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Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park
 
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Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park (Paperback)

by Michael Smith (Author)
3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 184 pages
  • Publisher: Channel 4 Books; New edition edition (18 Feb 2000)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0752271482
  • ISBN-13: 978-0752271484
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 653,649 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #36 in  Books > History > World History > World War II 1939-1945 > Enigma Code

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

When "Captain Ridley's shooting party" arrived at Bletchley Park in 1939 no-one would have guessed that by 1945 the guests would number nearly 10,000 and that collectively they would have contributed decisively to the Allied war effort. Their role? To decode the Enigma cypher used by the Germans for high-level communications. Their work has already inspired Robert Harris's novel Enigma and now a Channel 4 series has been produced, which this book accompanies.

It is an astonishing story. A melting pot of Oxbridge dons (including Alan Turing, the father of the modern computer), maverick oddballs and more regular citizens worked night and day at Station X, as Bletchley Park was known, to derive intelligence information from German coded messages. Bear in mind that an Enigma machine had a possible 159 million million million different settings and the magnitude of the challenge becomes apparent. That they succeeded, despite military scepticism, supplying information that led to the sinking of the Bismarck, Montgomery's victory in North Africa and the D-Day landings, is testament to an indomitable spirit that wrenched British intelligence into the modern age, replacing false beards and dodgy accents with a technological precision that was to be fundamental as the Second World War segued into the Cold War.

Michael Smith constructs his absorbing narrative around the reminiscences of those who worked and played at Bletchley Park, and their stories add a very human colour to what was a highly cerebral activity, remote as it was from the blood and loss of the battlefield, but with such direct bearing. The code breakers of Station X did not win the war but they undoubtedly shortened it, and the potential lives saved on both sides stand as their greatest achievement. --David Vincent --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.



Product Description

Tied to a Channel 4 television series in three one-hour parts, this is the story of the breaking of the Enigma code at Bletchley Park during World War II. That remarkable feat - breaking a code that the Germans believed to be unbreakable - was to play a major part in the outcome of the war. The book draws on official files and the testimonies of survivors to tell the story of a unique institution and the people who worked there. Examples designed to be intelligible to the layman are provided to illustrate how the code worked and how it was deciphered.

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Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.0 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but not the best., 6 Sep 2000
By P. Janeiro (Lisbon, Portugal) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
I bought "station X" in 1999 and although the stories surrounding Bletchley Park are interesting, the book frustrated me - it gives a very poor explanation about the machine "ENIGMA", which ends up being the driving force of the book. I would recommend "The Code Book" instead - It really explains how ENIGMA works.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Not Enough Detail, 18 Sep 2001
By A Customer
I found Station X an interesting read, but I felt there wasn't enough content on the workings of the Enigma code and the decyphering techniques used. I wasn't expecting a story that focused on Bletchley Park's intriguing personalities ?!
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars A good read, but not enough extra over the television series, 17 Feb 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park (Hardcover)
This book ties in well with the television series, and is able to go into greater detail about the major protagonists at Bletchley Park: in particular the programme's attitude of 'Alan Turing solved everything' is put firmly into perspective with the achievements of other codebreakers at Station X.

Inevitably, however, one is left wishing that the book were rather more heavyweight, as it does not offer enough extra over the series in the final analysis

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting to the younger reader
This in an extremely interesting book to read. It makes younger people like myself understand that the Second world War was not just fought milatarily against the Nazi Theird... Read more
Published on 9 Jul 2000

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