Ralph Bennett's first book on intelligence in the Second World War - Ultra in the West - dealt with the Normandy invasion and the campaign in North-West Europe. This volume appears later, in what he calls 'an unnatural order', because the material on which both are based was released to the public records without regard for chronological sequence. The book loses nothing in interest and value on this account: how could it, when the basic material is the signals which conveyed to the Allied commands the product of the decryption of the Axis high-grade cyphers? And when the author was among those who scrutinised the decrypts and composed the signals?

LRB 27 July 1989 | PDF Download