To speed things up, here's a link to the Amazon summary.
I really enjoyed this book - it's the memoirs of the British code master for their commando units during WWII. At the beginning of the war, the Brits were using a simplistic code based on picking a set of words out of a poem they had memorized and coordinated ahead of time with home base. Leo Marks, the protagonist, realized how vulnerable the codes were to interception and decoding, and designed a set of codes that were significantly more secure. The conflict between the eggheads who were designing codes and the directors who were running the agents is fascinating, and it's kind of surprising that we don't all speak German at this point, given how much politics went into fighting the war.
As an egghead, it was also really neat to read about someone who made a difference and saved lives in the field, even from the home base.
This book is quite long (600 pages?) but it is very well written. I could hardly put it down - he even makes frequency analysis exciting! The author later went on to write screenplays. Well worth a read if you like WWII history or cryptography.
"he even makes frequency analysis exciting!" [citation needed]
ReplyDeleteI tease, this does sound interesting!
Ok, it's not THAT exciting... but he really paints a good picture of the urgency that was felt at the time. They had hundreds of FANYs (auxiliary women's corps) brute-forcing garbled transmissions that they received from agents in the field. The guy actually invented, by accident, a highly effective cryptanalysis technique that freaked out the guys at Bletchly Park, where the military and diplomatic codes were being created. Fascinating stuff.
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