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    The Secrets of Station X: How the Bletchley Park codebreakers helped win the war
    Unavailable
    The Secrets of Station X: How the Bletchley Park codebreakers helped win the war
    Unavailable
    The Secrets of Station X: How the Bletchley Park codebreakers helped win the war
    Ebook462 pages8 hours

    The Secrets of Station X: How the Bletchley Park codebreakers helped win the war

    By Michael Smith

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The astonishing story of how the British codebreakers of Bletchley Park cracked the Nazi Enigma cyphers, cutting an estimated two years off the Second World War, never ceases to amaze.

    No one is better placed to tell that story than Michael Smith, whose number one bestseller Station X was one of the earliest accounts. Using recently released secret files, along with personal interviews with many of the codebreakers themselves, Smith now provides the definitive account of everything that happened at Bletchley Park during the war, from breaking the German, Italian and Japanese codes to creating the world’s first electronic computer. The familiar picture of Bletchley Park is of eccentric elderly professors breaking German codes, but in fact the vast majority of people who worked at Bletchley Park were young women. For them and for the young graduates plucked from Britain’s best universities who did the bulk of the day-to-day codebreaking, this was truly the time of their lives. The Secrets of Station X tells their story in full, providing an enthralling account of one of the most remarkable British success stories of all time.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBiteback Publishing
    Release dateOct 31, 2011
    ISBN9781849542623
    Unavailable
    The Secrets of Station X: How the Bletchley Park codebreakers helped win the war
    Author

    Michael Smith

    Professor Michael B. Smith received an A.A. from Ferrum College in 1967 and a BS in chemistry from Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1969. After working for 3 years at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co. in New- port News VA as an analytical chemist, he entered graduate school at Purdue University. He received a PhD in Organic Chemistry in 1977. He spent 1 year as a faculty research associate at the Arizona State University with Professor G. Robert Pettit, working on the isolation of cytotoxic principles from plants and sponges. He spent a second year of postdoctoral work with Professor Sidney M. Hecht at the Massachusetts Insti- tute of Technology, working on the synthesis of bleomycin A2.? Smith began his academic career at the University of Connecticut in 1979, where he is currently professor of chemistry.?In addition to this research, he is the author of the fifth, sixth, and seventh editions of March’s Advanced Organic Chemistry. He is also the author of an undergraduate textbook in organic chemistry titled Organic Chemistry. An Acid-Base Approach, now in its second edition. He is the editor of the Compendium of Organic Synthetic Methods, Volumes 6–13. He is the author of Organic Chemistry: Two Semesters, in its second edition, which is an outline of undergraduate organic chemistry to be used as a study guide for the first organic course. He has authored a research monograph titled Synthesis of Non-alpha Amino Acids, in its second edition.

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    Reviews for The Secrets of Station X

    3.5/5

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    • 5/5
      A gripping but very readable introduction to the rarefied secret world of the codebreakers of Bletchley Park and their incredibly important work. Go there if at all possible and read this book on the way!
    • 5/5
      I've read over a dozen books about Bletchley Park, the peculiar place and collection of people who helped defeat the Nazis by codebreaking the unbreakable Enigma machine. What a story. And this very personal narrative of the people and events of that amazing operation was a great look at both the scale of the challenge and the powerful role that literally thousands of people made in this critical operation that may well have affected the outcome of the war. At the very least, Bletchley shorted the war hugely, and the team and the organization -- oh so terribly British!
    • 3/5
      Not much new here as I have already read quite a few books on this topic. The newest parts to me had to do with the personal relationships amongst the workers and the introduction of the Americans late into the decrypting activities of Bletchley Park.
    • 3/5
      A who's who of the codebeakers of WWII who were based at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, about 50 miles North of London. A collection of the brightest brains gathered to pit themselves against ingenious cyphers of the enemy, especially the German Enigma machine. They started with a few hundred people and pencils to a peak of 8995 in 1945 utilising electro mechanical bombes and Colossus computers. Amazing commitment and dedication shaving years off the war.