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Bletchley Park and D-Day

The Untold Story of How the Battle for Normandy Was Won

Audiobook
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The untold story of Bletchley Park's key role in the success of the Normandy campaign

Since the secret of Bletchley Park was revealed in the 1970s, the work of its codebreakers has become one of the most famous stories of the Second World War. But cracking the Nazis' codes was only the start of the process. Thousands of secret intelligence workers were then involved in making crucial information available to the Allied leaders and commanders who desperately needed it.

Using previously classified documents, David Kenyon casts the work of Bletchley Park in a new light, as not just a codebreaking establishment but as a fully developed intelligence agency. He shows how preparations for the war's turning point—the Normandy landings in 1944—had started at Bletchley years earlier, in 1942, with the careful collation of information extracted from enemy signals traffic. This account reveals the true character of Bletchley's vital contribution to success in Normandy and, ultimately, Allied victory.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 19, 2019
      In this highly detailed, technical work, Kenyon (Horsemen in No Man’s Land), a research historian at Bletchley Park, demonstrates that the intelligence division housed at the British estate had a more significant role in WWII than previously acknowledged, making indispensable contributions to the invasion at Normandy. The estate was the WWII base of operations for the Government Code and Cypher School, the British military’s code-breaking organization. Using declassified documents, Kenyon argues that Bletchley Park’s significance has been undersold, that it was not merely notable for the complexity of the codes its workers broke, but also served as a fully functional intelligence agency. Staffed by thousands of code breakers, machine coding operators, transcribers, and analysts, Bletchley Park regularly made crucial information available to Winston Churchill and the militaries of the U.K. and U.S. Bletchley Park gave the allies crucial information about the Nazi order of battle, producing detailed understandings of the SS and German divisions on land, air, and sea, and decoding significant communications between Hitler and his armed forces commander. While the subject is significant and the achievements of those working at Bletchley heroic, this account is often a tedious march through dry, overly detailed technical coding lingo and jargon. It may be suitable for an aficionado of WWII military and coding systems, but for the average reader, it is ponderous and difficult to slog through, and readers may not be convinced that there’s much new here.

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  • English

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