Action This Day,
Having had his own run-ins with the man with a blue pencil, your Uncle was amused to read that one of the contributors to a new book about the codebreakers at Bletchley Park was not allowed to reveal how "cillies" - a break-in for unravelling Luftwaffe and army Enigma codes - worked, despite the attempt coming five decades after the war.
Action This Day, edited by Michael Smith and Ralph Erskine, is named after an order issued by Winston Churchill after receipt of a letter from four of "Station X's" top code breakers in October 1941 requesting greater resources. Written by contributors who were wartime code-breakers and by the top academics in the field, the book uniquely not only recounts Bletchley Park's wartime activities but also puts its operations into a post-war context, when Enigma was distributed to a number of other countries, which were not told, of course, that the code could be read.
Brain teasers: comprehensive overview by those who were there, and the academics that have studied the subject placed in a proper historical context. And the royalties are going to the trust which is keeping Bletchley Park open.
Brain aches: aircraft are peripheral to the story.
TAB rating: top shelf
Action This Day, Bletchley Park from Breaking the Enigma Code to the Birth of the Modern Computer. Bantam Press. £25 ($35). ISBN 0-593-4910-1
Source: Flight International