‘So were you levitating with rage by the end?’ I asked her. She — a veteran of Bletchley Park — and I were discussing The Imitation Game, the new film about the mathematician and code–breaker Alan Turing, featuring Benedict Cumberbatch and a host of historical inaccuracies. But she remained sanguine: ‘Not at all, I really enjoyed it a lot. A little dramatic licence here and there, but that’s what you get with films.’
Indeed. Still, the film didn’t take the biggest dramatic liberty of them all, thank goodness — that of suggesting that Bletchley’s triumphs were entirely down to the Americans. This claim — blood still boils at the mere memory — was famously made in the Hollywood blockbuster U-571, which depicted the Americans grabbing a German Enigma code machine off a U-boat and thus saving the world. They didn’t. The Enigma snatch was down to three astoundingly brave British sailors, two of whom died during the raid, and whose sacrifice helped Britain survive the Battle of the Atlantic.
Thankfully, the U-571 version of events is no longer orthodoxy in the States. When I was there recently, giving a series of lectures on the subject, I found to my surprise that people were eager to hear the story of a quintessentially British victory — the cracking of all Nazi ciphers, including messages from Hitler himself — in this most secret wartime establishment in a leafy corner of Buckinghamshire.
On a train between New York and Philadelphia, for instance, I got talking to a lady who, on hearing of my interest, became absurdly animated and called her husband on her mobile. There then followed from both of them a friendly barrage of Enigma questions, broadcast to the entire carriage.
Some of those whom I met at my talks told me that the code-breakers’ story encapsulated what they considered to be the finest of English attributes.
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