Professor John Ferris of the University of Calgary has written a book about Bletchley’s role during the second world war (WW2). In his book he says that Bletchley was not the war winner we have all come to know and love.
He does say it was important to the war effort, but that our intelligence services were not as clued up as perhaps the Germans were at the beginning of the war. We did however catch up and in some areas surpassed them.
Personally, I see Bletchley as something more, it brought together people like Tutte, Flowers and Turing who sowed the seeds of modern day computing.
While ENIAC was the first publicly accepted computer, Bletchley had been running its secret predecessor Collussus, had been built, used and destroyed to keep it’s secrets.
If it was not for the popularised history of Bletchley, many films and documentaries would never have been made. If it wasn’t for people like Tony Sale, Bletchley would have remained hidden from the world and America would have invented the modern computer.
Ferris’s book Behind the Enigma is out shortly and will be an interesting read.
It is more about our intellegence services and their history and the effects of modern technologies, methos and the effects of people like Edward Snowdon.
