they matched the settings of the sending machine they could read out the real message.

    Unbeknownst to the Germans, Polish agents had gotten ahold of one of these machines (code named Enigma) and some of their code books a couple years before the war and had started working on decoding the cipher and replicating the machine. They shared their information with France and England.

    This book is the story of the Enigma machine and how England figured out how to break the code and continue to break it as it was repeatedly changed and updated during WWII. The focus of this book is on the background of how the allies got their information, how they broke the code, and the way that was used by the navy in the Battle of the Atlantic. I'm sure there is a lot more info out there about how this sort of thing influenced other military ops but this book's focus is on the Navy.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    There is so much written now about World War II that an author needs to work hard at coming up with a new take on what they want to write about. In this book, Sebag-Montefiore decides to look at the whole story surrounding the German Enigma code. He starts with Polish attempts to decrypt it, follows it through France into the hands of English cryptographers, deals with the problems surrounding breaking the code (especially the naval version used on German submarines) and then moves off into a naval expeditions that either helped decipher the code or were positively or negatively affected by differing ability to read the code at various times. The author concentrated on exciting incidents about which there was a lot of documentation.I was more interested in the code and the machines than in the naval exploits. Most of the information on the machines is shunted to appendices, which are pretty hard going (and I'm someone who aced their computer architecture class).I think this book would appeal more to readers who are interested in the overall effects of cryptography on the war effort or are looking at the strategies needed to run an effective cryptography effort.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Interesting book about how the British were able to figure out the German codes during the War. I skipped the detailed mathematical explanations of how they did it, though, which was mostly at the end, in the Appendixes.
    I found out Alan Turing did a lot, but he worked with much decoding already done by a Polish team earlier, and had help from others too. The vanquished U-Boats and the rescuing of their codebooks, and other stories, such as the espionage in France were interesting too. This book gives a more complete story than the movie, The Imitation Game, which was very oversimplified.

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Enigma - Hugh Sebag-Montefiore

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