Insight into technology that helped win the war from Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes

A new book which throws light on the technology that changed the course of the Second World War has been launched today by the National Museum of Computing based at Bletchley Park.

Titled ‘The Bombe: The Machine that Defeated Enigma’, the book has been written by Dermot Turing, the nephew of Alan Turing who, while based at Bletchley Park, was responsible for breaking the Nazi Enigma code during the war.

The book explores how during the Second World War, the German Armed Forces sent thousands of messages encrypted by the Enigma machine every day, conveying crucial strategic information.

To crack this seemingly unbreakable cipher, the Allies turned to an electro-mechanical machine to do the job - the Bombe.

The Turing-Welchman Bombe was a marvel of engineering and ingenuity. The first bombe was put into operation in August 1940, and by the end of the war more than 200 of these machines had been built. By uncovering the daily 'key', they allowed as many as 5,000 messages to be deciphered each day.

Turing's book is presented as an essential guide to that technology and explains how the Bombe works in easy-to-understand language and walks you through the entire codebreaking process. With helpful diagrams and photographs throughout, The Bombe is the essential guide to the machine that changed the course of the war.

It is exclusively available to buy from TNMOC website https://www.tnmoc.org/

> Dermot Turing is also the author of Alan Turing Decoded: The Man They Called Prof (2015), X,Y and Z: The Real Story of How Enigma Was Broken (2018), The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park (2020) and Reflections of Alan Turing: A Relative Story (2021).