Enigma: The Battle for the Code - Hardcover

Sebag-Montefiore, Hugh

3.86

1,054 ratings by Goodreads

9780471407386: Enigma: The Battle for the Code

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0471407380 ISBN 13: 9780471407386

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2001

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"Cracking stuff . . . vivid and hitherto unknown details."

Sunday Times (London)

The complete story of the cracking of the Nazi code and those who risked their lives to make it possible

Most histories of the cracking of the Enigma code focus on the work done by the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, Britain s famous counterintelligence station. In addition to providing new details about the genesis of the code and the activities at Bletchley, Enigma tells, for the first time, the hair–raising stories of those who put their lives on the line to give the codebreakers the materials they needed. While researching the book, noted British journalist Hugh Sebag–Montefiore tracked down many of the surviving players in the Enigma drama. These witnesses some of them speaking on the record for the first time provide unforgettable firsthand accounts, including gripping stories of the secret agents, naval officers, and ordinary seamen who faced death in order to snatch vital codebooks from under the noses of Nazi officials and from sinking ships.

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Review:

Timing is all but even Hugh Sebag-Montefiore could hardly have dreamed when he started researching this book four years ago that its publication would coincide with the release of the Hollywood blockbuster U-571. The film claims that it was the Americans "wot won the war" through the bravery of two of its sailors who climbed aboard the crippled sub and made off with an Enigma machine and assorted codebooks before it sank. But then Hollywood has never let the facts get in the way of a good profit. As Sebag-Montefiore points out it was a British officer, Francis Fasson, together with Able Seaman, Colin Grazier, who climbed down the turret of U-559 to retrieve the codebooks and, furthermore, their capture was only a small, if important, part of the Enigma story. However, this book is neither an exercise in point scoring nor full of dramatic new revelations. Its purpose is to chart the entire Enigma history from 1931, when a cipher officer, named Hans Thilo Schmidt, working in the German Defence Ministry, first passed secrets of the code to the French to the end of the War. As such it is extremely welcome. There have been a fair number of books on various parts of the Enigma story--not least the work of Alan Turing and the Bletchley Park boffins--but there have been few that have so thoroughly charted the early years of the 1930s when Polish cryptographers battled to read Enigma messages. Thus Enigma becomes part of an ongoing story, not something just bolted on to a dramatic narrative of the Second World War. Sebag-Montefiore has unearthed a few new primary sources, who add colour and insight rather than anything new, but he does have an engagingly easy style not found among many historians and the book is an extremely accessible read. For all its thoroughness, though, there are some things that the author cannot explain. Why did the Germans not realise the code was broken when all the evidence pointed that way? And how did Enigma work? Sebag-Montefiore devotes a lengthy appendix to a simplified explanation of the latter--but this reader is still none the wiser. Maybe some things will always remain a mystery. --John Crace

Review:

"In a crowd of books dealing with the Allied breaking of the World War II German cipher machine Enigma, Hugh Sebag–Montifiore has scored a scoop."
––The Washington Post

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