Book #21 The Bletchley Girls

The Bletchley Girls by Tessa Dunlop
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thanks to my brother for this one. Another book covering the remarkable story of Bletchley Park, a story that remained withheld from the public for three decades following the end of the 2nd World War. Station X as it was known was home for the duration of the war to thousands of personnel working on decoding Enigma signals from the Germans. By 1944 women outnumbered men at Bletchley three to one. These are the girls who helped outsmart the enemy within the confines of a Buckinghamshire estate. Everyone working here had to sign the Official Secrets Act.

In order to make this book different from other accounts of BP, Tessa Dunlop interviewed fifteen nonagenarians, still alive when the book was published in 2015. This results in a very personal approach. Talking to these ladies gives her book an immediacy and intimacy, hearing the details of these elite veterans in their own voices. The book is full of anecdotes describing the hardships and heartaches of wartime work, much of which was humdrum and monotonous. Most of the 'romantic' cryptanalysts were men. The women were mostly involved with data entry and listening in to morse-code traffic.

This is an engaging work; my only criticism is the way the narrative jumps about from one woman to another making it difficult to keep track of who is who. Beyond that though there is much to enjoy here as the women of Bletchley Park tell their own story. Well worth a read for anyone interested in this period of history. These dedicated people no doubt helped to shorten the war, some say by as much as two years.



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