Robert Harris - Enigma

review by Brian Lowen on show 21st April
This is the best and most accurate telling of the story of the codebreakers at Bletchley Park during WW2, so forget the American version! Most of the codebreakers were highly qualified mathematicians, but some were recruited after winning crossword competitions in the Times newspaper.

The facts are all true, but some fiction has been added to make a thoroughly enjoyable story.
The Enigma machine looked like an old fashioned typewriter and thousands of them were made and distributed amongst all the various branches of the German war machine. It had the normal keys of a typewriter but when you pressed a key a different letter showed up on the display. There were four rotors in the machine, each containing the letters of the alphabet, plus a plug board at the back which in total gave about 150 million million different options for which ever letter was displayed. It had one flaw though which was that the same letter would never be displayed as the one that had been pressed. This was a great help to the codebreakers. Several of the enigma machines were captured during the war, but they were useless without the codebook which gave the daily settings for the enigma. It was when one of these codebooks was rescued from a sinking U-boat, even though it was only for weather reports, it gave the codebreakers all they needed to finally crack the codes of the messages being sent out by the German high command to the U-boat packs. So, to the story:

March 1943, the war hangs in the balance, and at Bletchley Park Tom Jerico, a brilliant young codebreaker, is facing a double nightmare. The Germans have unaccountably changed their U-boat Enigma code, threatening the convoys crossing the Atlantic Ocean laden with essential supplies for the war effort. And as suspicion grows that there may be a spy inside Bletchley, Jerico’s girlfriend, the beautiful and mysterious Claire Romilly, suddenly disappears.

Tom works with Claire’s friend, Hester Wallace to try and locate the spy and at the same time Tom is the one everyone is looking to, to solve the new code the Germans are using on their Enigma machines. The tension is built up well as Tom and his colleagues struggle to break the code before the U-boats locate the convoys.

A great thriller, that brings to life what it must have been like to work at Bletchley Park with the thousands of other staff all sworn to secrecy about their work. The conditions were pretty abysmal, working in wooden huts with little or no heating and surviving on atrocious food dished up at the canteen. The tension builds up dramatically and there are several twists in the tale at the finish.
Thoroughly recommended if you enjoy war stories.
review by Brian