The Hut Six Story: Breaking the Enigma Codes

"Gordon Welchman worked at Bletchley Park, on the most important British de-ciphering operations of the war [WW2], from 1939 to 1945. Here, unsuspected by the Germans, the famous Enigma codes were broken, almost continuously throughout the war. Welchman was a leading figure at Bletchley Park; his brilliant mathematical mind, and imaginative attack on apparently insuperable problems, were of inestimable value in shaping the course of the war and hastening victory.

No other book has explained so thoroughly how the job was done, and how so often a flash of genius, an inspired insight, or even a stroke of luck, tipped the balance from failure to success, against all the odds.

Gordon Welchman, a talented mathematician, was educated at Marlborough, and Trinity College, Cambridge. He had taken up a post as a fellow of Sidney Sussex College when the war started, and he was an obvious recruit for the expanding codebreaking operations at Bletchley Park. He was awarded the OBE for his war work. After the war he emigrated to the USA, and continued to work on computers and their applications to security and communications. He died in 1985."

A publishing history is given on page 252, in Appendix III: First published by McGraw-Hill Book Co. Inc. in 1982, with a British edition appearing in the same year under the Allen Lane imprint. A paperback edition was published by Penguin Books in 1984.