Last year I fought my way through Neil Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and, while exhausted, I discovered a new interest in the idea of cryptography and wanted to read something more historical about it. Curiously, my father was working his way through a bunch of books on the subject and he heartily recommended Stephen Budiansky’s Battle of Wits:The Complete Story of Codebreaking in WWII. Its the story of how British and American codebreakers developed and employed new technologies to crack German and Japanese codes in WWII.
Budiansky is a mathematician as well as an historian so he really understands what these cryptanalysts were working on and exactly what effect they had on the war. Budiansky is also a terrific storyteller. He does a great job of putting you in the moment when the lightbulb turns on for these scientist/mathematicians as they are unraveling the German and Japanese codes. He makes it sound exciting. Budiansky does an even better job of narrating the actual battles where the broken codes provided the key to Allied victory. My favorite parts were where the Allies had to create cover stories to explain how they seemed to know exactly what the Axis were up to so as not to give away the fact that they had broken Enigma.
The trouble I had with this book was the same I had with Cryptonomicon. The technical descriptions and explanations put me fast asleep, literally. I do most of my reading at bedtime and the technical sections of this book consistently had me asleep within 2 pages. These sections were very detailed, but not so that they were impenetrable. I have a newfound understanding of how IBM punchcards took a lot of the pencil work out of codebreaking, but it took way too long for me to finish this book. And Budiansky put most of the truly arcane mathematics in the appendices.
I do recommend it if you are interested in cryptography. It’s a terrific history book about a vital aspect of WWII that is often overlooked or misunderstood.
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