Author Description

"Captain Oswald Tuck (1876-1950) was pulled out of retirement to help Bletchley Park deal with the consequences of the Japanese attacks on Malaya and Pearl Harbor. It was obvious that there was an acute shortage of Japanese linguists to deal with Japanese codes, and Tuck was given the task of devising a course that was no more than six months long to relieve the shortage. He had been an instructor in the Navy and had lived in Japan before the First World War, but he was already 65: would he be able to meet the challenge? In the event, the first course was such a success that further courses ran until the end of the war and the young men and women Tuck trained went on to work at Bletchley Park and the Foreign Office, and in India, Australia, Colombo, Mauritius and, during the Occupation, in Japan. The whole operation remained secret for long after the war, and Tuck was never rewarded for his wartime work. This book contains the only surviving text of Tuck's final report on his wartime activities in charge of the Bedford Japanese School along with a memoir by Dr Michael Loewe, the only survivor of the first batch of Tuck's students. In addition, it contains biographies of almost all of Tuck's wartime students, and information about the courses run in the Naval Section at Bletchley Park."--taken from back cover.