Author Description

This unique work, written by the editor of the bestselling Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park, is the first to chronicle the British wartime successes in breaking Japanese codes during World War II. Other veterans of Bletchley Park have described how they broke the German Enigma machine to produce Ultra intelligence which helped to hasten victory in the war. There have also been been accounts of how the United States broke the Purple cipher and a navel code, even before Pearl Harbor. Here, Alan Stripp details the monumental British achievement at Bletchley Park and the Far East as these remarkable people broke codes of dazzling variety and complexity, powerfully contributing to the victory in Burma three months before Hiroshima. This firsthand account shows the magnitude of the task: grappling with one of the world's most daunting languages, learning the skills of cyptanalysis, turning out decrypts against the clock, and weaving together all the strands of intelligence to help vanquish a dogged and resourceful enemy who had never known defeat. It is a success story that conveys the sheer excitement of reading the enemy's mind, offering many surprises along the way: who would have expected Japanese signals to reveal not only what they were up to in Asia but also details of German aircraft, the latest U-boats, even the Normandy beach defences. With fascinating explanations of how codes were sent, intercepted, and broken, this personal and readable narrative makes perfectly clear vital importance of codebreakers to the outcome of the war.