A good-ish book on WW1 Code Breaking
Just finished James Phelps' book 'Australian Code Breakers' (ISBN 978 1 4607 5622 5) and enjoyed it overall. It tells the story of the early code-breaking efforts of the RAN's Section E in the Navy Office in Melbourne, and how the code breaker, F W Wheatley, used the German code books captured on the SS Pfaltz, to track the German East Asia Squadron.
Phelps' presents the story more as a 'ripping yarn' akin to a good novel than a solid historical narrative, and, to me, gets carried away in the process of being ever-so dramatic about events. Nevertheless, it does encapsulate the relations (and frustrations) between the Admiralty in London and the RAN during the first several months of the war.
While I enjoyed the book overall, there were many technical errors that could easily have been checked and avoided. Pfaltz was not a 70,000 ton ship, but 6,500 tons. The SMS Scharnhorst's main armament fired shells about 250 lb, not 550, and the eight main guns were SK L/40's, not L/35's (which were the secondary armament). And the dramatic end of SMS Gneisenau has the crew trying to avoid burning oil on the surface as the ship sinks - wonder where that large amount of oil came from, as the ship's boilers were coal-fired!
Once you get past the stupid gaffes, it is a really good and enlightening story.
Mike
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