This is a wonderful accounting of the lives of the Bletchley Girls and what it was like during their time of service. The stories Dunlop re-tells based on her interviews with the ladies are so engaging - I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of reading them! ( )

Although I thought the topic would be very interesting I found the book less so. I couldn't keep the women straight because the author jumped from person to person at various points in their working life. Perhaps I could have followed it better if each chapter was one person but that's just me.
I did not finish the book after 130 pages. I just didn't find it compelling to that point and want to move on to other books on my list. ( )

It’s not possible to read a book like this without being a little awestruck at what ordinary people endured in Britain during WW2. This remarkable history of the unsung women of Bletchley is an eye-opener into working conditions that none of us would tolerate today…

Bletchley Park, immortalised in films such as The Imitation Game and the TV series The Bletchley Circle, was the centre of intelligence gathering in Britain. As the war progressed, Bletchley grew from modest beginnings in 1938 to employing thousands of people engaged in the complex work of decoding enemy transmissions, and was the birthplace of modern computing. Today the site is a heritage tourist attraction but during the war it was top secret and the people who worked there were all bound by the Official Secrets Act.

For the young women recruited into the service—from the ATS, the WRENS, the WAAF and civilian life—their work was a complete mystery. Because it was vital that the Nazis (and later, the Japanese) not know that their transmissions were being intercepted, each cog in the mighty machine did not know what others were doing. The women did not know and they were not allowed to ask. Only the men at the very top of the organisation knew how and why seemingly mundane tasks fed successfully into the massive code-breaking machines which, some say, shortened the war by two-to-four years.

The Bletchley Girls doesn’t tell the stories of the eccentric geniuses who invented the information technology that broke the Enigma and Lorenz Ciphers: Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman, Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry. Their stories have been told elsewhere. This book tells the story of the thousands of young women on whom the entire enterprise depended. Although it’s true that very few of them were involved in high-level tasks, nevertheless their work was vital, and it required intense concentration, patience, and care.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/12/30/the-bletchley-girls-by-tessa-dunlop/ ( )

The subject matter of The Bletchley Girls is inherently fascinating: the highly organized, profoundly secret listening and decoding operation that was the key to the Allied victory in World War II. The young women who performed long hours of drudgery over radio messages, computing machines, and bits of code without knowing what they were a part of or what anyone else was doing were crucial to its success.

What's sad about this book is that the author is out of her depth. It's almost as if she herself, like the girls, were simply recording what she heard without an idea of how to fit it into a bigger picture.

As a work of nonfiction, the book has two basic flaws: organization of content and delivery of content.

(How much else is there?)

Author Dunlop interviewed fifteen women, both in person and in written form, who had served in some capacity at Bletchley Park during the war. The opportunity to gather this primary material from living sources won't last much longer; these women, most of whom were among the youngest recruits in Britain's war effort, are in their nineties. So Dunlop has performed a real service to history in gathering it.

Unfortunately her choice to break up the narrative threads into parallel vignettes arranged by topic rather than by speaker erodes the continuity of each speaker's recollections. Fifteen is too many threads to track mentally. Each individual young woman lacks wholeness--a Gestalt, if you will--because we can't readily follow and integrate her story without constantly looking back: "Who's Ruth again? Which one is Pat?"

I didn't keep that up for long and quickly regressed to treating names as arbitrary labels not meant to do anything but supply a dialogue tag. The only personality I managed to follow at all was the aspiring actress, whose name I don't remember now.

Not even distinctively titled Lady Jean came together well enough for me to gain a sense of who she was as much as I would expect to with a fictional character.

Not that telling each young woman's story linearly would necessarily have been better. They didn't all hit the same checkpoints, there would have been a lot of echo and repetition, and it might have been difficult for a whole picture of the Bletchley Park experience to emerge from it.

But that is the author's challenge: to select, arrange, and present the material effectively to the reader. If you don't know how, it isn't wrong to try; but if you don't know how, you're apt to leave your audience dissatisfied.

No amount of successful wrestling with the subject matter, however, would have canceled the detractive effects of poor writing. I would not have wanted to be the editor responsible for cleaning up the manuscript. The acknowledgments section thanks various people for contributing content review and grammatical support and includes the obligatory "Any errors are entirely my own," to which I can only say, "They sure are." Reviewers and editors seldom say "How about dangling about forty more modifiers?" and "Let's add a couple dozen more wrong word choices just for flavor."

Lists of examples would be tedious and painful. I can supply them if someone is perishing to see them. Open to any page and you'll probably find at least one. I'll settle for one instance each:

"But stuck on a train, with bombs dropping in the station,...Britain was a long way off."

Britain was not stuck on a train.

"It is well known that the Nazi machine swallowed Austria, then Czechoslovakia, while Britain prevaricated."

"Prevaricated" means "lied." Perhaps she meant "temporiz(s)ed" (stalled or delayed).

I gained some interesting glimpses of the time and place, mostly in the way of social history, such as how people responded to the call of duty and how the fact of war seemed to be gathered into the fabric of everyday life. The young women's relationships to their families, friends, and lovers adds a dimension to that.

And I did absorb the one very impressive fact that all those young people, thousands of them, respected and protected the secrecy they were obliged to maintain, even long after the war ended. I don't have any confidence that the young people of today, with their tell-all social paradigm, could or would do anything of the sort.

But as a complete product delivering its content effectively, the book falls short. I see its best use as a well-documented contribution to the literature on the history of the war and not as a finished work able to stand on its own. I'll give the author an A for effort and hope her raw source material finds a place in some archive. ( )

While the London Blitz was raining destruction down upon her majesty’s city, amazing events were occurring at a place called Bletchley Park just a short distance away. Author Tessa Dunlop’s non-fiction retelling of the World War II code-breakers comes alive as she unravels the lives of eleven women all involved in various top-secret acts of derring-do.

Her story uncovers many covert operations that many young British ladies were eager to assist with as they joined the WRENS (Women’s Royal Navy Service), and worked together as Code-Breakers, Message handlers, radio listener mechanics, visual signalers and directionalists. Whether they had headphones strapped to their heads round the clock to listen for German voices, sat for hours on end at typex machines typing in coded messages, or were involved with the infamous Colossus and Bombe decoder computers, these hearty and determined girls who were bound to secrecy, were completely dedicated to work for King and Country to help aid and shorten the war that was taking Europe by storm. These women loved what they did, they did not think for a moment of breaking their signed contracts of the Official Secrecy Act knowing that to do so would be deemed and act of treason punishable by imprisonment or death.

Amazingly their stories show great comradery during times of duress and years of boring monotonous work environments. They bravely performed their duty, but had fun doing it making sure they had outside fun to lighten up the truth that there was a bloody war on and people were killed by the thousands every day. You will meet many famous military heroes in this wonderful tale, as well as famous British politicians and upper crust society celebrities of the era. This was the crucial time when the war had to be won soon before more lives were lost. Hero of the war Alan Turing with his famous Enigma code-breaking computer that turned the tide of the war, also takes a heroic part in the Blechley Girls’s story.

Although in my opinion the author switches ladies to rapidly within the story often confusing the reader who she was talking about, I have to admit by the time I finished the book I understood and appreciated her method and why she chose to unfold the story in the manner that she did. My initial take half way through was that there was too much background information on the women before getting to the core story of their work at Bletchley Park. But, within the second half where you learn just how their work impacted their lives after the war was over, gave me a better sense of the totality of their lives before, during, and after the war. A little bit of editing to the book could have made this a five star review but as it is I give it four stars for an important piece of wartime history well told. ( )