The Secret Listeners: How the Y Service Intercepted German Codes for Bletchley Park

McKay, Sinclair

ISBN 10: 1845137639 / ISBN 13: 9781845137632

Published by Aurum, London, 2012

About this Item

First impression. 8vo. Pp 354 + 16pp b&w photographs. Red cloth boards stamped in silver on the spine. Name of ownership on the front free endpaper else a clean, unmarked and tightly bound copy in an unclipped dust jacket. Previous owner has weitten on the front flap of the dust jacket and on the front pastedown endpaper pointing out a factual error made by the publisher on the jacket blurb.

Seller Inventory # 102197

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Secret Listeners: How the Y Service Intercepted German Codes for Bletchley Park
• Publisher: Aurum, London
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1845137639
• ISBN 13: 9781845137632
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: very good
• Seller catalogs:
  • History

About this title

Synopsis

The follow-up to The Sunday Times bestseller The Secret Life of Bletchley Park.

Behind the celebrated code-breaking at Bletchley Park lies another secret. Before the German war machine’s messages could be decoded thousands more young men and women had to locate and monitor endless streams of radio traffic around the clock, and transcribe its Morse code with a speed few have ever managed since.

They were part of the “Y”- (for “Wireless”) Service: the Listening Service – an organisation just as secret as Bletchley Park but still little-known and unrecognised. Without it, however, the Allies would have known nothing of the enemy’s military intentions. Its listeners might be posted to bustling Cairo to listen in to Rommel’s Eighth Army, or Casablanca in Morocco, or Karachi for the Burma campaign, or in one case even the idyllic Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean to monitor Japan. To men and women often hardly out of school such exotic postings were life-changing adventures.

Now, in the follow-up to his Sunday Times-bestselling The Secret Life of Bletchley Park, through dozens of interviews with surviving veterans, Sinclair McKay chronicles the history and achievements of this remarkable group of people and the Y-Service’s vital contribution to the war effort.

Praise for The Secret Life of Bletchley Park

‘McKay has succeeded in honouring a genuinely remarkable group of people in a solid, often entertaining and above all warm-hearted way' Daily Mail

‘A truly breath-taking, eye-opening book’ A.N. Wilson, Reader's Digest

‘A remarkably faithful account of what we did, why it mattered, and how it all felt at the time' Guardian

About the Author

SINCLAIR MCKAY is the acclaimed author of history and historical true crime including the best-selling The Secret Life of Bletchley Park. HIs previous Aurum titles include Mile End Murder, The Lost World of Bletchley Park, The Secret Life of Fighter Command and The Secret Listeners for Aurum, as well as histories of Hammer films and the James Bond films. He writes features for the Daily Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday and lives in London.