I have just read the book titled “Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II”. I bought that book because the book’s cover caught my eyes, here is the cover of the italian version:
I like the book. I usually don’t read historic books because most of the time they contain a series of historical facts without a single comments. Not this time.
The book speaks about the hidden World War II, the war played in the cryptographic field. The core of the book is represented by the WW II, but the author begins from the first WW explaining how crypto starts to take part in the war.
Beyond the historical facts the book speaks about two interesting things:
– the life of people like Joseph Rochefot, Ian Fleming (yes, the author of James Bond), Garbo and others
– the description of the machines used by the contenders: enigma, the purple machine and the English bombs used to force the crypted messages.
In this special war there aren’t computers we have nowadays, but only some special guys able to create the basis of the modern computer science. A particular mention goes to Alan Turing.
It’s a nice reading for sure. If you like books you should try this one.
Here is a picture of the machine I shot when I was at the Deutsches Museum in Munich:
