Through the puzzles included in this book we hope that you can begin to understand the wide range of minds—and approaches—that were exploited so brilliantly at Bletchley Park. For whether they were working at nightmare speed during the extraordinary drama of D-Day in June 1944—Bletchley Park’s decrypts being fed back to Churchill constantly to enable him to see how the Germans were responding—or taking the longer-term approach to devise methodologies into cracking Enigma, everyone at Bletchley had to work not just with vigour but also a high-spirited alertness.
It is not too much to say that throughout those dark years the destiny of Europe was being shaped by the amazing puzzle-solving capacities of the extraordinary Bletchley Park veterans. The astounding thing now is that under that unthinkable pressure, the codebreakers tackled each fresh day, each fresh encryption, exactly as though they were Times crosswords, or delightfully fiendish conundrums. That love of puzzles—the amused determination not to be bettered by the person devising the problem—kept these young people not only constantly eager and hungry to smash the Nazi codes, but to do so in a way that helped protect their sanity.
One of the reasons the restored Bletchley Park Museum—with its historically accurate huts and grounds—is so popular today is that visitors are attracted by this central idea: that the people recruited for this extraordinary intellectual hothouse were, like them, quite simply puzzle addicts at heart.