(no subject)

[skygiants]

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.

Comments

[sdelmonte]

I think you might have been better off with this as it didn't spend too much time on the maths. I seem to recall that it did rely a lot on a small number of interviews, but otherwise it was a good history of the era and the people.

[skygiants]

That also looks pretty cool, thanks for the rec! Someday I feel like I'll have to write something set in wartime Britain just to justify the enormous amount of time I seem destined to spend reading about it.

[hebethen]

That kind of thing -- and let's not forget Navajo code talkers -- makes me shake my head and wonder where the linguists were? Then I realize that's exactly why CIA hires linguists nowadays and also there is pretty much no way I would want to put whatever training I have into the service of our CIA and its sketch-as-fuck activities. (That's on the record for ya, whichever poor slob they assigned to trawl through intertubes mentions of the CIA!)

[skygiants]

Hah, with the German codes they actually started with linguists (and they did keep recruiting some!), but by the time they started working on Japanese codes they'd already decided that what they really needed on this whole codebreaking endeavor was MATH PEOPLE. And crossword enthusiasts.

There was one poor linguist who was assigned the task of compiling an index of Japanese words which NO ONE ever used; she was so miserable and bored that she started learning Chinese in her spare time, and eventually pretty much gave up on indexing altogether and just started reading Chinese novels.

[hebethen]

Um, that is the best. And also pretty much what I would expect a miserable and bored linguist to do :P

[thistleingrey]

Related, if not directly: have you read Leo Marks's Between Silk and Cyanide about codebreaking forays? It too could have more of women than it does, but it has some, as I recall blurrily from a decade ago. Perhaps also of interest: London Calling North Pole, from the other direction. Marks goes into some detail about one-time pads (because it's crucial to the story he tells); I don't think Giskes has much technical detail about anything, sensible given the 1953 publication date.

[sovay]

Related, if not directly: have you read Leo Marks's Between Silk and Cyanide about codebreaking forays?

Seconded!

It too could have more of women than it does, but it has some, as I recall blurrily from a decade ago.

It has Violette Szabo and Noor Inayat Khan, who were both pretty awesome. [edit] There are a number of FANYs in the SOE and a pool of women who work as computers, although I'm not sure we get most of their names.

[skygiants]

I have not, but I should add it to the list! (I am also not opposed to technical detail at all -- just in this case it made it a denser read than I'd been anticipating. But some of it was fun! The part about breaking hand ciphers I could actually follow!)

[thistleingrey]

*nods* And contextualized tech detail is nicer, especially if one's reading while riding the subway/bus. (That was how most of my leisure reading happened for the long years of grad school--attention for detail depth came and went, for me.)

[skygiants]

(I'm actually having to adjust right now to a schedule where I don't have a daily subway commute anymore -- it's like, well, the extra time in my day is nice, but where does the reading go?!)

[gramarye1971]

I think the section about the difficult physical work involved in the code-breaking process was the one I liked best, too. I mean, reading about being recruited for one's interest in cryptic crosswords or chess puzzles is all well and good, but the sheer amount of literal paper-pushing involved in the process simply can't be overlooked and yet tends to be glossed over in some of the broader histories of cryptography.

Glad it proved to be worth reading, in spite of the logarithms. ^_^

[skygiants]

Right? When she's like, "this work was performed on the backs of several thousand WRENs, please don't forget that" -- yep. I was really glad they included it. I also appreciated how almost everyone took time to remark on how amazing the telegraph operators who intercepted the coded signals were, especially since they had no idea what their intercepts were being used for or why it was important.

It's also kind of inspiring to think about all the tedious-and-nitpicky-but-necessary work that went into it when one happens to be performing tedious-and-nitpicky-but-necessary tasks of one's own!

[sovay]

They managed to crack a few codes! They were very proud of themselves whenever they did!

Here is a lovely tiny caper war movie about the (highly, highly fictionalized, but who cares) American effort to break the Japanese "Red" cipher in 1935: The Red Machine (2009). It is no-budget and character-driven and perfectly of its time; none of its actors have contemporary faces. You can stream it on Netflix! I recommend doing so! It is one of the films nobody's heard of that I adore.

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.

I have to see that show. I heard such good things about it.

[skygiants]

Ha! That film looks ENORMOUSLY charming; thank you for the rec! (The Americans it seems were definitely doing better than the British on Japanese ciphers, at least; the Japanese chapters are also full of complaining about how they'd work for ages on a thing, and then their American counterparts would cheerfully send over the solution.)

The first season of Bletchley Circle is really, wonderful -- it's doing a lot of things that should be done all the time, and aren't. I've heard mixed reviews of the second, but I would still like to see it and decide for myself!

[sgac]

Well, I really enjoyed the second season of Bletchley Circle, and I particularly appreciated the absence of any serial killers.

[skygiants]

An excellent data point to have, thank you! :D

[aberration]

This reminds me a lot of going to Bletchley Park with Debi and trying very hard to understand what they were saying about the big machines, including with them you know, being right in front of us rather than reading about it while on the subway. And I was... still not super great at totally following out how it all worked. >___>

[skygiants]

They're VERY COMPLICATED machines. @___@ I mean, props to Turing and the rest for figuring out how they worked backwards and on high heels with their eyes closed, because I clearly can't even do it if you put one in front of me with helpful diagrams.