History distorted for modern propaganda

Rating: 4/10 (11 May 2015)

The portrayal of the cryptographic effort is fine enough, but the impression one gets from this overly-romanticised movie is that without Alan Turing's invention of what we are told was the precursor to the computer World War II would not have been won, and that his orientation was responsible for his genius, and therefore both must be held high. That is historical bunkum. The truth is that the machine he invented, which was called the Bombe, was an electromechanical device that was created to crack the Enigma codes, which indeed it did, but the far more complicated Lorenz codes were cracked by Colossus, which really was an electronic computer, and was far superior to the Bombes, and it was it that was the true precursor to the modern computer, It was invented by Tommy Flowers, whose genius surpassed that of Alan Turing, because he managed it without access to an actual Lorenz machine, unlike Turing who was provided with an Enigma machine. Flowers just worked out how the Lorenz worked from a 4000- character mistake made by a German operator. Enter 'bombe and Colossus' into Google and read the Wikipedia article to get the facts straight. Turing had some input into the Colossus machine (ultimately there were ten of them at Bletchley), but to pretend that he was all-important in the winning of the war is an overwrought notion of events wilfully twisted to make a point consistent with fashionable present-day propaganda. We would have won the war without Turing; with most of the world against him Hitler's over-reached lusts were unsustainable; and there were other people of genius. Victory might have taken longer and killed many fewer people, although we cannot know that for sure despite the claim made in this film , but there were many clever minds and strategies from many people that gave the Allies victory (the invention of radar, is one of many examples). If any one person at Bletchley is to be singled out above all others it should be Tommy Flowers, not Alan Turing. Turing was a genius and valuable, yes, but Flowers surpassed him. But Hollywood cannot make out of him a politically-correct song-and-dance-act to the tune of current ephemeral memes.