Title: COLOSSUS
Subtitle: BLETCHLEY PARK'S GREATEST SECRET
Description: Paul Gannon’s book on Colossus reveals the previously closely-guarded story of how British codebreakers at Bletchley Park broke into the secret communications of Hitler and his high commanders. The breaking of the Enigma machine at Bletchley Park is well known. But there was another, more complex and much more secret German cipher machine, the Geheimschreiber (‘secret writer’) used by Hitler and his high command to communicate with armies in NW Europe, the Mediterranean and Russia. Colossus was invented to break this more sophisticated cipher machine and in doing so revealed the details of Hitler’s operational planning to Allied armies. Colossus was the world’s first large-scale electronic computing machine - a pre-runner of the electronic computer and made Bletchley Park the world’s first ‘electronic information factory’. Paul Gannon’s book is the first to place Bletchley Park in its full historical context.
Subjects: codebreaking, cryptography, Bletchley Park, Colossus, World War II, Second World War, World War, 1939-1945, Military intelligence, Great Britain. Government Communications Headquarters, Great Britain
Places: Bletchley Park
People: Tom Flowers, Bill Tutte, John Tiltman, Max Newman, Alan Turing, Donald Michie, Jack Good
Time periods: World War II, 1939-1945