The Secret Listeners: How the Wartime Y Service Intercepted the Secret German Codes for Bletchley Park - Couverture souple

McKay, Sinclair

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1781310394 ISBN 13 : 9781781310397

Editeur : Aurum, 2012

Synopsis

Before Bletchley Park could break the German war machine's code, its daily military communications had to be monitored and recorded by 'the Listening Service', the wartime department whose bases moved with every theatre of war (Cairo, Malta, Gibraltar, Iraq, Cyprus) as well as having listening stations along the eastern coast of Britain to intercept radio traffic in the European theatre. This is the story of the - usually very young - men and women sent out to farflung outposts to listen in for Bletchley Park, an oral history of exotic locations and ordinary lives turned upside down by a sudden remote posting - the heady nightlife in Cairo, filing cabinets full of snakes in North Africa, and flights out to Delhi by luxurious flying boat.

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

Sinclair McKay s account of this secret war of the airwaves is as painstakingly researched and fascinating as his bestselling The Secret Life Of Bletchley Park, and an essential companion to it. - The Daily Mail Behind the celebrated code-breaking at Bletchley Park lies another secret. Before the German war machine s messages could be decoded turning the course of the war in a campaign like the Desert War thousands more young men and women had to locate and monitor endless streams of radio traffic around the clock, and transcribe its Morse code with a speed few have ever managed since. They were part of the Y - (for Wireless ) Service: the Listening Service an organisation just as secret as Bletchley Park during the war, but nowadays still little-known and unrecognised. Without it, however, the Allies would have known nothing of the enemy s military intentions. Now, in the follow-up to his Sunday Times-bestselling The Secret Life of Bletchley Park, through dozens of interviews with surviving veterans, Sinclair McKay chronicles the history and achievements of this remarkable group of people. Whereas Bletchley Park was a claustrophobically close community crammed into a single Buckinghamshire mansion, the Listening Service went wherever the war went which was all over the world. Its listeners might be posted to bustling Cairo to listen in to Rommel s Eighth Army, or Casablanca in Morocco, or Karachi for the Burma campaign, or in one case even the idyllic Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean to monitor Japan or they might be sent to congenial Scarborough or Douglas in the Isle of Man to listen in to German submarines. To men and women often hardly out of school such exotic postings were life-changing adventures even the journey out could be an epic voyage of troopships, flying boats and Indian railways and the challenges not merely arduous night shifts of 12 hours of dizzying concentration, but heat so intense the perspiration ran into your shoes, or snakes in the filing cabinets. In all of them it bred self-reliance and broad horizons rare to their generation, while many found lifelong romance in their far-flung corner of the world. Now the hidden story of the Y-Service and its vital contribution to the war effort can be told at last.

Présentation de l'éditeur

Behind the celebrated code-breaking at Bletchley Park lies another secret. Before the German war machine s messages could be decoded turning the course of the war in a campaign like the Desert War thousands more young men and women had to locate and monitor endless streams of radio traffic around the clock, and transcribe its Morse code with a speed few have ever managed since.

They were part of the Y - (for Wireless ) Service: the Listening Service an organisation just as secret as Bletchley Park during the war, but nowadays still little-known and unrecognised.  Without it, however, the Allies would have known nothing of the enemy s military intentions. Now, in the follow-up to his Sunday Times-bestselling The Secret Life of Bletchley Park, through dozens of interviews with surviving veterans, Sinclair McKay chronicles the history and achievements of this remarkable group of people.

Whereas Bletchley Park was a claustrophobically close community crammed into a single Buckinghamshire mansion, the Listening Service went wherever the war went which was all over the world. Its listeners might be posted to bustling Cairo to listen in to Rommel s Eighth Army, or Casablanca in Morocco, or Karachi for the Burma campaign, or in one case even the idyllic Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean to monitor Japan or they might be sent to congenial Scarborough or Douglas in the Isle of Man to listen in to German submarines.

To men and women often hardly out of school such exotic postings were life-changing adventures even the journey out could be an epic voyage of troopships, flying boats and Indian railways and the challenges not merely arduous night shifts of 12 hours of dizzying concentration, but heat so intense the perspiration ran into your shoes, or snakes in the filing cabinets. In all of them it bred self-reliance and broad horizons rare to their generation, while many found lifelong romance in their far-flung corner of the world. Now the hidden story of the Y-Service and its vital contribution to the war effort can be told at last.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Aurum
• Date d'édition: 2012
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1781310394
• ISBN 13: 9781781310397
• Reliure: Broché
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible