The Bletchley Park Codebreakers in Their Own Words

The Bletchley Park Codebreakers in Their Own Words PDF Author: Joel Greenberg
Publisher: Greenhill Books
ISBN: 1784388122
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
'A fascinating anthology which sheds new light on the Bletchley Park story and shows that there is still more to tell.' - Tony Comer OBE, formerly Departmental Historian at GCHQ This important volume tells the story of Bletchley Park through countless letters written by key players to former colleagues and loved ones as the war unfolded. Having intercepted millions of German communications, the codebreakers had felt bound by the Official Secrets Act and said little about their wartime activities. Some who had stayed on at GCHQ after the war, were concerned that speaking out could jeopardise their pensions.Over one hundred letters have been included in this volume and have either been recovered from family members or declassified by GCHQ. They reveal fresh information about the clandestine operation and disclose the true feelings of the participants at Bletchley.Park. In contrast to early accounts, which lacked detail and were occasionally inaccurate, this book thoroughly lays bare the day-to-day experiences at Bletchley Park and uncovers the operational and technical reasons behind the organisation's successes and failures. Simultaneously intimate and comprehensive, it will interest historians, World War II researchers, and anyone who wants to learn the secrets of Britain's signal intelligence effort.

Codebreakers

Codebreakers PDF Author: Francis Harry Hinsley
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780192801326
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
The story of Bletchley Park, the successful intelligence operation that cracked Germany's Enigma Code. Photos.

The Secret Life of Bletchley Park

The Secret Life of Bletchley Park PDF Author: Sinclair McKay
Publisher: Aurum
ISBN: 1845136837
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Bletchley Park was where one of the war’s most famous – and crucial – achievements was made: the cracking of Germany’s “Enigma” code in which its most important military communications were couched. This country house in the Buckinghamshire countryside was home to Britain’s most brilliant mathematical brains, like Alan Turing, and the scene of immense advances in technology – indeed, the birth of modern computing. The military codes deciphered there were instrumental in turning both the Battle of the Atlantic and the war in North Africa. But, though plenty has been written about the boffins, and the codebreaking, fictional and non-fiction – from Robert Harris and Ian McEwan to Andrew Hodges’ biography of Turing – what of the thousands of men and women who lived and worked there during the war? What was life like for them – an odd, secret territory between the civilian and the military? Sinclair McKay’s book is the first history for the general reader of life at Bletchley Park, and an amazing compendium of memories from people now in their eighties – of skating on the frozen lake in the grounds (a depressed Angus Wilson, the novelist, once threw himself in) – of a youthful Roy Jenkins, useless at codebreaking, of the high jinks at nearby accommodation hostels – and of the implacable secrecy that meant girlfriend and boyfriend working in adjacent huts knew nothing about each other’s work.

Codebreaker Girls

Codebreaker Girls PDF Author: Jan Slimming
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
ISBN: 1526784122
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
“What would it be like to keep a secret for fifty years? Never telling your parents, your children, or even your husband?” Codebreaker Girls: A Secret Life at Bletchley Park tells the true story of Daisy Lawrence. Following extensive research, the author uses snippets of information, unpublished photographs and her own recollections to describe scenes from her mother’s poor, but happy, upbringing in London, and the disruptions caused by the outbreak of the Second World War to a young woman in the prime of her life. The author asks why, and how, Daisy was chosen to work at the Government war station, as well as the clandestine operation she experienced with others, deep in the British countryside, during a time when the effects of the war were felt by everyone. In addition, the author examines her mother’s personal emotions and relationships as she searches for her young fiancée, who was missing in action overseas. The three years at Bletchley Park were Daisy’s university, but having closed the door in 1945 on her hidden role of national importance — dealing with Germany, Italy and Japan — this significant period in her life was camouflaged for decades in the filing cabinet of her mind. Now her story comes alive with descriptions, original letters, documents, newspaper cuttings and unique photographs, together with a rare and powerful account of what happened to her after the war. “Here’s a beauty of a history of some of the codebreaking girls who helped save us during the second world war. This one’s about Daisy Lawrence’s extraordinary life as a poor girl brought up in London and then chosen for top secret work at Bletchley Park. Reads like fiction.” —Books Monthly

Lorenz

Lorenz PDF Author: Jerry Roberts
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0750982047
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
The breaking of the Enigma machine is one of the most heroic stories of the Second World War and highlights the crucial work of the codebreakers of Bletchley Park, which prevented Britain's certain defeat in 1941. But there was another German cipher machine, used by Hitler himself to convey messages to his top generals in the field. A machine more complex and secure than Enigma. A machine that could never be broken. For sixty years, no one knew about Lorenz or 'Tunny', or the determined group of men who finally broke the code and thus changed the course of the war. Many of them went to their deaths without anyone knowing of their achievements. Here, for the first time, senior codebreaker Captain Jerry Roberts tells the complete story of this extraordinary feat of intellect and of his struggle to get his wartime colleagues the recognition they deserve. The work carried out at Bletchley Park during the war to partially automate the process of breaking Lorenz, which had previously been done entirely by hand, was groundbreaking and is recognised as having kick-started the modern computer age.

Station X

Station X PDF Author: Michael Smith
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9780330419291
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
In 1939, several hundred people - students, professors, international chess players, officers, actresses and debutantes - reported to a Victorian mansion in Buckinghamshire: Bletchley Park, known as 'Station X', where enemy codes were deciphered. This title details their remarkable achievements.

The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park

The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park PDF Author: Sir John Dermot Turing
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781789506211
Category : World War, 1939-1945
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description


Bletchley Park Brainteasers

Bletchley Park Brainteasers PDF Author: Sinclair McKay
Publisher: Quercus
ISBN: 1635061199
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
WOULD BLETCHLEY PARK--THE TOP-SECRET HOME OF BRITISH WORLD WAR II CODEBREAKERS--HAVE RECRUITED YOU? PUT YOUR MENTAL AGILITY TO THE TEST WITH THESE FIENDISHLY CHALLENGING PUZZLES AND FIND OUT. Have a knack for mastering Morse code? Want to discover whether your crossword hobby might have seen you recruited into the history books? Think you could have contributed to the effort to crack the Nazis' infamous Enigma code? Then this book about Bletchley Park was custom-made for you. When scouring the population for codebreakers, Bletchley Park recruiters left no stone unturned. They devised various ingenious mind-twisters to assess the puzzle-solving capacity of these individuals--hidden codes, cryptic crosswords, secret languages, and complex riddles. These puzzles, together with the fascinating recruitment stories that surround them, are contained in this book, endorsed by Bletchley Park itself. Though they had diverse backgrounds, the codebreakers of Bletchley Park were united in their love of a good puzzle. If you are of the same persuasion, put your intelligence to the test with the mind-boggling puzzles on these pages and ask yourself: Would Bletchley Park have recruited YOU?

Secret Days

Secret Days PDF Author: Asa Briggs
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books
ISBN: 9781848326156
Category : Bletchley Park (Milton Keynes, England)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Bletchley Park memoir of Lord Asa Briggs will be one of the most important documents to be published in 2010. Lord Briggs has long been regarded as one of Britain's most important historians. He has never, however, written about his time at Bletchley Park. The publication, which coincided with Lord Briggs 90th birthday, is a meticulously researched account of life in Hut Six, written by a codebreaker who worked there for five years alongside Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman. In addition to discussing the progress of the Allies' code-breaking efforts and their impact on the war, Lord Briggs considers what the Germans knew about Bletchley and how they reacted to revelatory memoirs about the Enigma machine which were not published until the 1970s. Briggs himself did not tell his wife about his wartime career until the 1970s and his parents died without ever knowing their son's contribution to the wartime effort.

The Lost World of Bletchley Park

The Lost World of Bletchley Park PDF Author: Sinclair McKay
Publisher: Quarto Publishing Group USA
ISBN: 1781312796
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
An illustrated history of the English manor house and grounds that were home to the famous World War II codebreakers. The huge success of Sinclair’s The Secret Life of Bletchley Park—a quarter of a million copies sold to date—has been symptomatic of a similarly dramatic increase in visitors to Bletchley Park itself, the Victorian mansion in Buckinghamshire now open as an engrossing museum of wartime codebreaking. Aurum is publishing the first comprehensive illustrated history of this remarkable place, from its prewar heyday as a country estate under the Liberal MP Sir Herbert Leon, through its wartime requisition with the addition of the famous huts within the grounds, from the place where modern computing was invented and the German Enigma code was cracked, to its post-war dereliction and then rescue towards the end of the twentieth century as a museum whose visitor numbers have more than doubled in the last five years. Featuring over two hundred photographs, some previously unseen, and text by Sinclair McKay, this will be an essential purchase for everyone interested in the place where codebreaking helped to win the war.