electronic intelligence

". . . the untold story of the brilliant team who built the world's first digital electronic computer at Bletchley Park, during a critical time in World War II. Decoding the communication of the Nazi high command was imperative for the success of the Allied invasion of Normandy. The Nazi missives were encrypted by the "Tunny" cipher, a code that was orders of magnitude more difficult to crack than the infamous Enigma code. But Tommy Flowers, a maverick English working-class engineer, devised the ingenious, daring, and controversial plan to build a machine that could think at breathtaking speed and break the code in nearly real time. Together with the pioneering mathematician Max Newman and Enigma code-breaker Alan Turing, Flowers and his team produced--against the odds, the clock, and a resistant leadership--Colossus, the world's first digital electronic computer, the machine that would help bring the war to an end. With fascinating detail and illuminating insight, David A. Price's Geniuses at War tells, for the first time, the mesmerizing story of the great minds behind Colossus, and chronicles their remarkable feats of engineering genius which ushered in the dawn of the digital age"--.

This account of the Allied efforts to decode Axis messages--and keep the success of their efforts secret--describes the men and women behind the scenes, as well as the institutions they served, and the early computers devised for the purpose.

Explains what wartime codes were, how Allied codebreakers decoded them, and how primary and other sources provide this information.

A history and description of the Allies' code-breaking operations at Bletchley Park during World War II. Covers the events which led to the successful description of German, Italian, and Japanese military and diplomatic codes.