Nibbline at the edges - The desert battle for North Africa
Breaking the ENIGMA code at Bletchley
...Churchill's preferred strategy was to nibble at the edges of the Third Reich until the United States could join the British effort. He and Brooke were in harmony on this point at least, in the need to postpone invasion until the enemy’s strength had been sufficiently reduced, seeing strategic attacks against German controlled North Africa and Italy as vital before proceeding with a major invasion of France.
Brooke believed passionately that the timing of an invasion of Europe had to be right. All equipment and manpower must be in place alongside meticulous planning to minimise casualties & offer the best chance of success. From long experience he respected the enemy’s strength and resourcefulness, matching this with an awareness of the overwhelming military challenge of an opposed landing on a heavily defended and wide front. In timing of the invasion there was no room for “gung-ho”; the natural aim was the Summer solstice so it would truly be “the Longest Day”.
To a large extent the Americans concurred with Stalin, expressing their view that bombing of Germany alone would not win the War; it would take troops on the ground, in Europe, to achieve total victory. However, before the millions of men armed with tanks, guns, planes, trucks, bullets, bombs, fuel, spares, rations and mountains of other supplies & equipment could be concentrated in Britain, the Atlantic crossing needed to be secured. The Royal Navy fought the Battle of the Atlantic to clear the U-boat menace which was disrupting the convoy supply system. Success came once the ENIGMA SHARK code was broken by the mathematicians at the secret Bletchley Park base in Southern England.
To overcome the extraordinary complication of the ENIGMA and its code, a computing machine was needed. The result was Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer, designed by Max Newman and installed at the code breaking centre in rural Buckinghamshire.
Colossus was the size of a living room and weighed about one tonne. Its 2,400 valves replicated the pattern of an encrypted Lorenz message as electrical signals. This breakthrough in computing remained a secret for many years, to the extent that two Americans falsely took credit for inventing the computer in 1945. In their genius invention of Colossus, Alan Turing and his staff of mathematicians made a vital contribution to the success of D-Day...
