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In 1940 Winston Churchill promised that the forthcoming Battle of Britain would, 1,000 years later, still be remembered as the British Empire’s “finest hour.” Eighty of these years have now passed and, despite the rapid collapse of said empire, the battle looms larger than ever in the nation’s collective memory.
Yet Britain’s understanding of that struggle has changed fundamentally. Churchill spoke of a shared struggle involving teamwork and sacrifice. Millions of members of the armed forces were, as David Edgerton has shown, supported by a powerful industrial base and national mobilization coordinated by experts of all kinds.1 Since then, the nation has grown to distrust institutions, experts, military commanders, manufacturing industries, and state planning. In the collective imagination of the British people, the site of victory has progressively shifted away from battlefields, factories, and international alliances towards Bletchley Park: the center of Britain’s formidable and once secret codebreaking effort. According to this narrative, it was mathematical and technological innovation that won the war, not mass mobilization or armed struggle.
The Oscar-winning 2014 movie The Imitation Game applied the narrative structure and beats of a superhero movie to Bletchley Park: an autistic Alan Turing introduces himself as “the best mathematician in the world,” dismisses the aid of Britain’s brightest (“these men would only slow me down”), and builds a war-winning computer. Bletchley Park’s idiotic military commander enters the frame only to order Turing arrested and his machine smashed. Five codebreakers secretly run the Battle of the Atlantic from their machine room. Having outwitted the armed forces of both Germany and Britain, Turing defines the main difference between him and the Almighty: “God didn’t win the war.” Silly as it was, the film differed more in degree than in kind from other narratives of innovation at Bletchley Park. Bletchley Park has become a prototype for Silicon Valley, itself misunderstood in popular accounts (for instance by Walter Isaacson) as the creation of a handful of genius hackers.2
This article reevaluates Bletchley Park’s technological triumphs, focusing on the Lorenz teleprinter cipher known to the British as “Tunny” rather than the Enigma work with which Turing was associated.3 The effort to break Tunny is often claimed to have had a more significant impact on the war’s...