The Rose Code

by Kate Quinn

German military communications were relayed using hand ciphers, teleprinter codes, and above all Enigma machines—portable cipher devices that scrambled orders into nonsense so they could be relayed via Morse code over radio transmitters, then unscrambled in the field. Even if the scrambled orders were intercepted by the Allies, no one could break the encryption. Germany thought Enigma was unbreakable.

When I began drafting The Rose Code, I realized just how much of a departure this book was going to be for me. My two previous books were about women spies (The Alice Network) and female bomber pilots (The Huntress)--both professions with a hefty dose of built-in danger and drama. My Bletchley Park heroines, by contrast, are in very little physical danger; they spend the majoritiy of their war safe in little green huts in the countryside, scratching away at cryptograms with pencil stubs. Their war, unlike that of the Alice network operatives and the Night Witches, is fought in the intellectual arena rather than the physical . . . but for all that, it's no less grueling or heroic. The women of Bletchley Park may not have spilled blood in their fight, but they made enormous personal sacrifices in their battle to break Germany's supposedly-unbreakable Enigma ciphers.