Geniuses At War: Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age, David A. Price, c. 2021.

 Geniuses At War: Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age, David A. Price, c. 2021.

Prologue

V-1, V-2, Wernher von Braun.

Bletchley Park: 55 miles northeast of London.

Germans never learned of Bletchley Park during the war.

Bletchley Park (BP): home of the British signals intelligence agency, cover name, Government Code and Cypher School, or GC&CS. Main task: reading intercepted radio messages of the Third Reich's military.

WWII: a cryptographic war like none before.

German U-boats drove the need for radio signals.

About 1/3rd of the way through the war: Enigma code broken.

Hut 8: team led by British chess champion Hugh Alexander and 27-y/o Cambridge-trained mathematician, Ala Turing. BP able to read naval Enigma traffic temporarily in 1941 and permanently starting in late 1942 -- Turing's invention, the Bombe.

The conquest of Enigma was only a warm-up. A different section of BP, known as the Newmanry, would become the site of the greatest decryption achievements of the war and the launch of the digital age.