(no subject)

gramarye1971 lent me Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park, a history of the work at Bletchley during WWII as told in separate chapters by twenty-seven of the different people who worked there.

This was a fascinating book to read but somewhat difficult to get through, because almost half of it is people trying very hard to explain exactly how the machines worked and the codes were broken, mathematically speaking, here are twelve diagrams and a lengthy discussion of logarithmic equations, which is all a bit difficult to focus on when you're holding the subway pole. I am very sorry, guys, I know you all tried, but I still do not quite really, fully understand now Enigma worked. I'M SORRY. It's not you, it's me! I would not have been a good Bletchley codebreaker, I would have failed the interview process. :(

(The interview process for work at Bletchley -- which was mostly done by bright-eyed young undergraduates -- seems to have mostly gone something like this: "Do you like chess? Do you like crossword puzzles? Great, turn up at this top-secret location next week and if anyone asks what you do for the war effort, you're a secretary!" Sadly I am actually terrible at crossword puzzles.)

Anyway, despite the bits that went over my head, there's a lot of really interesting stuff in there. Not enough chapters written by women -- I think only two or three -- but my favorite was the chapter in which one of the women from the Royal Navy Service who was recruited to feed information into the massive calculating machines talks about the actual difficult, physical labor that these thousands of women were performing, without much intellectual satisfaction or reward, that allowed the codebreaking operations. This is pretty strong to read in contrast with all the sections from the Enigma codebreakers (a group that did also include some women), who were uniformly like "Yeah, it was great, we spent the whole war doing the most exciting and intellectually stimulating work of our lives!"

I also enjoyed the sections from the people breaking hand ciphers that weren't created by fancy calculating machines, who were mostly complaining that BREAKING HAND CIPHERS IS HARD TOO, GUYS, NOBODY APPRECIATES US, and the final section about breaking Japanese codes, which boils down to "... well, we tried ..." The problem there being, of course, that a.) Japanese uses an entirely different system of writing and b.) almost nobody in England actually understood the language to begin with, so they took some undergraduates, gave them a crash course from a nineteenth-century textbook with some added military jargon thrown in ("we learned how to say 'U-boat!' ... we did not learn how to say 'You!'") and tossed them out into the ocean. They managed to crack a few codes! They were very proud of themselves whenever they did!

Anyway, mostly what I want to do now is go back and rewatch The Bletchley Circle. And also watch Season Two, which I have not yet seen.