Cribs for Victory: The Untold Story of Bletchley Park's Secret Room

by Joss Pearson

Cribs For Victory is a posthumous account of the secret code-breaking process in Bletchley Park's Fusion Room during World War II by Major Neil Webster, one of the key members of the team involved. The Fusion Room was the central unit where decrypted German messages obtained from Hut 6 were compared with the corresponding data extracted by the log readers from the daily radio traffic between enemy stations, thus enabling a complete wartime picture of the enemy order of battle to be constructed. Neil Webster's liaison role between traffic analysis and cryptography meant he was centrally involved in the search for 'cribs' - short pieces of enciphered text where the meaning is either known or can be guessed, allowing the whole cipher to be broken. His book describes this intensive search in detail, the intellectual and technical challenge, the personal stories, the setbacks and the triumphs. Security clearance for publication of his first-hand account was only granted in 2010, more than 20 years after his death. Was it too close to the real truth about how Enigma was broken and the inner workings of British intelligence? Webster's daughter, Joss Pearson, believes her father's book was just too clear, both about the relationship between signals intelligence and cryptography, and about the habits of the German military mind that opened the door to understanding Enigma.

150 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2011

Reviews

[Spad53]

This was a book about code-breaking and radio traffic analysis, except it wasn’t. The first half of the book was interesting about Neil Webster’s work of liaison between code-breaking and radio traffic analysis, and that was interesting enough, but the second half was just personal letters and arguments about the organization, terribly boring to be honest. Worth reading for the first half, but very little of that was new, the radio traffic analysis was interesting but didn’t delve very deep.

[Severin Garanzuay]

Fanatic insight into an often overlooked part of Bletchley's success. Very interesting life story and anecdotes from the war. Great read, thanks!

[Andrew Parnell]

Actually very little on enigma code breaking. More a biography on an ordinary man, in an extraordinary time.