Greenberg, Joel Alan Turing and the Enigma Code

Secrets, Lies and Myths of Bletchley Park in World War II

For years, early accounts of the codebreaking work at Bletchley Park during World War II contained numerous factual errors. This was entirely understandable: many of the authors were veterans who lacked access to official records. They relied solely on their recollections of events that had taken place more than thirty years earlier. As secrecy restrictions were relaxed, more and more Bletchley Park veterans wrote their own accounts. Some historians studying British wartime intelligence adopted a number of these questionable stories. These tales gradually became part of the Bletchley Park mythosappearing in print media as well as in stage and film productionsand persist to this day. In his book *Alan Turing and the Enigma Code*, Joel Greenberg selects twenty of the most widespread myths about Bletchley Park during World War II (such as the claim that thousands of carrier pigeons were used there to transmit secret messages to British troops in France). With impressive attention to detail, he describes the origin of each mythas well as the inaccuracies, secrets, and sometimes even lies that kept it alive over the yearsbefore finally revealing the truth behind the story. The book offers a completely fresh perspective on Bletchley Park; no other work on the subject tells the story in quite this way, and it is sure to be of great interest to anyone fascinated by the world of wartime intelligence.