SEIZING THE ENIGMA - the Race to Break the German U-boat Codes, 1939-1943 by Kahn, David

Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1991. US first edition, hard bound in dust jacket, 6 1/2 x 9 1/2, FINE/FINE CONDITION, xi, 336 pages, maps, illus, bibliog., index, notes.------------------------------------- For almost four desperate years, from 1939 to mid-1943, the British and American navies fought a savage, losing battle against German submarine wolfpacks. The Allies might never have turned the tide of that historic battle without an intelligence coup, and the race to break the German U-boat codes is one of the last great untold stories of World War II. Now David Kahn, the world's leading historian of cryptology, brings to life this tense, behind-the-scenes drama for the first time.-----------------------------------------------------------------Soon after war broke out, Hitler's U-boats began to sever Allied lifelines. Out in the gray wasteland of the North Atlantic, submarines prowled; at night, the sky lit up with the flames of exploding tankers. To meet the growing crisis, ingenious amateurs joined the nucleus of dedicated professionals at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking headquarters. As the Battle of the Atlantic raged, these men and women worked night and day to unlock the continually changing German naval codes. Their mission: to read the U-boat messages of Hitler's cipher device, the Enigma.Critical to their success was a series of daring raids at sea. The U-110, captured intact in the mid-Atlantic, yielded not only the Enigma machine itself but also a trove of secret documents. The weather ship Lauenburg, seized near the edge of the Arctic ice pack, provided code settings for an entire month. In the Mediterranean, two brave sailors rescued, at the cost of their lives, a German weather cipher that enabled the Bletchley team to solve the Enigma after a yearlong blackout.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------As Kahn expertly shifts the narrative between the combat at sea and the investigations at Bletchley, a marvelous cast of heroes and quirky characters emerges: the eccentric chess champion in charge of the naval codebreaking unit; the Royal Navy lieutenant who shot open the lock on a ship's drawer and found cipher wheels inside; the mild Polish mathematician whose prewar reconstruction of the Enigma ranks as one of the greatest cryptanalyses of all time. In the end, the work of these and many others enabled the British and American analysts to break the Enigma codes almost continuously, permitting Allied commanders to divert convoys around the wolfpacks and finally to hunt and destroy the deadly U-boats.Only David Kahn, author of the bestselling The Codebreakers, could tell this fascinating story with such authority and power. Seizing the Enigma provides the definitive account of how British and American code-breakers fought a war of wits against Nazi naval communications — and helped lead the Allies to victory in the crucial Battle of the Atlantic.