When the German cruiser Magdeburg ran aground off the Estonian coast in August 1914, little did the British Admiralty realise that what was onboard the ill-fated vessel would hand them a decisive advantage in the battle for North Sea supremacy, and subsequently lead to the birth of the Government Co[...]
In 1940, almost a year after the outbreak of the Second World War, Allied radio operators at an interception station in South London began picking up messages in a strange new code. They invented a machine called Colossus to decipher what turned out to be the secrets of Nazi high command. This book [...]