-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- 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 <awestrop@nyx.net> <awestrop@crl.com> PGP 0xB8359639: D6 89 74 03 77 C8 2D 43 7C CA 6D 57 29 25 69 23 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMQuU6FRRFMq4NZY5AQH67AP/WmQjKge1yVM1jbqSQo2B7xoCEaK/BDpW Bh0C4C5BL0potn5tLJS7D6p3gCELQlcmtoJcHjngm+wj3a+dl9x/7vQ5Y83cUPAK C4VHKiRyran3IB/V/ZOt6TcDP0FdkgTuyofuC3u196km5NmlpEEGwfDQEA2Zcgur 6l0sV4mj3PA= =EqBe -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----