Bletchley Park and D-Day

by David Kenyon

Overview

The untold story of Bletchley Park's key role in the success of the Normandy campaign

Since the secret of Bletchley Park was revealed in the 1970s, the work of its codebreakers has become one of the most famous stories of the Second World War. But cracking the Nazis’ codes was only the start of the process. Thousands of secret intelligence workers were then involved in making crucial information available to the Allied leaders and commanders who desperately needed it.
 
Using previously classified documents, David Kenyon casts the work of Bletchley Park in a new light, as not just a codebreaking establishment, but as a fully developed intelligence agency. He shows how preparations for the war’s turning point—the Normandy Landings in 1944—had started at Bletchley years earlier, in 1942, with the careful collation of information extracted from enemy signals traffic. This account reveals the true character of Bletchley's vital contribution to success in Normandy, and ultimately, Allied victory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300254754
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	05/24/2022
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.75(h) x (d)

About the Author

David Kenyon is the research historian at Bletchley Park.

Table of Contents

Foreword Robert Hannigan vii

List of illustrations and maps xi

List of abbreviations, codenames and technical terms xiv

A note on military units and ranks xxv

Introduction: Overture to Overlord 1

Part I Bletchley Park In 1944

1 The intelligence factory 11

2 Incoming intercepts and codebreaking 43

3 Outgoing intelligence 73

Part II Preparations for Invasion

4 Invasion planning in 1943: the Western Front Committee 99

5 Invasion planning in 1944: Shaef and Jellyfish 124

6 Understanding German expectations 149

Part III Invasion and After

7 Getting ashore: Operation Neptune and the landings 183

8 Staying ashore: the Normandy Campaign 210

9 The importance of Bletchley Park to Overlord 236

A note on sources and further reading 249

Endnotes 263

Acknowledgements 279

Index 281

Editorial Reviews

Mr. Kenyon’s book adds substantially to our understanding of the vast operational-intelligence machine that the Allies assembled.”—Helen Fry, The Wall Street Journal

"With access to thousands of documents declassified in the last forty years, he paints a . . . detailed picture of BP and of the Normandy campaign."—Jonathan Beard, Michigan War Studies Review

"David Kenyon and Bletchley Park is the dream ticket. A wonderful scholar and communicator writing about one of the world's most fascinating historical sites." - Dan Snow, historian, documentary filmmaker and television presenter

From the Publisher

08/19/2019

In this highly detailed, technical work, Kenyon (Horsemen in No Man’s Land), a research historian at Bletchley Park, demonstrates that the intelligence division housed at the British estate had a more significant role in WWII than previously acknowledged, making indispensable contributions to the invasion at Normandy. The estate was the WWII base of operations for the Government Code and Cypher School, the British military’s code-breaking organization. Using declassified documents, Kenyon argues that Bletchley Park’s significance has been undersold, that it was not merely notable for the complexity of the codes its workers broke, but also served as a fully functional intelligence agency. Staffed by thousands of code breakers, machine coding operators, transcribers, and analysts, Bletchley Park regularly made crucial information available to Winston Churchill and the militaries of the U.K. and U.S. Bletchley Park gave the allies crucial information about the Nazi order of battle, producing detailed understandings of the SS and German divisions on land, air, and sea, and decoding significant communications between Hitler and his armed forces commander. While the subject is significant and the achievements of those working at Bletchley heroic, this account is often a tedious march through dry, overly detailed technical coding lingo and jargon. It may be suitable for an aficionado of WWII military and coding systems, but for the average reader, it is ponderous and difficult to slog through, and readers may not be convinced that there’s much new here. (July)

Publishers Weekly