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In 2001 in the small town of Hartsville SC, one of the youngest code breakers gave his last two public talks. He had been hired by Turing because he was one of the few studying both math and German at the start of the war.

Besides being very interesting it felt odd to hear all this in such an out of the way place. Well after the war he collaborated on some books with a professor teaching at the college there.

Two years ago my mother's memory care home had an American Battle of the Bulge veteran and Bronze Star winner who was sharp as a tack.

He was 99 and said he just wanted to live to be 100, but sadly he didn't make it.

I remember my late grandmother telling us they had made mittens for my great uncle, but he died in that battle before the mittens arrived.

Crazy to think I passed up my chance to have a cup of coffee with a man who might have fought beside my great uncle.

Most of them were told "Never, ever speak about any of this".

And they didn't.

Like the Zanryu Nipponhei [0], they were loyal to the last. Even my own father kept things about his airforce days way too tightly wrapped up long, long after the official secrets sell-by date. I have some admiration for this, but in the end it's a loss to historical record.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_holdout

It's insane how the largest conflict in human history is just now passing out of living memory. It's also insane how 1 in 4 Americans under 40 believe the holocaust is a fabrication or exaggeration.

From wikipedia:

some tasks performed include registering messages on little cards, which Webb believes totaled 10,000 a day in the whole park, and organizing the cards into shoeboxes according to a strict order so they could be retrieved efficiently when called for.

I suppose times have changed.

The main 'Bletchley Park' exhibition is good, but it focuses on the human experience of the code breakers. Head around the corner from the car park to the National Museum of Computing (also on the Bletchley Park site) to see more technical exhibitions: they give proper demonstrations of the machines invented at Bletchley, as well as the oldest working computer in the world (which was computing prime numbers when I visited).

https://www.tnmoc.org/

I don't know if they are still in print but Bletchley Park Trust published a great series of monographs on particular aspects of the codebreaking story there. Highly technical, written by specialists, sometimes by people who had worked there. I picked up a load of them when I was there and can recommend.

Definitely enjoy the scenery. I've done Bletchley and the National Cryptologic Museum, the former is in a genuinely beautiful location, especially if you have sun.

This book, written by the man who created and ran the organization responsible for distributing the decrypted messages to political and military leaders: https://archive.org/details/ultrasecret00wint/

Really shows the extent and impact of this knowledge - they virtually sat at the same table as the Nazi high command.

They have a neat computer history museum there so make time for that too.

If you want a book in the same vein, and contemporary with Bletchley "Turning's Cathedral" by George Dyson is about the Institute for Advanced Study and the Manhattan Project. Needless to say there's a lot of overlap and it really defines the culture of computer engineering at the time.

This is a great book and touches on the subject you mention https://simonsingh.net/books/the-code-book/

The Hut 6 Story, goes into enough detail that Gordon Welchman (Simply put, Turing's boss) lost his security clearance. If you care about the human side, but are keen to take on the details there's no better book possible.

If you would enjoy loosely related fiction, Neal Stephenson Cryptonomicon is an option I would personally recommend. You must have some tolerance for his particular style and content…

"The Theory that Would Not Die" by Sharon McGrayne has a good chapter on this, book is a more general history of Bayesian statistics.

>It's a really fascinating perspective on WWII and how crap Monty was at being a general; he was reading the Germans' messages and still couldn't defeat Rommel.

He did defeat Rommel though, didn't he?

Indeed, it is very easy to forget the struggle when one has sacrificed nothing to achieve it.

At least WWII, unlike those preceding it, has a vast well of literature to draw those lessons from. The trouble, however, is not just getting younger people to sit, read and analyze it, but also to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, with all the propaganda and misinformation to be had these days about the events of WWII, the Holocaust, Hiroshima/Nagasaki and so many other things that would make this list exceptionally long.

Books, are not the same as having lived it, of course. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it best in The Gulag Archipelago.

“If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people's bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: 'It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.'

Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.”

In their prime, they too forgot the lessons of their own ancestors struggle.