Quotes About Cryptanalysts

Turing needed more staff, but his requests had been blocked by Commander Edward Travis, who had taken over as Director of Bletchley, and who felt that he could not justify recruiting more people. On October 21, 1941, the cryptanalysts took the insubordinate step of ignoring Travis and writing directly to Churchill.

the enemy of security: repetition leads to patterns, and cryptanalysts thrive on patterns.

The Americans even exacted their revenge for Pearl Harbor in April 1943, when cryptanalysts learned that Admiral Yamamoto, who had planned the deadly attack, was due to make a visit to the island of Bougainville, near New Guinea. American fighters, waiting in ambush, came out of the clouds and sent the admiral down in flames to his death in the jungle below.

But the collective contribution of U.S. and British cryptanalysts to the war effort was greater than that of any other such small body of men in history. Their operations provided the supreme example of the Western Allies' imaginative integration into the war effort of their cleverest civilian intellects.