Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II (Paperback)

~ (Author) "HERBERT Osborn Yardley was a boastful drinker, a boastful womanizer, and boastful cryptanalyst..." (more)
Key Phrases: initial rotor setting, monalphabetic substitution, code breaking bureau, Bletchley Park, Arlington Hall, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

On December 3, 1941, officers of the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Unit decoded a message sent from Tokyo to the Japanese embassy in Washington, ordering embassy staff to destroy its code books and other sensitive material. This, the officers determined, meant that Japan was preparing to break off diplomatic relations with the United States and go to war. When, they could not say; to gain a precise date, they would have had to break the Japanese naval codes. Therein, writes Stephen Budiansky in Battle of Wits, lay the rub: "Since mid-1939, America had not read a single message in the main Japanese naval code on the same day it had been sent. For most of the period from June 1, 1939, to December 7, 1941, the [U.S.] Navy was working on naval messages that were months, or even over a year old."

For all their lack of preparedness and occasional inefficiencies, and for all the disdain with which some Allied ground commanders held the work of military intelligence, writes Budiansky, Allied cryptographers were of critical importance in determining the outcome of World War II. The decoding of Japanese and German encryption engines, for instance, helped the Allied navies gain victory in the battles of the Atlantic and Midway, while the translation of secret German railroad schedules allowed Winston Churchill to warn Josef Stalin that the German army was about to invade the Soviet Union--though Stalin refused to take the warning seriously. The codebreakers, in short, "averted disasters that would have been terrible setbacks to the Allied cause," and they almost certainly saved a considerable number of lives as they labored to crack such profound puzzles as Enigma and Purple.

Budiansky's narrative is strong on the science of cryptography--so much so that readers without a background in mathematics and logic may have trouble following the arcana of key squares, bigrams, and all the other trade secrets of cryptanalysis. Readers willing to brave matters technical, however, will find Budiansky's comprehensive account to be the best single book on the subject, and one well worth their attention. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

In February of 1926, German codes, long intercepted and analyzed by Polish cryptanalysts, abruptly became impenetrable. As BudianskyDan Atlantic Monthly correspondent, applied math degree-holder and former congressional fellowDnotes in this penetrating, edgy study, the wary Poles suspected that these new, seemingly unbreakable codes had been generated by a machine. How the Allies' mathematicians and cryptanalysts later deciphered nearly every top-level code produced by that machine, called EnigmaDwhose internal rotors could be wired in 10 to the 80th power (1 followed by 80 zeroes) waysDand by other machines in Axis use is a story already covered by David Kahn's classic The Codebreakers and many other books. Budiansky's bibliography reflects a reliance on those sources, deploying them along with a wealth of archival material; unlike Codebreakers, this book foregrounds the role of cryptanalysis in fighting the war, rather than treating the war as background to cryptanalysis. Readers of a technical bent will be particularly drawn to the meticulous explanations and diagrams depicting trial-and-error code breaking at work. Doling out a consistent measure of beautifully turned observations ("No matter how elaborate a scheme was used to scramble and disguise the original text, its ghost always shone through"), Budiansky is a master at interweaving the science of code breaking within its cultural and historical contexts. He depicts with clarity how the World War II-era code breakers struggled to halt German aggression at a time when the role of signals intelligence in heightening the impact of force was little understood, and delineates the remarkable achievement of those who recognized that the minutiae of enemy communications are well worth knowing. This book gives a fascinating impression of just how crucial these efforts were. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (April 2, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743217349
• ISBN-13: 978-0743217347
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #335,963 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Account of Codebreaking and Its Effects, October 18, 2000

By	Professor Donald Mitchell "Jesus Makes Me a P... (Boston) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Battle Of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II (Hardcover)

This book deserves more than five stars, and the massive British and American government information releases that made it possible also deserve credit for making the book possible.

This book pays the reader the compliment of assuming both intelligence and sincere interest in the subject. Although much of the book is a repeat of what has been written before, the book also contains much new information (especially about breaking the Japanese codes) and important insights. As the most complete examination of the code side of World War II, the book is essential reading for anyone who is interested in that conflict.

Although this book is about World War II, it contains much interesting material about earlier code-breaking, especially during World War I and the disarmament conference in the 1920s.

Basically, codes and codebreaking were in a transition period during the 1930s and 1940s between the primitive historical codes and the modern encryption techniques. The weakness of this transition period was that computer-like devices could use brute force calculations to spot patterns that the code designers were unaware of.

Clues came from many places. For example, "eins" showed up very frequently in German communications, so by looking for four word groups of great frequency, you could guess that they meant "eins" and work from there. This could unmask the daily code key much faster. Luftwaffe code operators were sloppy about the codes they used, and those bad habits provided clues as well. The British were brilliant in targeting German naval and weather vessels, and sinking them in ways so that codes and code machine parts could be saved. In some cases, Japanese embassies were broken into and codes directly stolen.

The most fascinating parts of the book come from the descriptions of how raw brain power solved problems. Many new code-solving techniques were developed. The Poles (especially Marian Rejewski) deduced the structure of the German Enigma machine just through examining the encoded message structures, and built one. Later, Turing took the idea of linking Enigma machines together to test patterns and developed a process for finding which settings were being used each day. Almost unbelievably, ideas and machines came along later that greatly improved the efficiency of this process even further.

If you like puzzles, you will love the discussions of the codebreaking technques because they employ detailed descriptions of the codes, code machines, and the exact methods used. Many wonderful diagrams of wiring and logical connections make this transparent for those who are interested in fully understanding. If you are not so interested, you can skip ahead to the material that interests you instead.

Emotionally, you will find yourself riveted by the races between the code breakers and the pace of unfolding battles. In several instances, such as at Midway, in the North Atlantic convoy runs, in North Africa, and during the Battle of the Bulge, the codebreakers played a decisive role. You will be intrigued by how many military leaders were reluctant users of this intelligence. Does Monty come to mind? You will never think about the events in World War II in the same way, after fully understanding what was known and not known by government and military leaders.

New light was shed on major controversies for me in this book. A famous one surrounds whether FDR knew of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and used inaction to manipulate entry into World War II. From a codebreaking perspective, it is clear that the U.S. knew that the Japanese were going to break off diplomatic relations, but little else. There were indications that an attack was coming, but no knowledge that it was aimed at Pearl Harbor.

On the other hand, decoded radio transmissions from German police units clearly indicated that massive numbers of Jews were being killed during the invasion of Russia. This material was probably read by Churchill. It is not clear who else read it. Those who are interested in what government should have been doing about the Holocaust will find much troubling evidence of government's knowing inaction in this book.

The many bureaucratic battles detailed here to take over codebreaking and to get the credit for it are worth the price of the book by themselves. For example, there is a fascinating story of how the key person in the codebreaking for the battle of Midway, Commander Joseph Rochefort, ended up running a dry dock on the west coast soon thereafter, far away from codebreaking for the rest of the war.

007 fans will enjoy the many references to the war-time activities of Ian Fleming in dreaming up schemes to help the codebreakers.

After you finish reading and thinking about this fascinating book, I suggest that you consider how you can overcome the vulnerability that you have to someone breaking into your communications. How can and should you be using encryptian today? This book won't answer those questions, but you should be asking them and looking for answers.

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best overall coverage of the topic, October 19, 2000

By	D. C. Carrad "augustabookman" (Augusta, GA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Battle Of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II (Hardcover)

This book is well-written in a clear, flowing and lucid style. Lots of details and human interest liven up a subject that is always on the edge of putting some readers to sleep. This book surveys code-breaking in both the European and Pacific theaters of war and even-handedly deals with the contributions of both the Brits and the Yanks (all too few books on this topic do so). The author wisely puts the most arcane bits of math in appendices.

Very well done and hightly recommended to both those who have never read a book on this subject and those who have read several.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fills in a critical part of WWII history., February 15, 2006

By	Solomon (Colorado) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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I have for many years wondered exactly how the supposedly unbreakable German Enigma machine and the Japanese diplomatic and Naval codes were broken. Stephen Budiansky does a great job at explaining how this was done. This was no easy task, requiring the ability to explain complex mathematical and mechanical concepts in a political and military context. Budiansky is uniquely suited to this task and I for one am grateful for his successful effort. He has a master's degree in applied mathematics, along with work in military studies as a Congressional Fellow. To this one must add that he is a good writer, as attested to by the fact that he is a correspondent for The Atlantic, The New York Times and The Economist among other prestigious publications.

This is no dry academic text, but is a story of great excitement, of great internal rivalries and intrigues. It is also fortunately much more, as it also goes into detail about the design and operation of the code machines and ciphers, as well as the novel approaches that were used to overcome them. It goes into considerable detail about these approaches, without becoming overly pedantic. This book covers the Japanese Diplomatic and Naval codes as well as the German Enigma machine. As such, it covers both code machines and ciphers, with a very good discussion of the history of both and the distinction between them. This book is more than a dry discussion of mathematics, but also delves into the personalities of the people involved and the internal rivalries between the US Army and Navy and between the civilian and military branches of the governments involved. It touches on espionage and the application of the knowledge of what was learned from the code breaking.

I was aware of the general outlines of what was done, of Bletchley Park and the American equivalents and of the importance of the early work of Polish code breakers. What I was not aware of was exactly how this was done. The Germans were confident that even if the allies got hold of a code machine they could not unscramble a message that was coded with what was a virtually unlimited number of possible combinations. I now have a better idea of how this was done and if you read this book so will you. I learned of the importance of a spy in Germany who early on provided a few messages and some code setting that were of great initial help, how German regularity in the form of the messages and the laziness of some operators in reusing the same text were of great importance, of the struggles to overcome the continual changes in the machines and upgrading of the codes. Most of all, I learned of the creativity and persistence of the human mind. My only criticism, and it is a minor one, is that very little space is given to the German and Japanese efforts (many of them successful) in deciphering allied codes. I hope that this will be the subject of a future book of Budiansky's.