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Geniuses at War: Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age
*Running Time => 5 hrs. and 45 mins.*
The dramatic, untold story of a brilliant team the world's first digital electronic computer, and the race to decrypt the Nazis'.
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 (British English for "tuna") cipher, a code that was orders of magnitude more difficult to crack than the infamous Enigma cipher.
Thankfully, 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 that ushered in the dawn of the digital age.
The dramatic, untold story of a brilliant team the world's first digital electronic computer, and the race to decrypt the Nazis'.
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 (British English for "tuna") cipher, a code that was orders of magnitude more difficult to crack than the infamous Enigma cipher.
Thankfully, 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 that ushered in the dawn of the digital age.
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First published June 22, 2021
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July 28, 2022
This book provides an interesting study of the people and the technology behind one of World War II’s greatest breakthroughs, the cracking of military codes that the Axis powers considered unbreakable. To really understand what the codebreakers were up against, however, requires some Show and Tell. I recommend watching some YouTube videos.
Start with Enigma, which plays only a small part in this book but shows the complexity of the systems involved and the brilliance of the people involved. There are many Enigma videos (Goodreads no longer allows links to third party websites, so I will just give their titles). I would start with “How did the Engima Machine Work?," by Jared Owen. It uses computer animation to show the complexity of these machines, and will give viewers some appreciation of the brainpower required to reverse engineer the architecture in an age before high speed computers. From there I would watch the video “Cracking Enigma in 2021 – Computerphile”, by Dr. Mike Pound, which uses a modern laptop to recreate the techniques that were used.
Enigma is forever associated with Alan Turing, who developed a number of ways to break the German ciphers, including improvements to an electromechanical machine known as a Bombe, which the pre-war Polish government had developed. Turing’s changes made the decryption process faster and more accurate. Eventually, the British government would build 200 Bombes, and the Americans 150 more, and by late in the war British and American codebreakers were often able to read messages before the Germans themselves. For those interested, the National Security Agency’s museum in Fort Meade, Maryland, had both an original Enigma machine and a recreation of a Bombe on display when I visited.
The Germans also developed another, far more complex machine, to encrypt communications at the highest military and diplomatic levels, the Lorenz SZ40/42 (SZ for Schlüssel-Zusatz, or cipher attachment), a machine of astonishing complexity that used twelve wheels, each with cams that could be individually set. Cracking this code required genius-level skills, both in terms of the mathematical analysis needed to understand the logic behind the machines, and the engineering skills necessary to build a computer that could break them. The result was codenamed Colossus, and was the world’s first true digital computer, becoming operational in December 1943, two years before the United States' Eniac.
There are also a number of good videos about Colossus, and I particularly recommend one called “Colossus – The Greatest Secret in the History of Computing”, by Chris Shore.
In August, 1941, the Germans made a critical blunder: a message from Athens was sent twice using the same key settings, but with some changes in things like abbreviations in the body of the text. At Bletchley Park cryptanalyst John Tiltman was able to create a 4000 character keystream, which is a stream of random or pseudorandom characters that are combined with a plaintext message to produce an encrypted message. Using this, Bill Tutte, in one of the greatest intellectual feats in history, in six weeks was able to determine how the Lorenz machine must be constructed, including the number of wheels it had and other key features. With this information Colossus could be built, but its construction required another remarkable man, this time Tommy Flowers, a working class engineer who had developed telephone switching stations for the Post Office before the war. He would create an engineering marvel, including a tape transport system that allowed 30,000 characters per second to be read for analysis. The machine could actually process faster than that, but 30,000 was the limit before the paper tape disintegrated.
And someone had the thankless task of managing all these brilliant people. It could not have been easy, especially as Bletchley Park would eventually grow to 8,700 men and women and over twenty buildings. Both the pressures and the personalities were difficult to keep under control. The first manager, from pre-war army Intelligence, had a talent for identifying and recruiting genius, but not for managing them well, and was eventually replaced. He would eventually die in obscurity, even though he was the man who built the successful structure that others would use to crack the German codes.
Enigma and Colossus remained classified until the 1970s, by which time many of the people who had played key roles had already passed on. In his history of the war, Winston Churchill wanted to allude to the British codebreaking successes, but even that was too much for the Intelligence community, and he had to remove the references. Part of the reason was that many countries continued to use Engima-type machines for years after the war, thinking they were still unbreakable, never knowing that the British and American governments could read them with ease.
The Colossus machines were not only destroyed after the war, but so was all of their documentation and construction drawings. Tommy Flowers returned to the Post Office, where he tried to convince management to build a digital switching system that would be far faster and more reliable than the existing electromechanical ones, but his superiors turned him down, believing such machines were impossible. Flowers knew he could build them, having built an even more powerful digital computer a few years before, but he could not mention any of the work he had done during the war. Some of Colossus remains classified even today.
This book provides an overview of Bletchley Park during the war, with a focus on the development of Colossus. It is written for a non-technical audience and provides a good introduction for anyone wanting to understand more about some of the most important Intelligence advances of the war, and some of the greatest intellectual breakthroughs of all time.
Start with Enigma, which plays only a small part in this book but shows the complexity of the systems involved and the brilliance of the people involved. There are many Enigma videos (Goodreads no longer allows links to third party websites, so I will just give their titles). I would start with “How did the Engima Machine Work?," by Jared Owen. It uses computer animation to show the complexity of these machines, and will give viewers some appreciation of the brainpower required to reverse engineer the architecture in an age before high speed computers. From there I would watch the video “Cracking Enigma in 2021 – Computerphile”, by Dr. Mike Pound, which uses a modern laptop to recreate the techniques that were used.
Enigma is forever associated with Alan Turing, who developed a number of ways to break the German ciphers, including improvements to an electromechanical machine known as a Bombe, which the pre-war Polish government had developed. Turing’s changes made the decryption process faster and more accurate. Eventually, the British government would build 200 Bombes, and the Americans 150 more, and by late in the war British and American codebreakers were often able to read messages before the Germans themselves. For those interested, the National Security Agency’s museum in Fort Meade, Maryland, had both an original Enigma machine and a recreation of a Bombe on display when I visited.
The Germans also developed another, far more complex machine, to encrypt communications at the highest military and diplomatic levels, the Lorenz SZ40/42 (SZ for Schlüssel-Zusatz, or cipher attachment), a machine of astonishing complexity that used twelve wheels, each with cams that could be individually set. Cracking this code required genius-level skills, both in terms of the mathematical analysis needed to understand the logic behind the machines, and the engineering skills necessary to build a computer that could break them. The result was codenamed Colossus, and was the world’s first true digital computer, becoming operational in December 1943, two years before the United States' Eniac.
There are also a number of good videos about Colossus, and I particularly recommend one called “Colossus – The Greatest Secret in the History of Computing”, by Chris Shore.
In August, 1941, the Germans made a critical blunder: a message from Athens was sent twice using the same key settings, but with some changes in things like abbreviations in the body of the text. At Bletchley Park cryptanalyst John Tiltman was able to create a 4000 character keystream, which is a stream of random or pseudorandom characters that are combined with a plaintext message to produce an encrypted message. Using this, Bill Tutte, in one of the greatest intellectual feats in history, in six weeks was able to determine how the Lorenz machine must be constructed, including the number of wheels it had and other key features. With this information Colossus could be built, but its construction required another remarkable man, this time Tommy Flowers, a working class engineer who had developed telephone switching stations for the Post Office before the war. He would create an engineering marvel, including a tape transport system that allowed 30,000 characters per second to be read for analysis. The machine could actually process faster than that, but 30,000 was the limit before the paper tape disintegrated.
And someone had the thankless task of managing all these brilliant people. It could not have been easy, especially as Bletchley Park would eventually grow to 8,700 men and women and over twenty buildings. Both the pressures and the personalities were difficult to keep under control. The first manager, from pre-war army Intelligence, had a talent for identifying and recruiting genius, but not for managing them well, and was eventually replaced. He would eventually die in obscurity, even though he was the man who built the successful structure that others would use to crack the German codes.
Enigma and Colossus remained classified until the 1970s, by which time many of the people who had played key roles had already passed on. In his history of the war, Winston Churchill wanted to allude to the British codebreaking successes, but even that was too much for the Intelligence community, and he had to remove the references. Part of the reason was that many countries continued to use Engima-type machines for years after the war, thinking they were still unbreakable, never knowing that the British and American governments could read them with ease.
The Colossus machines were not only destroyed after the war, but so was all of their documentation and construction drawings. Tommy Flowers returned to the Post Office, where he tried to convince management to build a digital switching system that would be far faster and more reliable than the existing electromechanical ones, but his superiors turned him down, believing such machines were impossible. Flowers knew he could build them, having built an even more powerful digital computer a few years before, but he could not mention any of the work he had done during the war. Some of Colossus remains classified even today.
This book provides an overview of Bletchley Park during the war, with a focus on the development of Colossus. It is written for a non-technical audience and provides a good introduction for anyone wanting to understand more about some of the most important Intelligence advances of the war, and some of the greatest intellectual breakthroughs of all time.
October 20, 2021
When I searched Amazon for “Bletchley Park books,” 269 entries turned up. I’ve read and reviewed at least a half-dozen of them. But David A. Price’s Geniuses at War surprised me. Most accounts of the World War II British codebreakers at Bletchley Park single out Alan Turing (1912-54) as the central figure in the enterprise and the genius who built the first digital computer. It’s not true. Turing’s Bombe was an analog device. He speculated that a digital computer might be faster and more efficient. But others acted on Turing’s ideas and actually designed and built the machine. It was called Colossus. And David A. Price has written their story in Geniuses at War: Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age.
LONG-FORGOTTEN GENIUSES
For reasons that are difficult for me to understand, the wartime secrecy imposed by the British and Americans alike kept hidden for many decades much of went on behind the scenes in World War II. Facts about many aspects of the “secret war” involving espionage and signals intelligence are still emerging well into the twenty-first century. And this book is a prime example. David Price teaches us that Alan Turing was far from the only genius at work at Bletchley Park. There were many others. Price tells their remarkable stories here. He brings to light the spectacular but long-forgotten breakthrough in digital computing of the prodigious Tommy Flowers (1905-98) and his colleagues. It turns out that the first digital computer wasn’t ENIAC, which was built in the United States in 1945, but Colossus in 1943-44.
THREE EXTRAORDINARY CENTRAL CHARACTERS BEHIND THE FIRST DIGITAL COMPUTER
Price dwells on the work of three men he views as central to the design and construction of Colossus. First was Max Newman (1897-1984), “a mathematical genius from 1940s Central Casting.” He managed the project, which began in 1942. “The second person who was indispensable to the making of Colossus was Turing, who had been Newman’s protégé at Cambridge.” Turing contributed to the breakthrough in two ways. His theory about the practicality of a digital electronic computer pointed the way for Newman. And “he told Newman about Tommy Flowers, a telephone engineer . . . who had impressed him.” But “during the Colossus era, Turing had not been working at Bletchley Park.” He was in the United States.
It was Flowers whose mechanical genius allowed him to design and build the machine, using an approach virtually everyone else told him was impossible. “Flowers didn’t mind being in a minority of one, as he often was.” He headed a team of fifty people but worked closely with only two assistants. Colossus permitted the British to read communications from the German general staff—and even Adolf Hitler himself—to their commanders in the field just hours after having been sent.
Price explores the lives of these three men, both before and after the war, with a light touch and an eye for engaging detail.
BLETCHLEY PARK WAS A MASSIVE ENTERPRISE
Geniuses at War paints a broad picture of the massive scope of work undertaken at Bletchley Park. It is by no means exclusively about Colossus. “Over the course of the war,” Price writes, “the size of the staff at Bletchley Park would climb to more than 8.700 men and women, working in three shifts and spread across twenty-odd buildings.” So much for the image of a handful of eccentric geniuses laboring away in tight quarters. (That’s an impression you might have gained from The Imitation Game, the 2014 film starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing.) The author supplies details about the specialized work undertaken in the many “huts” scattered about the grounds of the estate.
That work involved far more than deciphering the German military codes and ciphers. Many other nations encrypted their messages—and Bletchley Park worked on many of them. He describes the recruitment program that brought such a diverse array of personalities into play together. Price also explains how bureaucratic snafus and personality conflicts frequently got in the way. And he lays out in engaging detail the impact of the work they all accomplished over the six years of the conflict.
THE PARK HELPED TURN THE TIDE OF THE WAR AT TWO CRUCIAL JUNCTURES
Price’s book is in no way an effort to minimize the contribution of Alan Turing, either to the war effort or to the development of the “thinking machines” he hoped to build. In fact, he credits Turing for helping win the life-or-death Battle of the Atlantic against Germany’s U-boats. “The victory was made possible by a mechanical device, principally of Turing’s invention, known as the Bombe, which mimicked the operation of a series of Enigma machines lashed together.”
But “where Turing’s Bombe was used against the Enigma, Colossus was used against another, much more complex machine, the crown jewel of German encryption technology . . . known to the germans as the Lorenz SZ series . . . and to the Allies by the code name Tunny (British English for ‘tuna’). . . Tunny’s ciphering system was ten trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times as complex as Enigma’s.” But this first digital computer broke through the cipher, and in the process provided the Allies with strategically pivotal intelligence that played a large role in the success of the Normandy Invasion.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David A. Price (1961-) is the author of two other nonfiction books, including The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company, a history of Pixar Animation Studios and computer animation. He received his bachelor’s degree in economics and computer science from the College of William and Mary and graduate degrees from Harvard University and the University of Cambridge. He lives in Richmond, Virginia, his home town.
LONG-FORGOTTEN GENIUSES
For reasons that are difficult for me to understand, the wartime secrecy imposed by the British and Americans alike kept hidden for many decades much of went on behind the scenes in World War II. Facts about many aspects of the “secret war” involving espionage and signals intelligence are still emerging well into the twenty-first century. And this book is a prime example. David Price teaches us that Alan Turing was far from the only genius at work at Bletchley Park. There were many others. Price tells their remarkable stories here. He brings to light the spectacular but long-forgotten breakthrough in digital computing of the prodigious Tommy Flowers (1905-98) and his colleagues. It turns out that the first digital computer wasn’t ENIAC, which was built in the United States in 1945, but Colossus in 1943-44.
THREE EXTRAORDINARY CENTRAL CHARACTERS BEHIND THE FIRST DIGITAL COMPUTER
Price dwells on the work of three men he views as central to the design and construction of Colossus. First was Max Newman (1897-1984), “a mathematical genius from 1940s Central Casting.” He managed the project, which began in 1942. “The second person who was indispensable to the making of Colossus was Turing, who had been Newman’s protégé at Cambridge.” Turing contributed to the breakthrough in two ways. His theory about the practicality of a digital electronic computer pointed the way for Newman. And “he told Newman about Tommy Flowers, a telephone engineer . . . who had impressed him.” But “during the Colossus era, Turing had not been working at Bletchley Park.” He was in the United States.
It was Flowers whose mechanical genius allowed him to design and build the machine, using an approach virtually everyone else told him was impossible. “Flowers didn’t mind being in a minority of one, as he often was.” He headed a team of fifty people but worked closely with only two assistants. Colossus permitted the British to read communications from the German general staff—and even Adolf Hitler himself—to their commanders in the field just hours after having been sent.
Price explores the lives of these three men, both before and after the war, with a light touch and an eye for engaging detail.
BLETCHLEY PARK WAS A MASSIVE ENTERPRISE
Geniuses at War paints a broad picture of the massive scope of work undertaken at Bletchley Park. It is by no means exclusively about Colossus. “Over the course of the war,” Price writes, “the size of the staff at Bletchley Park would climb to more than 8.700 men and women, working in three shifts and spread across twenty-odd buildings.” So much for the image of a handful of eccentric geniuses laboring away in tight quarters. (That’s an impression you might have gained from The Imitation Game, the 2014 film starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing.) The author supplies details about the specialized work undertaken in the many “huts” scattered about the grounds of the estate.
That work involved far more than deciphering the German military codes and ciphers. Many other nations encrypted their messages—and Bletchley Park worked on many of them. He describes the recruitment program that brought such a diverse array of personalities into play together. Price also explains how bureaucratic snafus and personality conflicts frequently got in the way. And he lays out in engaging detail the impact of the work they all accomplished over the six years of the conflict.
THE PARK HELPED TURN THE TIDE OF THE WAR AT TWO CRUCIAL JUNCTURES
Price’s book is in no way an effort to minimize the contribution of Alan Turing, either to the war effort or to the development of the “thinking machines” he hoped to build. In fact, he credits Turing for helping win the life-or-death Battle of the Atlantic against Germany’s U-boats. “The victory was made possible by a mechanical device, principally of Turing’s invention, known as the Bombe, which mimicked the operation of a series of Enigma machines lashed together.”
But “where Turing’s Bombe was used against the Enigma, Colossus was used against another, much more complex machine, the crown jewel of German encryption technology . . . known to the germans as the Lorenz SZ series . . . and to the Allies by the code name Tunny (British English for ‘tuna’). . . Tunny’s ciphering system was ten trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times as complex as Enigma’s.” But this first digital computer broke through the cipher, and in the process provided the Allies with strategically pivotal intelligence that played a large role in the success of the Normandy Invasion.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David A. Price (1961-) is the author of two other nonfiction books, including The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company, a history of Pixar Animation Studios and computer animation. He received his bachelor’s degree in economics and computer science from the College of William and Mary and graduate degrees from Harvard University and the University of Cambridge. He lives in Richmond, Virginia, his home town.
July 3, 2021
A nice corrective on the narrative that the U.S. won the war for the Allies. The U.S. definitely was key, but without the British ability to decrypt messages electronically the war could have swung towards the Axis powers. Also, the British invented the first electronic computing machine years before the U.S. came out with theirs. Because of the secrecy around the British electronic war effort this did not come out until years later. Also, the book puts Alan Turing into proper context and gives a more realistic view of his contribution than pop culture movies portray.
June 30, 2021
Although the author's explanations of code breaking methods and the early ideas for a "thinking" computer were hard for me to understand, that only increased my admiration for the brilliant and often eccentric folks who worked in secrecy at Bletchley Park during WWII to help defeat Nazi Germany.
September 30, 2021
Fascinating yet superficial look at some of the work done at Bletchley Park to break the Tunny codes. A little known piece of WWII history.
August 16, 2021
This book explained much more of the work at Bletchley Park than has been explored in popular literature and movies. The genius of Alan Turing is placed in its proper context along with others whose achievements were equally vital to the war effort. Also I found the “After the War” section especially interesting and informative. Lots of great info.
October 13, 2021
Pretty interesting look at how the work At Bletchley was the predecessor to computers, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
December 28, 2021
Good, but a bit of a re-tred of other works.
June 18, 2024
The role played by Alan Turing and the teams at Bletchley Park in breaking the German's Enigma code is rather well known and has been the subject of several books, films and a play. The efforts in cracking an even more challenging code, which the British called "Tunny", have been less well promulgated, possibly because some of the relevant records remained classified until early in the 21st century. This book attempts to recount this remarkably successful campaign, which also led to the development of the first digital computer.
Unfortunately, the author is not quite equal to the task. Explanations of the maths and technology are quite sloppy, surprising for someone who claims to have studied at Harvard and Cambridge. (Of course, his degrees might be in English.) He also makes puerile mistakes, such as locating the Clarendon Laboratory at Cambridge when every child knows it is in Oxford, which belies his claim to have been a Cambridge student.
Also, the history is rather spotty, which might be the result of records having been lost or destroyed. While the efforts in tackling Tunny seemed to be coeval with those against Enigma, the part played by Turing, if any, is unclear.
Nevertheless, this is worth reading even if only to achieve an imperfect understanding of some remarkable events of the second world war and the history of computing.
Unfortunately, the author is not quite equal to the task. Explanations of the maths and technology are quite sloppy, surprising for someone who claims to have studied at Harvard and Cambridge. (Of course, his degrees might be in English.) He also makes puerile mistakes, such as locating the Clarendon Laboratory at Cambridge when every child knows it is in Oxford, which belies his claim to have been a Cambridge student.
Also, the history is rather spotty, which might be the result of records having been lost or destroyed. While the efforts in tackling Tunny seemed to be coeval with those against Enigma, the part played by Turing, if any, is unclear.
Nevertheless, this is worth reading even if only to achieve an imperfect understanding of some remarkable events of the second world war and the history of computing.
October 18, 2021
An engaging addendum to the more familiar history of the code breakers at Bletchley Park – the history of Colossus. The celebrated-far-too-late Alan Turing plays an important role in building the first computer to crack the German codes, but he’s only one of the small crowd of classicists and mathematicians Britain pulled into this most secret of projects. Especially interesting is the figure of Tommy Flowers, an engineer from a working class background who in addition to solving a host of technical problems had to deal with the British class system, and never received the honor he was due because of the absurd amount of secrecy Britain insisted upon for decades after the war.
Price tells a good story, somewhat in the spirit of the justly celebrated The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz.
Price tells a good story, somewhat in the spirit of the justly celebrated The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz.
August 27, 2022
Very good historical reporting on the geniuses at Bletchley Park and how they not only helped win World War II for the allies but set the world on a course toward computers, artificial intelligence and digital electronics. Price does a good job of parceling out the credit not only to Alan Turing, but also Max Newman, William Tutte, Tommy Flowers and others. Of course, the women--the Wrens, the ATFs, the secretaries and assistants--were unsurprisingly underrated, though mentioned. (Interestingly, Price notes that in the US, the code-breaking teams were often led by women.) A good piece of history that complements other books--including novels--available on the subject.
August 17, 2021
I'm glad that the people who helped found modern computing are finally recognised for their contributions during the war; this book highlights how it might have gone very differently if British engineers and their inventions were not kept secret after the war. I found the prose a little hard to follow at points because there are so many people introduced, but the technological descriptions are easy to understand and sources easy to find. Readers without a computing background should be able to follow it and learn something about computer architecture in the process, and those more familiar with early computer systems will enjoy the story of how binary processors were build up from scratch
August 17, 2021
Pretty sure, with the TV series, a lot of people know or have heard of Bletchley Park. Alan Turing is also quite well known. This book shows us the other people who was responsible for the success of Bletchley Park. It's a very interesting read for a history buff like me.
July 12, 2021
The story of the Enigma codebreakers and the impact they had on WW2 has been well told many times. This book was a pleasant surprise because it focused on other code breaking triumphs by the British at Bletchley Park. There was a lot of material that I wasn't already familiar with and I appreciated the technical detail. The background stories of some of the lesser known, but vitally important participants, was also more interesting than I expected.
If you are interested in the history of cryptography and/or a survey with some technical detail regarding the wide ranging activities at Bletchley Park then you will be glad you read this book.
If you are interested in the history of cryptography and/or a survey with some technical detail regarding the wide ranging activities at Bletchley Park then you will be glad you read this book.
July 2, 2021
I don't spend much time in the non-fiction world and will only pick up a book if it's focused on something in which I'm truly interested. "Geniuses at War" checks a couple boxes there, WWII and computers, so I thought I'd give it a shot. I'm glad I did. It's a neat little tome that covers a part of the war that nobody really knew about until now.
Many people in the world of computers are familiar with Alan Turing's work and thoughts at the dawn of creation of computers. They may also know of his involvement in the cracking of the code of Germany's Enigma encryption process during the war, which allowed the Brits to read German messaging and saved literally thousands of lives. Geniuses at War is the story of how Turing's work was leveraged by a small group at Bletchley Park to design the first digital computer, Colossus, which decrypted messages between German officers. It's an amazing story of brilliant, flawed people doing incredible things under unbelievable pressure to create something the world had never seen before. Due to the need for secrecy about the project and the possibility of utilizing its product in the future, the entire effort was cloaked in total secrecy by the hundreds of people who ended up working on it until fairly recently, which is pretty sad in that what they accomplished was truly heroic and they deserved public recognition and adulation.
Geniuses at War is a bit short on some details but a bit long on others (I didn't really want to know all that much about decryption....). It's a concise, very readable story of an extremely crucial innovation by some brilliant folks that shortened WWII.
Many people in the world of computers are familiar with Alan Turing's work and thoughts at the dawn of creation of computers. They may also know of his involvement in the cracking of the code of Germany's Enigma encryption process during the war, which allowed the Brits to read German messaging and saved literally thousands of lives. Geniuses at War is the story of how Turing's work was leveraged by a small group at Bletchley Park to design the first digital computer, Colossus, which decrypted messages between German officers. It's an amazing story of brilliant, flawed people doing incredible things under unbelievable pressure to create something the world had never seen before. Due to the need for secrecy about the project and the possibility of utilizing its product in the future, the entire effort was cloaked in total secrecy by the hundreds of people who ended up working on it until fairly recently, which is pretty sad in that what they accomplished was truly heroic and they deserved public recognition and adulation.
Geniuses at War is a bit short on some details but a bit long on others (I didn't really want to know all that much about decryption....). It's a concise, very readable story of an extremely crucial innovation by some brilliant folks that shortened WWII.
November 25, 2021
'Geniuses at War' is a peek-under-the-bedsheets of the goings on at Bletchley Park and the development of code breaking during WWII. Price does an admirable job documenting the excitement that was felt solving the German codes of Enigma and the much more complicated Tunny. It is a two-step forward and one-step back race with a winner take all ending. Even if you, have read other books about Turing, von Neumann, and Bletchley Park, this is a must read. One of the unsung heros is Tommy Flowers, from a working class background and self taught engineer who was the hands on main developer of Colosus, the machine which cracked the Tunny codes and without which the war may have had a far different ending. The outcome we know, but the credit of those working so hard to ensure our success were credited too little and too late as England's secrecy act left behind too many unsung heros.
July 5, 2021
Finished Geniuses at War: Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age by David A. Price. This is not the first book I’ve read about the crypto analysis work done at Bletchley Park breaking WW2 German and Japanese war communications but it is one of the best in setting the context of the work and it’s transition to modern computing. I learned that many of the secrets of the work were closely held until well into the twenty first century. The British public never knew that Alan Turing, the brilliant British mathematician whose team broke the German Enigma codes and was convicted of indecency for homosexuality in the 50’s was a hero for his work. He later committed suicide.
June 20, 2022
This is a remarkable non-fiction book. First, the story itself is fascinating and revelatory--the Brits at Bletchley Park actually developed (only recently revealed) functioning digital electronic computers during WWII which were able to finally decrypt Nazi war communications. Succinct and very well written, this book, either due to good writing or good editing (I suspect both) is not padded, does NOT repeat itself every chapter and ends when its story is complete, with only a short following chapter telling the postwar stories of the key characters. What a pleasure to read and interesting too!
August 11, 2021
I wanted to love this - knowing that both The Imitation Game and The Bletchley Circle were historical fiction and this non-fiction. But while a quick read, it was dry; didn’t do a great job of explaining the technology, and the people never came to life for me.
July 26, 2025
I wish this book had been longer. For a book that wanted to be about the engineering aspects of the “Colossus” and about the associated cryptographic problems, I feel the author elided too much of the technical detail that would have enriched the story for me. That he found it necessary to explain, in elementary terms, what “soldering” is, tells me he was pitching to the wrong audience. Wrong, that is, in not being me. /
The one image I will take away with me was the in-passing remark about one of the early leadership figures (Collins?) who was an inveterate practical joker. He had, at some point, called up someone and convinced them to prepare a bucket of water and immerse their telephone in it. Imagining the absurdity of this antique, black-Bakelite phone being chucked into a bucket of water while the call was progress just kills me.
No wait there’s more. I didn’t realize that there were multiple German organizations, each using their Enigma machines under different procedures, and the naval command being the most disciplined and hardest to crack. Then further that the Colossus was actually used against another, much more complex machine, known to the Germans as the Lorenz SZ series . . . and to the Allies by the code name Tunny (Cockney slang; “tuna”). “Tunny’s ciphering system was ten trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times as complex as Enigma’s.”
Melancholy about how so many people with such amazing achievements had to keep their war work secret. A guy named Tommy Flowers, for instance, was a self-taught engineer with a working-class accent, who had the crucial insight that vacuum tubes were the key to implementing reliable binary logic. He got some award for his war work in 1998 and he was, like, “too late to matter.” Meaning, no doubt, that his postwar career could have been so much more rewarding if he had been allowed to present himself as, in effect, the inventor of the digital computer.
Now that example makes me realize how much technical detail there was in the book: quite a lot. So voila, well worth reading. Should have been longer.
The one image I will take away with me was the in-passing remark about one of the early leadership figures (Collins?) who was an inveterate practical joker. He had, at some point, called up someone and convinced them to prepare a bucket of water and immerse their telephone in it. Imagining the absurdity of this antique, black-Bakelite phone being chucked into a bucket of water while the call was progress just kills me.
No wait there’s more. I didn’t realize that there were multiple German organizations, each using their Enigma machines under different procedures, and the naval command being the most disciplined and hardest to crack. Then further that the Colossus was actually used against another, much more complex machine, known to the Germans as the Lorenz SZ series . . . and to the Allies by the code name Tunny (Cockney slang; “tuna”). “Tunny’s ciphering system was ten trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times as complex as Enigma’s.”
Melancholy about how so many people with such amazing achievements had to keep their war work secret. A guy named Tommy Flowers, for instance, was a self-taught engineer with a working-class accent, who had the crucial insight that vacuum tubes were the key to implementing reliable binary logic. He got some award for his war work in 1998 and he was, like, “too late to matter.” Meaning, no doubt, that his postwar career could have been so much more rewarding if he had been allowed to present himself as, in effect, the inventor of the digital computer.
Now that example makes me realize how much technical detail there was in the book: quite a lot. So voila, well worth reading. Should have been longer.
December 25, 2024
As Claude Shannon said in The Mathematical Theory of Communication, The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. If a bad actor or a spy intercepts the message, you need protection for that missive. The best way to do that was with a code or a cipher.
The book opens at the end of World War I. At the time, it was the Great War, a war of such a massive scale that everyone involved in it thought no more war would ever happen again. As we know through our 20/20 history vision, Hitler came to power in Germany, and Neville Chamberlain believed Hitler's lies. Geniuses At War is a book by David A. Price. Price doesn't follow the story of the Enigma Machine or how they cracked it. Price covers Tommy Flowers and his construction of the Colossus Computer. The biggest issue Flowers faced may have been his comrades. Flowers was not a university-educated gentleman of Blue Blood, so High Command looked down on Flowers and his work.
I was fascinated by technology milestones as a young boy. I learned about the ENIAC when I was 9 years old. It's something you have backseat pride for, you know? Then I heard about Colossus, and I was disappointed, but I kept hearing about many different milestones. The biggest issue with Colossus was the secrecy around it. The British High Command ordered all the Colossus Computers to be dismantled. No one from Bletchley Park could say anything about what they did there. It may have stunted the British in Computers and Electronics. If the British had the advancements of the Colossi and ran with it, what would the world look like now? Flowers lived to see recognition, but it was too little, too late. He died a few months later in 1998.
I enjoyed the book. Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.
The book opens at the end of World War I. At the time, it was the Great War, a war of such a massive scale that everyone involved in it thought no more war would ever happen again. As we know through our 20/20 history vision, Hitler came to power in Germany, and Neville Chamberlain believed Hitler's lies. Geniuses At War is a book by David A. Price. Price doesn't follow the story of the Enigma Machine or how they cracked it. Price covers Tommy Flowers and his construction of the Colossus Computer. The biggest issue Flowers faced may have been his comrades. Flowers was not a university-educated gentleman of Blue Blood, so High Command looked down on Flowers and his work.
I was fascinated by technology milestones as a young boy. I learned about the ENIAC when I was 9 years old. It's something you have backseat pride for, you know? Then I heard about Colossus, and I was disappointed, but I kept hearing about many different milestones. The biggest issue with Colossus was the secrecy around it. The British High Command ordered all the Colossus Computers to be dismantled. No one from Bletchley Park could say anything about what they did there. It may have stunted the British in Computers and Electronics. If the British had the advancements of the Colossi and ran with it, what would the world look like now? Flowers lived to see recognition, but it was too little, too late. He died a few months later in 1998.
I enjoyed the book. Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.
October 14, 2021
“Geniuses at War: Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the dawn of the digital age,” by David A. Price (Knopf, 2021). Let us call this “beyond the ‘Imitation Game.’ ” The “bombe” that deciphered the Nazis’ Enigma coding system was just part of the British code-breaking operation during World War II. According to Price, it wasn’t even the most important and difficult. At the same time that Turing’s huge deciphering machine was put to work, there were another, even larger and more complex machine under construction. This was Colossus, and Price says that it was the first computer to use a binary or digital system such as all computers use today. Price tells the story of how it was developed and built, to the point that the Allies (mostly the Brits) were reading German orders down to the division level and below before and during D-Day. He describes the physical buildings in Bletchley Park, how women were recruited to do a lot of the work, and the fearsome timetable they were facing. He talks about the men who were involved, how there were mutinies at times against some of the leadership, how the tasks were broken down; even the Americans were involved, and surprised the British by being competent and able to work alongside them. Btw, he looks at Turing’s ultimate suicide, and concludes that it may have been an accident. Brilliant, and taut.
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April 6, 2022This was a nice quick book that outlined the activities that occurred in Bletchley Park during the Second World War and some of the principal people involved.
If you don't know much about the British code-breaking activities that occurred during the Second World War then this book is perfect for you. It does a good job of explaining the events during the lead-up to the war, then what happened during the war, and finally what happened post-war. The central characters are explained, some of them such as Alan Turing are fairly well known but others such as Thomas Flowers are not as well known to the general public.
While it does explain the theory behind how some of the encryption devices work and the methods that Bletchley Park used to crack the German codes you don't have to have an advanced degree in Maths to understand it.
For those that have read a number of books on the subject, you might not be interested in this book as I don't think there was anything new introduced that you most likely have read in other books. It is still an enjoyable read so you will still enjoy it.
My one complaint with the book is the lack of pictures. This is just my personal opinion but books like this should be lots of pictures in them. I find pictures to make things more relatable. Even with that minor gripe I still recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of the Second World War or cryptology.
If you don't know much about the British code-breaking activities that occurred during the Second World War then this book is perfect for you. It does a good job of explaining the events during the lead-up to the war, then what happened during the war, and finally what happened post-war. The central characters are explained, some of them such as Alan Turing are fairly well known but others such as Thomas Flowers are not as well known to the general public.
While it does explain the theory behind how some of the encryption devices work and the methods that Bletchley Park used to crack the German codes you don't have to have an advanced degree in Maths to understand it.
For those that have read a number of books on the subject, you might not be interested in this book as I don't think there was anything new introduced that you most likely have read in other books. It is still an enjoyable read so you will still enjoy it.
My one complaint with the book is the lack of pictures. This is just my personal opinion but books like this should be lots of pictures in them. I find pictures to make things more relatable. Even with that minor gripe I still recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of the Second World War or cryptology.
December 29, 2025
Geniuses at War is an excellent short history of the secret Bletchley Park project to decrypt Nazi transmissions during WWII. The book holds its focus nicely, giving brief backgrounds for many of the key people without getting bogged down in backstories. Most fascinating is the nature of the decryption effort itself. The breaking of the Enigma machine codes has been well known for years, but the efforts to decrypt signals from "Tunny" was only recently declassified. The Tunny machines used twelve wheels with different settings. Led by Tommy Flowers, the British built the world's first programmable digital computer to statistically analyze messages and identify which wheel settings were used for each message.
A few interesting tidbits:
1) The SS's use of Enigma was cracked in part by Himmler's "vainglorious habit of signing his full name and the end of every message together with his lengthy rank."
2) The Germans found it relatively easy to decrypt Allied messages, which gave them a false sense of the security of their own codes. "The Germans thus seem to have held a transitive theory of weakness: because the Allies were weak in the making of their tactical ciphers, they must also be dummkopfs in the breaking of ciphers."
A few interesting tidbits:
1) The SS's use of Enigma was cracked in part by Himmler's "vainglorious habit of signing his full name and the end of every message together with his lengthy rank."
2) The Germans found it relatively easy to decrypt Allied messages, which gave them a false sense of the security of their own codes. "The Germans thus seem to have held a transitive theory of weakness: because the Allies were weak in the making of their tactical ciphers, they must also be dummkopfs in the breaking of ciphers."
September 8, 2021
Well researched account of the operations at Bletchley Park, Britain's command post for cracking Germany's codes and ciphers during WWII. It's more than what you saw about Alan Turing in "The Imitation Game", and includes a lot of unknown people who designed and built the Colossus, which was used to analyze and decode thousands of intercepted messages digitally instead of manually. While I didn't understand the complex math and binary algorithms used, I could understand enough to see how powerful the machine was for the time, and how pulling together teams of people with varying talents led to making it a reality.
I think my favorite person was Tommy Flowers, because of his underprivileged background and education, yet his mind was able to see things that the elite mathematicians could not.
Also interesting was the misogyny: the use of women both in the US and Britain for the tasks, but then they were shoved back home into the kitchen after the war ended.
I think my favorite person was Tommy Flowers, because of his underprivileged background and education, yet his mind was able to see things that the elite mathematicians could not.
Also interesting was the misogyny: the use of women both in the US and Britain for the tasks, but then they were shoved back home into the kitchen after the war ended.
May 21, 2022
Bletchley Park is a modest estate in the Midlands north of London. It was also the secret site of English code-breakers, who were at the heart of Germany's defeat in World War II. I had the pleasure of visiting Bletchley several years ago and was amazed that an effort that involved many thousands of civilian cryptographers could have been kept so secret for so many years. Much has been written about how the English team used captured Engima machines to decode German military messages. Author David A. Price tells the story of Colossus, the world's first digital electronic computer that would help bring the war to an end. Colossus was the brainchild of Tommy Flowers, a telephone engineer with blue-collar roots who worked elbow-to-elbow with the Oxford and Cambridge academics that formed the inner circle of the Bletchley Park team.
August 7, 2023
One of the many books about Bletchley Park and its crew of eccentric code-breakers. Alan Turing and his "bombe" is part of it, of course, but also a different machine, the Colossus, which functioned on a different principle and was a marvel of electrical engineering as much as of code-breaking.
This was a relatively superficial and light book, a good introduction for people with a general interest in the topic. As for this reader... I would have liked more detail, more examples and some illustrations. Part of the fun of this type of narrative nonfiction is for the reader to try and follow the reasoning of these brilliant brains (linguistic, mathematical or engineering). If there is such a thing as armchair travel, perhaps there can be armchair code-breaking?
This was a relatively superficial and light book, a good introduction for people with a general interest in the topic. As for this reader... I would have liked more detail, more examples and some illustrations. Part of the fun of this type of narrative nonfiction is for the reader to try and follow the reasoning of these brilliant brains (linguistic, mathematical or engineering). If there is such a thing as armchair travel, perhaps there can be armchair code-breaking?
January 20, 2023
This short and informative book is a concise introduction to the role of Bletchley Park not only in the wartime effort to break the Axis coded, but also the groundbreaking innovations in digital computing they were compelled to make in the process.
While focusing on some of the lesser known and celebrated names involved in this monumental endeavour, it successfully conveys the complexity of the challenges they faced without loosing the lay person.
David A Price writes well and keeps the narrative moving, making this an enjoyable read and one that has left me motivated to learn more about this intriguing and inspiring chapter in history.
While focusing on some of the lesser known and celebrated names involved in this monumental endeavour, it successfully conveys the complexity of the challenges they faced without loosing the lay person.
David A Price writes well and keeps the narrative moving, making this an enjoyable read and one that has left me motivated to learn more about this intriguing and inspiring chapter in history.
October 15, 2024
Short and sweet book about the story behind the 3 leading figures (Alan Turing, Max Newman and Tommy Flowers) in Bletchley Park, arguably the most important ally facilities that changed the course of WW2. Fascinating to see the more detailed history about how these geniuses solved the unsolvable puzzle against all odds. Full of dramas, coincidences and some amazing strikes of luck. The best part is that all these are not fiction - they all really happened.
Equally interesting are the stories of the 3 geniuses AFTER the war, esp. the mistreatment/ under-appreciation they received. Really heart breaking.
Equally interesting are the stories of the 3 geniuses AFTER the war, esp. the mistreatment/ under-appreciation they received. Really heart breaking.
December 18, 2021
Fascinating story of the people behind the WWII effort to fight the Nazis with minds - not mines. The war is such a mighty tale yet I hadn't considered the people waging it against communications strategy. So much depended on fooling the enemy and confirming targets for planes and troops.
The author includes details about the people and decoding projects that humanize a technically challenging story. Tea time meetings where people shared ideas and puzzled problems, throwing off the normal class divides to attend to the merit of ideas seemed especially important. The image of men forced to destroy the evidence of their creation is so much folly. Despite their inability to reveal their success, I appreciate what the Brits did to enter the digital age.
The author includes details about the people and decoding projects that humanize a technically challenging story. Tea time meetings where people shared ideas and puzzled problems, throwing off the normal class divides to attend to the merit of ideas seemed especially important. The image of men forced to destroy the evidence of their creation is so much folly. Despite their inability to reveal their success, I appreciate what the Brits did to enter the digital age.
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