Codebreakers Victory

With exclusive interviews, a Signal Corps veteran tells the full story of how cryptography helped defeat the Axis powers, at Bletchley Park and beyond. For years, the story of the World War II codebreakers was kept a crucial state secret. Even Winston Churchill, himself a great advocate of Britain’s cryptologic program, purposefully minimized their achievements in his history books. Now, though, after decades have passed, the true scope of the British and American cryptographers’ role in the war has come to light. It was a role key to the Allied victory. From the Battle of Britain to the Pacific front to the panzer divisions in Africa, superior cryptography gave the Allies a decisive advantage over the Axis generals. Military intelligence made a significant difference in battle after battle. In Codebreakers’ Victory, veteran cryptographer Hervie Haufler takes readers behind the scenes in this fascinating underground world of ciphers and decoders. This broad view represents the first comprehensive account of codebreaking during World War II. Haufler pulls together years of research, exclusive access to top secret files, and personal interviews to craft a captivating must-read for anyone interested in the behind-the-front intellect and perseverance that went into beating the Nazis and Japan.

This unique reference presents 59 biographies of people who were key to the sea services being reasonably prepared to fight the Japanese Empire when the Second World War broke out, and whose advanced work proved crucial. These intelligence pioneers invented techniques, procedures, and equipment from scratch, not only allowing the United States to hold its own in the Pacific despite the loss of most of its Fleet at Pearl Harbor, but also laying the foundation of today’s intelligence methods and agencies. One-hundred years ago, in what was clearly an unsophisticated pre-information era, naval intelligence (and foreign intelligence in general) existed in rudimentary forms almost incomprehensible to us today. Founded in 1882, the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI)—the modern world’s “oldest continuously operating intelligence agency”—functioned for at least its first forty years with low manning, small budgets, low priority, and no prestige. The navy’s early steps into communications intelligence (COMINT), which included activities such as radio interception, radio traffic analysis, and cryptology, came with the 1916 establishment of the Code and Signals Section within the navy’s Division of Communications and with the 1924 creation of the “Research Desk” as part of the Section. Like ONI, this COMINT organization suffered from low budgets, manning, priority, and prestige. The dictionary focuses on these pioneers, many of whom went on, even after World War II, to important positions in the Navy, the State Department, the Armed Forces Security Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency. It reveals the work and innovations of well and lesser-known individuals who created the foundations of today’s intelligence apparatus and analysis.

One of the most common assumptions about World War II is that the Jews did not actively or effectively resist their own extermination at the hands of the Nazis. In this powerful book, Benjamin Ginsberg convincingly argues that the Jews not only resisted the Germans but actually played a major role in the defeat of Nazi Germany. The question, he contends, is not whether the Jews fought but where and by what means. True, many Jews were poorly armed, outnumbered, and without resources, but Ginsberg shows persuasively that this myth of passivity is solely that—a myth. The author describes how Jews resisted Nazism strongly in four major venues. First, they served as members of the Soviet military and as engineers who designed and built many pivotal Soviet weapons, including the T-34 tank. Second, a number were soldiers in the U.S. armed forces, and many also played key roles in discrediting American isolationism, in providing the Roosevelt administration with the support it needed for preparing for war, and in building the atomic bomb. Third, they made vital contributions to the Allies—the Soviet Union, the United States, and Britain—in espionage and intelligence (especially cryptanalysis), and fourth, they assumed important roles in several European anti-Nazi resistance movements that often disrupted Germany’s fragile military supply lines. In this compelling, cogent history, we discover that the Jews were an important factor in Hitler’s defeat.

For a decimated post-war West Germany, the electronic music studio at the WDR radio in Cologne was a beacon of hope. Jennifer Iverson's Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde traces the reclamation and repurposing of wartime machines, spaces, and discourses into the new sounds of the mid-century studio. In the 1950s, when technologies were plentiful and the need for reconstruction was great, West Germany began to rebuild its cultural prestige via aesthetic and technical advances. The studio's composers, collaborating with scientists and technicians, coaxed music from sine-tone oscillators, noise generators, band-pass filters, and magnetic tape. Together, they applied core tenets from information theory and phonetics, reclaiming military communication technologies as well as fascist propaganda broadcasting spaces. The electronic studio nurtured a revolutionary synthesis of science, technology, politics, and aesthetics. Its esoteric sounds transformed mid-century music and continue to reverberate today. Electronic music--echoing both cultural anxiety and promise--is a quintessential Cold War innovation.

Magnificent and engrossing, One Day in August reveals in full for the first time the “Ultra Secret” story behind one of WW2’s most controversial mysteries—and one of Canada’s most sorrowful moments. In a narrative as powerful and moving as it is authoritative, David O’Keefe rewrites history, connecting Canada’s tragedy at Dieppe with an extraordinary and colourful cast of characters—from the young Commander Ian Fleming, later to become the creator of the James Bond novels, and his team of crack commandos to the code-breaking scientists of Bletchley Park (the closely guarded heart of Britain’s wartime Intelligence and code-breaking work) to those responsible for the planning and conduct of the Dieppe Raid—Admiral John Godfrey, Lord Louis Mountbatten, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and others. The astonishing story critically changes what we thought we knew. For seven decades, the objective for the raid has been one of the most perplexing mysteries of WWII. In less than six hours on August 19, 1942, nearly one thousand Canadians—as well as British and Americans—lay dead or dying on the beaches around the French seaside town, with over two thousand other Canadians wounded or captured. These awful losses have left a legacy of bitterness, recrimination and controversy. In the absence of concrete reasons for the raid, myriad theories ranging from incompetence to conspiracy developed. Over almost two decades of research, sifting through countless recently declassified Intelligence documents, David O’Keefe skillfully pieces together the story like a jigsaw puzzle to reveal the prime reason behind the raid: a highly secret mission designed, in one of Britain’s darkest times, to redress the balance of the war. One Day in August provides a thrilling, multi-layered story that fundamentally changes our understanding of this most tragic and pivotal chapter in Canada’s history.

Due to Enemy Action tells for the first time a World War II story that spans generations and straddles two centuries, a story that begins with the dramatic Battle of the Atlantic in the 1940s and doesn't conclude until an emotional Purple Heart ceremony in 2002. Based on previously classified government documents, military records, personal interviews, and letters between crew members and their families, this is the saga of the courageous survival of ordinary sailors when their ship was torpedoed and their shipmates were killed on April 23, 1945, and the memories that haunted them after the U.S. Navy buried the truth at war's end. It is the story of a small subchaser, the Eagle 56, caught in the crosshairs of a German U-boat, the U-853, whose brazen commander doomed his own crew in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to record final kills before his country's imminent defeat. And it is the account of how one man, Paul M. Lawton, embarked on an unrelenting quest for the truth and changed naval history. Author Stephen Puleo draws from extensive personal interviews with all the major players, including the three living survivors (and a fourth who emerged as the book went to press); a senior U.S. naval archivist who worked with German historians after the war to catalog U-boat movements; and the son of the man who commanded America's sub-tracking "Secret Room" during the war. Due to Enemy Action also describes the final chapter in the Battle of the Atlantic, tracing the epic struggle that began with shocking U-boat attacks against hundreds of defenseless merchant ships off American shores in 1942 and ended with the sinking of the Eagle 56, the last American warship sunk by a German U-boat.

In v.1-8 the final number consists of the Commencement annual.

The award-winning New York Times bestseller about the American women who secretly served as codebreakers during World War II--a "prodigiously researched and engrossing" (New York Times) book that "shines a light on a hidden chapter of American history" (Denver Post). Recruited by the U.S. Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than ten thousand women served as codebreakers during World War II. While their brothers and boyfriends took up arms, these women moved to Washington and learned the meticulous work of code-breaking. Their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives, and gave them access to careers previously denied to them. A strict vow of secrecy nearly erased their efforts from history; now, through dazzling research and interviews with surviving code girls, bestselling author Liza Mundy brings to life this riveting and vital story of American courage, service, and scientific accomplishment.