Customer Reviews

The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Mark Urban has added another great book to the many titles competing to be placed in a Napoleonic library. This book, `The Man Who Broken Napoleon's Codes' covers a little known and written of subject, the story of George Scovell. This man had as much to do with the British victories in Spain as did Wellington although you would not know it if you read any previous accounts of the Peninsular War.

George Scovell helped break the French Imperial codes and provided much useful intelligence to Wellington in his campaigns against the French armies. But since Scovell was of low birth he struggled for advancement. He showed his bravery on a number of battlefields but was almost always forgotten when it came to promotion, being passed over by younger men of more distinguished birth.

I must admit that I was a bit dubious when I started reading this book as I usually find accounts on code breaking and intelligence quite dull and boring however this book reads like a novel. Full of information with a narrative that races along, it was a great story and full of action. The book covers all the major campaigns and battles in the Peninsular and was a joy to read. I have no hesitation in recommending this book to anyone who loves reading about the Napoleonic period.

The hero of this valuable work is Major George Scovell, a member of Wellington's Quater-Master staff in the Peninsula War who almost single handedly broke the Great Paris cypher used by the French Army. Scovell also ran the postal system in the Peninsula for Wellington, and created a docket system for the delivery of confiential material that is still used today.

As such, this book sheds invaluable light on the process of intelligence gathering and dissemination, as well as the analysis of encrypted messages. Many of these basic field techniques are stock in trade for intelligence professionals in the twenty-first century.

I thought that author did an excellent job of balancing readability and historical detail. The book moves along at a good pace, and is fairly compelling reading. Many of the details of the Peninsula campaign are well drawn, and good light is shed on otherwise porrly documented actions.

Although I rated this book as five stars, I did eventually tire of the author's clear prejudice against Wellington, and his belief that Scovell was hard done by after the end of the campaign. This is not entirely correct. Scovell ended his days as a Major-General, and the Commandant of Sandhurst. Although others from well connected families were promoted faster, this was a common occurrence in the British Army of the time, and indeed most European armies. I got the faint suspicion that the author had a bee in his bonnet, although perhaps I do him a disservice.

This one of the few flaws in an otherwise excellent text. The only other criticism is that the author should have included a deciphering table for the Great Paris cypher. This was a curious omission.

Codebreaking is not an easy subject to make plain, or to make exciting. There have been a number of good accounts of the work of Alan Turing and the crew at Bletchley Park, accounts that were aided by the memories of the participants and an exciting tale of successful boffins who made a difference against the Nazis. Codebreaking in previous wars has not had as spectacular a story, but in _The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes_ (HarperCollins) by Mark Urban, we can read about a similar victory through brainpower. Oddly, Wellington's one-man cryptography staff is only now, almost two hundred years after the fact, getting his recognition.

George Scovell was of humble background, a matter that was to bedevil his entire career. He was a brilliant linguist in school and got his break in the army when he was put in charge of Wellington's communications. He had a knack for decoding, but then his first efforts were easy. But when Wellington stepped up his campaign, the French started using their "grand cipher," a fiendishly difficult code in which a single word could be encoded in multiple ways, eliminating the easy patterns that made previous codebreaking possible. Urban describes the decipherment in sufficient detail to appreciate the intellectual challenge; Scovell cracked the code when teams in London could not do so. By the eve of the decisive Battle of Salamanca in July 1812, Scovell had chipped away enough at the code to be able to tell how big an army Wellington would be facing and how long before it would be reinforced with more soldiers. It is possible that because he was working with captured documents from many sources, Scovell had such information to give Wellington that it may have been more than the on-scene French general had himself.

Possibly because codebreaking is a pretty dry subject, this extensive book covers more than just Scovell's efforts. It is, indeed a history of the peninsular war, with special attention to intelligence matters. Scovell is only now getting the recognition within this book because Urban looked up Scovell's papers in an archive; they consisted of his own journal, extensive notes, and explanations of his method. Wellington owed him a lot, but never really repaid his debt. He knew how much Scovell had done; he was even able to send a sarcastic note back to London where experts in secret writing had been trying to crack the code with far less success than Scovell had. But when after the war, Scovell asked for a reference letter, it did not come. Wellington one evening told fellow diners who were curious about the code victory that decipherment had come because "I tried, everyone at headquarters tried, and between us we made it out." It is quite possible that Wellington wanted to emphasize his own brilliance, or the steadfast character of the British soldier, as the key to victory, without acknowledging the dirty work of espionage. "The legend of his great generalship might have been undermined, however subtly, by revelations that he had been reading his enemy's most sensitive mail." Nonetheless, Scovell can now be placed in his proper position as far greater than a footnote within the Napoleonic wars, and he has an exciting tale of military history as his commemoration.

This is a solid, workmanlike effort about a little-known man (George Scovell) and a little-discussed aspect (codes and codebreaking) of the Peninsular War. There are enough maps and enough detailed descriptions of the various battles to satisfy fans of military history and enough biographical information and anecdotes to satisfy the general reader. If you are not mathematically inclined you need not be concerned as the information about how the codes came to be deciphered is pretty basic.Most interesting to me, more so than the battles and the codebreaking, were the human interest aspects of the book. The Duke of Wellington comes across as a snob who wanted to be surrounded by aristocratic subordinates and as a person who had nothing but disdain for the common soldier. On the other hand, although he didn't want to socialize with "the lower orders" he could and would recognize and promote people of talent. However, it is certainly not to his credit that later on in life he seemed to have developed "selective amnesia" regarding George Scovell's codebreaking contributions- probably because he felt it would take away from his own mystique.It was fascinating to read about the contribution made by the Spanish guerillas. If they had not intercepted so many French military dispatches and delivered them to the British, Scovell could not have had the success he had. Without the intelligence that Scovell provided things would have been much harder for Wellington.Another interesting aspect of the book was to read about all the bickering and backstabbing going on between Napoleon's brother, who was King of Spain, and Marhsal Soult and Marshal Marmont. If the French could ever have worked together instead of everyone only looking out for themselves, which caused insufficient manpower to counterbalance Wellington's forces, the Peninsular War could have played out to a different conclusion.This was a very enjoyable book, which should appeal to the general reader.

Mark Urban has managed to excavate a real unsung hero from the great campaigns against Napoleon, George Scovell, a tradesman turned soldier and master cryptographer.

The real value of this tale is that it shows the British army evolving into modern warfare. Scovell was a commoner, and as an officer had to fight traditional practices which dictated that nobles could buy commissions into the Army at the expense of lower-born officers. Scovell was a technical or "scientific" soldier, trained in the new Royal Military College at Wycombe, and Urban's witty, intelligent writing gives one a good picture of the British military culture and its growing pains at the time of Napoleon. The only addition I would suggest would be to give more context to Scovell's Spanish adventures: there are jumps in the chronology which are sometimes confusing to those who are not very up on their Napoleonic history (like me). This may be more of an American complaint, as we are not as concerned with Bonaparte as Europeans were and are, but a brief paragraph here or there might have helped a lot as we navigate the years in the book.

Scovell started out as a minor player the dark early years of the Peninsular Wars, but once the British and their Spanish allies began to regularly capture encoded French messages, Scovell's methodical mind and genius for language come to the fore. Most people do not think of code-breaking as being particularly interesting, but Urban does a good job of teaching one the basics and making it interesting. Code-breaking after all is much like solving a crossword puzzle or some word game, albeit for very high stakes. Urban also tells you about the marshals and family of Napoleon, the men who wrote those letters which Scovell cracked, so both Scovell's work and his enemies come alive.

This story is important because it shows how the world was evolving into our own modern age. In WWII, breaking codes was central to Allied efforts in both the Pacific and European theatres, and nowadays cryptography and personal security are daily concerns on the Internet. In fighting Napoleon, Wellington made use of Spanish guerillas--guerilla warfare, of course, was quite important to the 20th Century and to the Afghanistan conflict of the 21st. And last but not least, Napoleon himself was the a sort of prototype for the dictators of WWII and the Cold War. Scovell was on the leading edge of modern warfare, and in learning his story we understand our own world a little better.

Scovell was largely unknown to historians before Urban's book, but having read about him, I think we need to know more about him and how warfare changed in his time. Fortunately, with Urban's writing, this is more for fun than a task!

Welcome account of an interesting period of history I was ignorant of: the Peninsular War of the British/Spanish against the puppet Napoleonic regime in Spain, 1809 - 1813. The premise -- that an obscure staff officer to Lord Wellington, by deciphering Le Grand Chiffre, turned the tide of military history -- is a bit thin, but a competent platform for a well-told, well-researched account. Interesting theme of the social /political conflicts within the British military bureaucracy between aristocratic hegemony vs. the rise of meritocratic military colleges. The accounts of the battles are lucid and compelling, and make the point, understatedly but clearly, that war is hell. The writer is a British commentator with combat experience.

Mark Urban's entry point into a crowded field of histories of the Napoleonic Wars is the story of George Scovell, the Duke of Wellington's cryptographer. In "The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes", Urban places Scovell's personal story in the context primarily of the Peninsular War. Urban manages to reduce the fairly esoteric work of code-breaking to understandable prose, in the process providing excellent insights into the workings of Wellington's staff and into the Duke's command style. The availability of intelligence is shown to be crucial to the survival and success of the outnumbered Anglo-Portuguese Army in the Iberian Peninsula. Wellington's success in attacking the separate pieces of the French Army in Spain while avoiding larger concentrations was based on his understanding of their movements and intentions, derived from the reconnaissance of British officers and Spanish guerrillas, and especially from the deciphering of captured French dispatches. Urban is evenhanded in his treatment of the principal characters. Scovill himself emerges as a sympathetic character, a hardworking staff officer of lower class social origins trying to make his way in an Army hierarchy informally based on social position. This book is highly recommended for the serious student of the Napoleonic Wars looking for insight into intelligence matters. Remarkably, this book will also be accessible to the casual reader, thanks to Urban's clear and engaging writing style.

George Scovell, a man of fairly humble origins, made a tremendous contribution to the success of the Duke of Wellington in defeating Napoleon's armies in Spain, but those humble origins worked against his receiving the fame and professional advancement he really deserved. Mark Urban's book, half biography and half military campaign history, does much to restore Scovell to his rightful place. Readers will come away with both an appreciation of Scovell's considerable talents as a military administrator and a code breaker and also a decent understanding of the flow of events during Wellington's great campaigns during the Peninsular War. While the battles are not neglected by Urban, much of the book of necessity is aimed at describing the events behind the scenes which are so often neglected by standard military histories.

George Scovell was an British army officer on the staff of the Duke of Wellington, the primary British commander in the Iberian Peninsula for much of the war against Napoleon. The French occupation of Spain was violently disliked by many Spaniards, resulting in guerilla warfare that captured many French army documents. These often were turned over or sold to the British army. Many were in a code, at least in part. Scovell was able to decipher not just the messages concealed in simpler codes, but also a more complicated code based on the French diplomatic cipher. Though not a sophisticated code by 20th century standards, it certainly would have befuddled me. Scovell's knowledge of French and ability with languages were another asset he brought to this intelligence work, which was only one of his duties. The combined efforts of Scovell and the Spanish guerillas meant that Wellington had a great deal of inside information about the force strength, problems, backbiting within, and intentions of the several disunited French armies in Spain.


Scovell was evidently of working class or lower middle class origins, as he started adult life as an apprentice engraver. Only the emergencies of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars made it possible for him to become an army officer, generally an upper class preserve. Wellington disliked the idea of lower class men becoming army officers, fearing that their social origins would encourage such men to use their army positions to engage in revolutionary politics all too similar to the French Revolution. Consequently, Scovell did not gain promotions as rapidly as officers from upper class backgrounds. However his long life and another principle of army personnel policy, promotion by seniority after one reached a certain rank, eventually worked in his favor, though he had some difficult years in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic wars.

The book is based on such original sources as Scovvell's journals. Many of the captured messages and their decipherings also survive in the British archives.

I published a very similar review first at Goodreads.com

An excellent historical survey of the era and astonishing depth of detail on the main protagonist, his life and times, but... regretfully, the cryptographic information in the book is scanty. One wishes for more detail in how he broke those codes.

You will note a large number of used copies of this book for sale cheaply which seems to confirm my opinion. What we have here is an excellent history book in which the publisher cleverly spiked the title to make it appear to be more - it is not.