Re: "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail"

[awestrop@crl.com (Alan Westrope)]

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On Fri, 26 Jan 1996, "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com> wrote:

> jim bell writes:
> > (For the historically-impaired:  Coventry was/is an English town (small 
> > city?) perhaps most famous from the Lady Godiva legend...but I digress...    
> >  British found out, I guess through Ultra, that it was going to be bombed.  
> > Telling the inhabitants would have saved many lives, but (possibly) alerted 
> > the Germans that Enigma had been broken.  British made the correct choice:  
> > Let the city get bombed without (much?) warning.  The value of keeping the 
> > broken-ness of Ultra a secret far outweighed the value of Coventry.)

> The current claim is that, in fact, there was no advance warning about
> Coventry and that the claims that there was are unsubstantiated.

Correct; here's my two Simoleons' worth toward exorcising the "Churchill
Anguished Over Coventry Bombing" meme:

    The first international conference of cryptologists took place in
    Germany in November of 1978.  The backroom boys of World War II --
    Allied communications intelligence experts and Axis communications
    security specialists -- met under scholarly sponsorship to try to
    determine the effect of codebreaking on the war. [...] Dr. Forrest
    Pogue, author of the standard biography of General George C. Marshall,
    U.S. Army chief of staff, said that [...] 15 to 20 years is the time
    lag for facts to catch up with fiction.  That's how long it will take
    for the false story that Winston Churchill allowed Coventry to be
    destroyed to save the secret of ULTRA "to stop being used to keep
    sophomores awake in the classroom."

  David Kahn, "The ULTRA Conference," Cryptologia, January 1979

Alan Westrope     PGP public key:  http://www.nyx.net/~awestrop
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