Bletchley Park and D-Day: From Code Breaking to Intelligence—The Untold Story of How the Battle for Normandy Was Won

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. (July)