In 1939, several hundred people - students, professors, international chess players, junior military officers, actresses and debutantes - reported to a Victorian mansion in Buckinghamshire: Bletchley Park. This was to be 'Station X', the Allies' top-secret centre for deciphering enemy codes. Their task was to break the ingenious Enigma code used for German high-level communications. The settings for the Enigma machine changed continually and each day the German operators had 159 million million million different possibilities. Yet against all the odds this gifted group achieved the impossible, coping with even greater difficulties to break Shark, the U-Boat Enigma, and Fish, the cypher system used by Hitler to talk to his guards.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
The success the Allies had breaking Nazi codes in WWII has been reliably credited with cutting three years off the time it took to defeat Germany. Central to this Herculean effort was an eccentric, motley crew assembled at an unassuming Victorian mansion just north of London, called Bletchley Park but officially dubbed Station X. The name wasn't intended to connote mystery--the tagged-on Roman numeral simply designated Bletchley as the 10th wartime installation set up by Britain's covert intelligence organization, MI6. But Station X trafficked in more than its share of intrigue over the course of the war, with code-breaking coups that included intercepting the first evidence of the Holocaust and tipping off the British naval squadron that sank the Bismarck, pride of the German fleet.
Michael Smith, the senior espionage reporter for London's Daily Telegraph, gives an intimate and intense account of the exploits of Station X by drawing on recently declassified documents and extensive interviews with many of the students, soldiers, and mathematicians who were sequestered at the top-secret site. Smith strikes an engaging balance between the human side of the effort and the nuts and bolts of the code game, giving clear explanations of how brilliant code breakers such as Alan Turing solved the puzzles the Nazis put to them. --Paul Hughes
From Publishers Weekly
A bestseller in the U.K., this gripping account of British intelligence's cracking of the Nazi Enigma machine code during WWII is the basis of a PBS Nova documentary. Billed as the first book on the subject to incorporate interviews with the code-breakers since the declassification of official files, the volume is packed with revelations and the voices of these largely unsung heroes. While most histories of Enigma focus on the top brains such as mathematician Alan Turing, Smith (New Cloak, Old Dagger, etc.), a reporter for London's Daily Telegraph, portrays the top-secret code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park ("Station X"), a quaint Victorian mansion outside London, as a vast collaborative effort involving several thousand people, the great majority of them women. An odd mix of Cambridge mathematicians, seasoned and novice code-busters, eccentrics, spies, bureaucrats, German-language students, patriotic volunteers and clerical assistants, they tell their stories with a refreshing modesty that makes their saga all the more inspiring. Without getting bogged down in technical complexities, Smith illuminates how the Bletchley Park cryptanalysts' ingenuity, obsessive persistence and "Alice in Wonderland-type thought processes" enabled them to decipher the Germans' chameleon code. The intelligence obtained from Enigma decrypts shortened the war and saved countless lives by furnishing information vital to the Allies' D-Day invasion, the British sinking of U-boats and campaigns in Italy, North Africa and the Balkans. On one level, this page-turner is a deeply satisfying parable of the power of humane intellect to defeat evil; it's also a stunning re-creation of one of the most important chapters in the war. Photos.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Too light for the serious historian!,
By A Customer
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Station X: Decoding Nazi Secrets (Hardcover)
Having already read a few books on the work at Bletchley Park (Station X) and attended talks by those that worked at BP I was perhaps hoping for too much from this text. It appears to be a rehash of much of the work already published in better texts. It is certainly not as dry as some books on this subject instead focusing on the personalities, rather than the efforts that went into the decryption work. If you want a populist review on what took place at BP then this is probably a good text. However if you want to understand more about the critical importance of the work undertaken at Station X this is not the text to give that information. I was hoping for more in depth discussion with events set in their historical context however this was not the case. The narrative style is quite disturbing at first, however it is a very light read and can be completed in an afternoon. The procedures for selecting staff to work at BP is quite interesting and amusing in itself, just try completing the crossword provided in less than twelve minutes! If you really want to get a more in depth feel of the events at BP then Codebreakers : The Inside Story of Bletchley Park by F. H. Hinsley & Alan Stripp maybe a better read. If you want a good fictional view then try Enigma by Robert Harris.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Pulled in by the subject matter....,
By A Customer
This review is from: Station X: Decoding Nazi Secrets (Hardcover)
The subject matter originally attracted me to this selection, as secret codes have always interested me...but this holds alot more...you not only gain an understanding of what was done, but you get to feel like you were a part of it! The problem solvers are as engaging as the solutions are fascinating. Liked this enough that I'm buying another as a gift.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Bits & Pieces of Bletchley Park's History,
By Jayne MacManus (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Station X: Decoding Nazi Secrets (Hardcover)
There should never be any shortage of admiration for the work done by BP's codebreakers and staffers -- a great majority of them being women. Michael Smith's book on Bletchley Park is a collection of fun facts, historical highlights, and occasionally dense information on wartime codebreaking methods. It makes for untidy reading and indicates the storytelling of someone who's been too immersed in the story to really understand how to distill it for general consumption anymore. That said, I still found the book enjoyable, and I'm all the more motivated to find out more.
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