Books in Brief: Ultra Goes to War

Ultra Goes to War, by Ronald Lewin (McGraw-Hill, 298 pp., $12.95). The Enigma glow-lamp machine was as wondrous as its name. Invented by a Dutchman in 1919, marketed in the open by a German firm, it came secretly to influence battle decisions of Allied commanders in World War II. Enigma transformed sensible messages into garble for transmission by radio, then unscrambled them at the receiving end. Hitler’s forces habitually encoded tactical information on Enigma devices and filled the airwaves with critically important gibberish. Ronald Lewin tells, in wondrous language, how a hush-hush British decoding outfit in a Victorian mansion in Buckinghamshire cracked the Reich’s codes and monitored their message traffic undetected through VE Day. The operation was known as Ultra: a pet project of Churchill’s from the start. The cream of England’s thinkers—Oxford and Cambridge men—were, contrary to usual military personnel procedure, funneled to precisely the right place. As the Allies pushed through North Africa, Italy, and France, decoding units the Americans dubbed “secret limeys” monitored German field communications. Some of their findings, Lewin reports, were striking. They learned Rommel was crimped for supplies. They deduced the enemy wasn’t expecting the Normandy landings. They realized Arnhem bridge, hard by a Nazi headquarters, was a foolish target. History demonstrates that not all Ultra’s intelligence was acted upon or understood. But Lewin is all for Ultra’s people—“all the brothers courageous, all the sisters virtuous.” He early on confesses ignorance of Enigma’s operating principles, but doesn’t let that hobble him. Comfortably he speaks the magic language of cipher wizards. Loyal, self-effacing, literate, he can get away with murder. Ultra Goes to War is charming military history.

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Paul T. Hornak

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Ultra Goes to War, by Ronald Lewin (McGraw-Hill, 298 pp., $12.95). The Enigma glow-lamp machine was as wondrous as its name. Invented by a Dutchman in 1919, marketed in the open by a German firm, it came secretly to influence battle decisions of Allied commanders in World War II. Enigma transformed sensible messages into garble for transmission by radio, then unscrambled them at the receiving end. Hitler’s forces habitually encoded tactical information on Enigma devices and filled the airwaves with critically important gibberish. Ronald Lewin tells, in wondrous language, how a hush-hush British decoding outfit in a Victorian mansion in Buckinghamshire cracked the Reich’s codes and monitored their message traffic undetected through VE Day. The operation was known as Ultra: a pet project of Churchill’s from the start. The cream of England’s thinkers—Oxford and Cambridge men—were, contrary to usual military personnel procedure, funneled to precisely the right place. As the Allies pushed through North Africa, Italy, and France, decoding units the Americans dubbed “secret limeys” monitored German field communications. Some of their findings, Lewin reports, were striking. They learned Rommel was crimped for supplies. They deduced the enemy wasn’t expecting the Normandy landings. They realized Arnhem bridge, hard by a Nazi headquarters, was a foolish target. History demonstrates that not all Ultra’s intelligence was acted upon or understood. But Lewin is all for Ultra’s people—“all the brothers courageous, all the sisters virtuous.” He early on confesses ignorance of Enigma’s operating principles, but doesn’t let that hobble him. Comfortably he speaks the magic language of cipher wizards. Loyal, self-effacing, literate, he can get away with murder. Ultra Goes to War is charming military history.