For the first time, the inside story of the brilliant American engineer who defeated Enigma and the Nazi code-masters Much has been written about the success of the British “Ultra” program in cracking the Germans’ Enigma code early in World War II, but few know what really happened in 1942, when the Germans added a fourth rotor to the machine that created the already challenging naval code and plunged Allied intelligence into darkness. Enter one Joe Desch, an unassuming but brilliant engineer at the National Cash Register Company in Dayton, Ohio, who was given the task of creating a machine to break the new Enigma settings. It was an enterprise that rivaled the Manhattan Project for secrecy and complexity–and nearly drove Desch to a breakdown. Under enormous pressure, he succeeded in creating a 5,000-pound electromechanical monster known as the Desch Bombe, which helped turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic–but not before a disgruntled co-worker attempted to leak information about the machine to the Nazis. After toiling anonymously–it even took his daughter years to learn of his accomplishments–Desch was awarded the National Medal of Merit, the country’s highest civilian honor. In The Secret in Building 26, the entire thrilling story of the final triumph over Enigma is finally told.

The German attack on merchant shipping in the Second World War, known as the Battle of the Atlantic, was countered partly by code-breaking intelligence known as Ultra. The dramatic revelation of this factor in the middle 1970s resulted in many works giving this as the most important cause of Allied success.

'A lively and readable account' Spectator 'A fine book ... well-written and well-researched' Washington Times In less than six hours in August 1942, nearly 1,000 British, Canadian and American commandos died in the French port of Dieppe in an operation that for decades seemed to have no real purpose. Was it a dry-run for D-Day, or perhaps a gesture by the Allies to placate Stalin's impatience for a second front in the west? Historian David O'Keefe uses hitherto classified intelligence archives to prove that this catastrophic and apparently futile raid was in fact a mission, set up by Ian Fleming of British Naval Intelligence as part of a 'pinch' policy designed to capture material relating to the four-rotor Enigma Machine that would permit codebreakers like Alan Turing at Bletchley Park to turn the tide of the Second World War. 'A fast-paced and convincing book ... that clears up decades of misinformation about the ignoble raid' Toronto Star

Closely examining the work of women in the US and British naval services towards Allied naval intelligence during the Second World War, this book focuses on their contributions during the Battle of the Atlantic and Pacific Naval War, in order to shed new light on arenas of war from which women's narratives are almost always absent. Including personal testimonies from those involved, and surveying a wide cross-section of different roles, Sarah-Louise Miller analyses the work of women at every level and rank in the US and British naval services, and offers a much wider picture of how they assisted the Allied forces behind closed doors. With exploration of the work of the WRNS and WAVES on developing naval intelligence, this book argues that they played a crucial role in the British and American SIGINT systems, and within programs such as those at Bletchley Park and OP-20-G – therefore directly impacting the organisation and outcome of Anglo-American naval efforts. Including analysis of the development of the modern 'kill-chain', Miller also re-evaluates the effect of the 'combat taboo', to demonstrate that the WRNS and WAVES were in fact at the cutting edge of the emergence of modern warfare.