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David A. Price

Geniuses at War: Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age Hardcover – Deckle Edge, June 22, 2021

by David A. Price (Author)

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The dramatic, untold story of the brilliant team whose feats of innovation and engineering created the world’s first digital electronic computer—decrypting the Nazis’ toughest code, helping bring an end to WWII, and ushering in the information age.

• Winner, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Middleton Award for "a book ... that both exemplifies exceptional scholarship and reaches beyond academic communities toward a broad public audience." • A Kirkus Best Book of 2022 •

Planning the invasion of Normandy, the Allies knew that decoding the communications of the Nazi high command was imperative for its success. But standing in their way was an encryption machine they called Tunny (British English for “tuna”), which was vastly more difficult to crack than the infamous Enigma cipher.

To surmount this seemingly impossible challenge, Alan Turing, the Enigma codebreaker, brought in a maverick English working-class engineer named Tommy Flowers who devised the ingenious, daring, and controversial plan to build a machine that would calculate at breathtaking speed and break the code in nearly real time. Together with the pioneering mathematician Max Newman, Flowers and his team produced—against the odds, the clock, and a resistant leadership—Colossus, the world’s first digital electronic computer, the machine that would help bring the war to an end.

Drawing upon recently declassified sources, David A. Price’s Geniuses at War tells, for the first time, the full mesmerizing story of the great minds behind Colossus and chronicles the remarkable feats of engineering genius that marked the dawn of the digital age.

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256 pages
Language

English
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Knopf
Publication date

June 22, 2021
Dimensions

5.97 x 1.12 x 8.55 inches
ISBN-10

0525521542
ISBN-13

978-0525521549
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Editorial Reviews

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Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction of the Year
Winner, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Middleton Award

“A remarkable book. Highly accessible, with many historical details formerly unknown to me. The book is empathetic and engaging with a three-dimensional and rich texture. I felt as if I were there. What was accomplished, especially with Colossus, is nothing short of amazing. Reading excerpts from correspondence about predictions for artificial intelligence and networks was astonishing for its accuracy looking back nearly 75 years. Price deserves great praise for a historical gem.” —Vint Cerf, father of the Internet

“David Price has produced the riveting story of how a team of colorful geniuses in Bletchley Park, England broke the most secure German World War II codes. The tale of Alan Turing and the Enigma machine is well known, but Price describes the very secret code-breaking project that Turing and his colleagues tackled later in the war, which involved building the world’s first electronic computer. Thus was the digital age born.” —Walter Isaacson, author of The Innovators

“World War II opened two legendary gateways to the modern age: Los Alamos and Bletchley Park. A declassified report on the construction of the atomic bomb was released just six days after Hiroshima, while the Official Secrets Act lingered for thirty years over the codebreaking at Bletchley Park. David Price has distilled the available knowledge into an authoritative yet fast-paced account, lending the characters behind Colossus a voice that was silenced for far too long.” —George Dyson, author of Turing's Cathedral

"A methodical account of the secret British code-breakers working to decode Adolf Hitler’s wartime communications. . . . Gripping. . . . A narrative worthy of James Bond." —Foreign Policy

"[Price] weaves a superb narrative, at once compelling and relatable. . . . Incredibly well-written and well-researched, this fast-paced book reads like a novel. Highly recommended to readers with an interest in World War II and 20th-century history, as well as anyone looking for an exciting story of code breaking and intrigue.” —Library Journal (starred)

“Fresh. . . . Page-turning. . . . Price delivers a fascinating account of the problems Flowers and his team overcame before the massive machine called Colossus arrived. . . . He tells a terrific story. An entertaining history of brilliant minds at work against the Nazi behemoth.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“An entertaining introduction to Bletchley Park and the era’s technological innovations.” —Publishers Weekly

About the Author

DAVID A. PRICE was educated at the College of William and Mary, Harvard University, and the University of Cambridge. He is the author of The Pixar Touch and Love and Hate in Jamestown. Price lives with his wife in Richmond, Virginia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

The Right Type of Recruit

In the years after the Great War, as it was called at the time, and continuing through World War II, the United States maintained two agencies for decoding intercepted communications: one in the army and one in the navy. This arrangement may have had the merit of making the maximum number of bureaucrats happy, but it sometimes led to counterproductive results. For instance, in September 1940, after the army’s codebreakers solved Japan’s most secure diplomatic code, known to the Americans as Purple, the question arose as to how to do the voluminous work of actually reading each day’s messages. Each service felt an imperative to keep not only the Empire of Japan, but also the other service, in its place. After protracted negotiations, the two sides agreed that the navy’s outfit, OP-20-G, would handle the messages received on odd-numbered days while the army’s Signal Intelligence Service would handle those received on even-numbered days. The fruits of their labors would be given to the president by his army aide in odd-numbered months, by his naval aide in even-numbered months. The scheme was internally logical but ludicrous. In another instance when the rivalry showed itself, after the war with Hitler was under way, a British representative to the U.S. codebreaking units found himself forbidden by the U.S. Army from sharing details of their conversations with the U.S. Navy.

The British had endured similar rivalries between their own services during World War I. Unlike the American government, however, the British sought to avert such issues in the future by fusing their army and navy codebreaking services into a single unit following the end of the war. In October 1919, eleven months after the armistice, Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s war cabinet ordered the creation of a new organization, the Government Code & Cypher School, to be located in the Watergate House in central London. Its publicly revealed mission was defensive—“to advise as to the security of codes and cyphers used by all Government departments” and to help in setting them up. Codebreaking was to be an additional, highly secret one.

The Admiralty had acceded to the change on one condition: that the head of the new organization would be one of its own, namely Alexander G. Denniston, known as Alastair or simply AGD. His education at Bonn University, and the German fluency that had come with it, led to his being one of the first four staff recruited to Room 40, the Admiralty’s small codebreaking office, in 1914. The extent of his continental education—he had also studied at the Sorbonne in Paris—was unusual for a British naval officer of the time. He was an athletic Scotsman with bright blue eyes; as a younger man, he had played for Scotland’s field hockey team in the 1908 Olympics. His stature, small and slight, resembled that of a jockey or a rowers’ coxswain. He was accustomed to going without; his father had died when he was eleven, after which his mother struggled financially to raise him and his two younger siblings. Outwardly, his manner tended to be stiff and correct, concealing a humane interest in those with whom he worked and a tolerance of eccentricity. The latter quality could prove invaluable. Cryptanalysts, one observer noted at the time, were “somewhat kittle-cattle to deal with and all of them, if they are any good, have somewhat peculiar temperaments.”

Thus the Admiralty made its stand. “We should only consent to pool our staff with that of the War Office [army] on condition that Commander A. G. Denniston is placed in charge of the new Department,” the head of naval intelligence declared. He added, “Denniston is not only the best man we have had, but he is the only one we have left with special genius for this work. We shall not be able to retain him in a subordinate capacity, and no advantage of concentration or co-operation with the War Office would compensate us for the loss of his services.”

But in the end, what seems to have been decisive in Denniston’s selection, in addition to the Admiralty’s support, was his attitude. The War Office’s pick, a Maj. Malcolm Hay, was asked whether he was willing to be second in command under Denniston; Hay gave a flat no. Denniston, asked whether he would work under Hay, said yes without hesitation—he would serve wherever he was needed. Denniston received the nod.

Denniston had never run anything before. (The wartime head of Room 40 had retired in January.) He disliked anything to do with bureaucracy and administration. Inevitably, some of his peers were skeptical of his elevation, one of them carping that he was “possibly fit to manage a small sweet shop in the East End.” He would prove them wrong—although not wrong enough.

On November 1, 1919, the Government Code & Cypher School opened with Denniston as its operational head and a small staff of two dozen former Room 40 and War Office workers. He found in short order that, in fact, there was little demand any longer for military codebreaking. After all, the Treaty of Versailles had permanently stripped Germany of its ability to wage war. The treaty banned Germany from having tanks, submarines, or an air force. Its army and navy were shrunk to shadows of their former selves. The German Army, now limited to 100,000 men—down from 3.8 million at the start of the war—was to be “devoted exclusively to the maintenance of order within the territory and to the control of the frontiers [borders].” Germany was a beaten country, its military to give trouble nevermore.

There was, however, demand for intelligence on the contents of secret diplomatic messages. Denniston turned the attention of GC&CS to these. The organization’s principal targets were France (whose codes Britain had ignored during the war), Japan (relevant in light of Britain’s colonial outposts and dealings in Asia), the young Soviet Union, and the United States, with the U.S. section having the strongest codebreakers.

For the first two and a half years of its existence, GC&CS was lodged within the Admiralty—illogically, since the whole idea had been to create an organization that wasn’t beholden to one service. But the navy ran most of the interception stations, and no one outside the armed services was interested. There matters stood until March 1922, when the foreign secretary, George Curzon, made a private comment to the French ambassador in London, an indiscreet remark—its contents are no longer known—that would have been embarrassing to Curzon if it ever came to light. The ambassador dutifully conveyed the remark to his government in Paris via telegraph, at which point it was intercepted by a British station, decoded at GC&CS, and distributed to the usual recipients in the government. Whether Curzon belatedly realized the value of GC&CS or simply wished to avoid such episodes in the future, he asked for and got control of the organization.

The following year, Denniston had a new boss, the chief of the Foreign Office’s Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS, more familiar today as MI6. The man was an anonymous figure, known to all but a few simply as “C”; for the sake of secrecy, his code name alone was used even in the agency’s phone directory. His actual name was Hugh Sinclair. Four years earlier, in his former role as director of naval intelligence, it was he who had backed Denniston to become GC&CS’s first chief. Sinclair had been born into a wealthy family, his naval service having been a form of noblesse oblige. (His father’s occupation was “gentleman.”) Although anonymous, he was anything but reticent: the Dictionary of National Biography records that the upward path of his career was aided by his “immense clubbability.” On his unofficial time, he boomed around London in an Italian-made Lancia convertible and was never without his crocodile-skin suitcase filled with expensive cigars. His friends had bestowed on him the nickname “Quex,” inspired by the play and film The Gay Lord Quex; in it, Lord Quex, debonair and crafty, was “the wickedest man in London.”

Nominally, Quex was director of GC&CS while Denniston was deputy director, but as a practical matter, Denniston was in charge from day to day and left largely to his own devices. Under his management, the specialists on the staff cracked the codes of all four of the main targeted countries, along with other codes that came and went on the priority list as the political situation evolved, such as those of Budapest, Rome, and various South American capitals. He took a founder’s pride in the organization having accomplished as much as it did with meager numbers, “the poor relation of the SIS,” as he put it, “whose peacetime activities left little cash to spare.”

But within Germany, schemes were being drawn up and carried out, invisibly at first to the outside world. Beginning in the early 1920s, a decade before Hitler would take power, the disarmament provisions of the Treaty of Versailles were already becoming dead letters one by one. Circumventing the Inter-Allied Military Commission of Control that the victorious powers had installed in Germany after the war to enforce the treaty, the German military built up its army beyond the 100,000-man limit with “black,” or illegal, soldiers. Officers studied the previous war and doctrines for fighting a future large conflict. Germany built U-boats in secret and sent their officers and crews abroad for training. A system of gliding clubs was established to serve as a source of future air force pilots. Starting in 1927, German pilots received military training in the Soviet Union. When forty-three-year-old Adolf Hitler, née Schicklgruber, became Reich chancellor on January 30, 1933, all that remained was to accelerate the developments that were already under way; this would take place partly underground, partly in the open as Hitler correctly sized up the Allies’ readiness to acquiesce.

The following year, in May, Hitler struck a deal for the armed services’ support. His part would be the purge of their distasteful rivals for power, the leadership of the SA, the Sturmabteilung—the Storm Troopers, also known as the Brownshirts. The top echelon of the SA was pushing for the consolidation of the armed services with the SA into a single organization, under their command, a notion that was beyond appalling to the German officer corps. The SA was Hitler’s army of street toughs who had served as his enforcers since 1921, intimidating his opponents and breaking up their political speeches and meetings. But that was then: Hitler had no further need of them, while he calculated that he did need the backing of the generals.

The Brownshirts’ time came in the early morning hours of June 30, 1934, when officers of Heinrich Himmler’s SS began executing SA leaders and others deemed suspect. Hitler would state a couple of weeks later in the Reichstag that seventy-four had been killed, but unofficial estimates were much higher, ranging from 401 to over a thousand. (The numbers were high enough, at any rate, to lead to sloppiness: one man, a Willi Schmid, was abruptly taken from his wife and children at home on the thirtieth by four SS men, and then, equally mysteriously, returned to his family several days afterward in a coffin. It turned out that the wanted man was Willi Schmidt, with a t, a minor SA leader. The unfortunate Mr. Schmid had been a music critic.)

Hitler having fulfilled his part of the bargain, the military supported his taking over the powers of the presidency without the formality of an election, in addition to the chancellorship he already held, following the death on August 2 of President Hindenburg. Further, all soldiers, sailors, and officers would take an oath—vowing loyalty neither to a constitution nor to a set of ideals nor to a country but rather to a man: “I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life at any time for this oath.”

The union of the master-race theorist and the German officer corps was now complete.

For the next five years, Hitler led successive British prime ministers, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, to believe his territorial aims were modest. He merely wished, he averred, to bring a few bordering regions of German-speaking people under Germany’s protection: first the Rhineland, which he invaded in 1936, then Austria in 1938 and Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland the same year. With each advance, he vowed that this territorial claim was to be his last—assurances that the British government gratefully believed.

It was a foolish self-deception on Chamberlain’s part, but it was also a hard one to avoid. The Great War, and the memory of more than 722,000 Britons dead—around the same number as the total losses on both sides of the American Civil War—was less than two decades in the past.

In September 1938, Chamberlain and Hitler met privately for three hours at the Berghof, the Führer’s country retreat in the Alps, to discuss peace. “For the most part H. spoke quietly and in low tones,” Chamberlain wrote to one of his sisters afterward. “I did not see any trace of insanity.”

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf; First Edition (June 22, 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0525521542
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0525521549
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.97 x 1.12 x 8.55 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #400,210 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #367 in History of Technology
- #616 in England History
- #3,190 in World War II History (Books)

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David A. Price

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David A. Price was educated at the College of William and Mary, where he received his degree in computer science, and at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

His book The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company was named a Wall Street Journal "Best Book of the Year," a Fast Company "Best Business Book of the Year," and a Library Journal "Best Business Book of the Year." His book Love and Hate in Jamestown was a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year." His latest book is Geniuses at War: Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age.

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Mal Warwick

How the British developed the world's first digital computer

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 20, 2021

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When I searched Amazon for “Bletchley Park books,” 269 entries turned up. I’ve read and reviewed at least a half-dozen of them. But David A. Price’s Geniuses at War surprised me. Most accounts of the World War II British codebreakers at Bletchley Park single out Alan Turing (1912-54) as the central figure in the enterprise and the genius who built the first digital computer. It’s not true. Turing’s Bombe was an analog device. He speculated that a digital computer might be faster and more efficient. But others acted on Turing’s ideas and actually designed and built the machine. It was called Colossus. And David A. Price has written their story in Geniuses at War: Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age.

LONG-FORGOTTEN GENIUSES

For reasons that are difficult for me to understand, the wartime secrecy imposed by the British and Americans alike kept hidden for many decades much of went on behind the scenes in World War II. Facts about many aspects of the “secret war” involving espionage and signals intelligence are still emerging well into the twenty-first century. And this book is a prime example. David Price teaches us that Alan Turing was far from the only genius at work at Bletchley Park. There were many others. Price tells their remarkable stories here. He brings to light the spectacular but long-forgotten breakthrough in digital computing of the prodigious Tommy Flowers (1905-98) and his colleagues. It turns out that the first digital computer wasn’t ENIAC, which was built in the United States in 1945, but Colossus in 1943-44.

THREE EXTRAORDINARY CENTRAL CHARACTERS BEHIND THE FIRST DIGITAL COMPUTER

Price dwells on the work of three men he views as central to the design and construction of Colossus. First was Max Newman (1897-1984), “a mathematical genius from 1940s Central Casting.” He managed the project, which began in 1942. “The second person who was indispensable to the making of Colossus was Turing, who had been Newman’s protégé at Cambridge.” Turing contributed to the breakthrough in two ways. His theory about the practicality of a digital electronic computer pointed the way for Newman. And “he told Newman about Tommy Flowers, a telephone engineer . . . who had impressed him.” But “during the Colossus era, Turing had not been working at Bletchley Park.” He was in the United States.

It was Flowers whose mechanical genius allowed him to design and build the machine, using an approach virtually everyone else told him was impossible. “Flowers didn’t mind being in a minority of one, as he often was.” He headed a team of fifty people but worked closely with only two assistants. Colossus permitted the British to read communications from the German general staff—and even Adolf Hitler himself—to their commanders in the field just hours after having been sent.

Price explores the lives of these three men, both before and after the war, with a light touch and an eye for engaging detail.

BLETCHLEY PARK WAS A MASSIVE ENTERPRISE

Geniuses at War paints a broad picture of the massive scope of work undertaken at Bletchley Park. It is by no means exclusively about Colossus. “Over the course of the war,” Price writes, “the size of the staff at Bletchley Park would climb to more than 8.700 men and women, working in three shifts and spread across twenty-odd buildings.” So much for the image of a handful of eccentric geniuses laboring away in tight quarters. (That’s an impression you might have gained from The Imitation Game, the 2014 film starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing.) The author supplies details about the specialized work undertaken in the many “huts” scattered about the grounds of the estate.

That work involved far more than deciphering the German military codes and ciphers. Many other nations encrypted their messages—and Bletchley Park worked on many of them. He describes the recruitment program that brought such a diverse array of personalities into play together. Price also explains how bureaucratic snafus and personality conflicts frequently got in the way. And he lays out in engaging detail the impact of the work they all accomplished over the six years of the conflict.

THE PARK HELPED TURN THE TIDE OF THE WAR AT TWO CRUCIAL JUNCTURES

Price’s book is in no way an effort to minimize the contribution of Alan Turing, either to the war effort or to the development of the “thinking machines” he hoped to build. In fact, he credits Turing for helping win the life-or-death Battle of the Atlantic against Germany’s U-boats. “The victory was made possible by a mechanical device, principally of Turing’s invention, known as the Bombe, which mimicked the operation of a series of Enigma machines lashed together.”

But “where Turing’s Bombe was used against the Enigma, Colossus was used against another, much more complex machine, the crown jewel of German encryption technology . . . known to the germans as the Lorenz SZ series . . . and to the Allies by the code name Tunny (British English for ‘tuna’). . . Tunny’s ciphering system was ten trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times as complex as Enigma’s.” But this first digital computer broke through the cipher, and in the process provided the Allies with strategically pivotal intelligence that played a large role in the success of the Normandy Invasion.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David A. Price (1961-) is the author of two other nonfiction books, including The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company, a history of Pixar Animation Studios and computer animation. He received his bachelor’s degree in economics and computer science from the College of William and Mary and graduate degrees from Harvard University and the University of Cambridge. He lives in Richmond, Virginia, his home town.

7 people found this helpful

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Just adequate

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 17, 2022

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The rôle played by Alan Turing and the teams at Bletchley Park in breaking the German's Enigma code is rather well known and has been the subject of several books, films and a play. The efforts in cracking an even more challenging code, which the British called "Tunny", have been less well promulgated, possibly because some of the relevant records remained classified until early in the 21st century. This book attempts to recount this remarkably successful campaign, which also led to the development of the first digital computer.

Unfortunately, the author is not quite equal to the task. Explanations of the maths and technology are quite sloppy, surprising for someone who claims to have studied at Harvard and Cambridge. (Of course, his degrees might be in English.) He also makes puerile mistakes, such as locating the Clarendon Laboratory at Cambridge when every child knows it is in Oxford, which belies his claim to have been a Cambridge student.

Also, the history is rather spotty, which might be the result of records having been lost or destroyed. While the efforts in tackling Tunny seemed to be coeval with those against Enigma, the part played by Turing, if any, is unclear.

Nevertheless, this is worth reading even if only to achieve an imperfect understanding of some remarkable events of the second world war and the history of computing.

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Sunil

Book on Colossus not a colossus to read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 4, 2021

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This book is an excellent description of how the folks at Bletchley Park(BP) in England, during WWII, broke the two Nazi cipher systems: Enigma and Lorenz. Compared to other stories about BP, this book gives a more thorough description of the breaking of the Lorenz cipher. The breaking of Lorenz (also called Sagefisch, Tunafish, Fish, and Tunny) was probably more significant than breaking Enigma for two reasons: it was significantly more challenging, and the messages enciphered with Lorenz tended to be more important, high-level messages, frequently involving correspondence between Hitler and his commanders. The book gives good detail on how Bill Tutte (later professor at U. Waterloo in Canada) made the initial breakthrough on Lorenz, and how later Tommy Flowers built essentially a large scale, by 1943 standards, remarkable electronic computing device(computer?), Colossus, to help decipher Lorenz messages. When BP broke Enigma, they already were in possession of an Enigma machine. In the case of Lorenz, BP did not initially even know of the existence of the Lorenz machine but deduced its features from the enciphered messages it produced. If was only after WWII that the BP folks saw an actual Lorenz machine. The book gives good coverage of all the personalities at BP, including Alan Turing, Tutte, Flowers, Ralph Tester, and Maxwell Newman. At 183 pages of text, the book is on the short side, however, the writing is concise, so the reader gets good value per word. For the researcher, there are over 20 pages of notes and references and an Index of 10 pages.

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Richard G. St. John

Good, But Weak on Operational Impact

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 27, 2022

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I gave this book only three stars. On the positive side, it tells the little known but very important story of how the British created the first programmable digital electronic computer ever and used it to crack high-level German Lorenz-enciphered messages. It thus usefully corrects the undue historical emphasis on the cracking of German Enigma-enciphered messages. But it does not follow through anywhere near enough by explaining how Allied commanders made operational use of the intelligence derived from cracking Lorenz-enciphered messages. (I do not deny however that tracking German messages, from interception, to decryption, to transmission of the decrypts to operational commanders, to operational use by those commanders, is often a very, very difficult art. I just think the author should have tried a bit harder to do so, rather than focus largely on the technical achievement.)

Bill Humber

wonderful insight

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on December 30, 2021

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great overview of a period so important to the present

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