Codename Nemo

April 15, 2024
An account of World War II codebreaking focused more on action than brainwork. Lachman, executive producer of Inside Edition and author of The Last Lincolns and Footsteps in the Snow, explains that the typewriterlike enigma machine generated critical Nazi communication by scrambling input in billions of ways, and German experts never doubted that its code was unbreakable. However, by 1941, the British were deciphering many messages by ordinary codebreaking brilliance, aided by the earliest computers; despite these successes, actual possession of an enigma machine would make their work easier. All U-boats carried one, but crew invariably destroyed it when threatened with capture. No history of the enigma program--including perhaps the best, Stephen Budiansky's Battle of Wits--neglects the story of how the Allies hit the jackpot on June 4, 1944, but Lachman tells the fascinating story from the beginning. Opening the book with the U-505 launch in August 1941, the author describes its German crew, the often grotesque conditions inside a U-boat, and the nearly three years of campaigning that featured far more tedium and terror than successful attacks. Lachman does the same with significant American ships and sailors, including Daniel V. Gallery, leader of the antisubmarine task force who, unlike other commanders, had publicly vowed to seize a machine. Few readers will object as Lachman recounts the background, and they will perk up just past the halfway point, when he chronicles how sonar detected U-505. In earlier years, the Allies had captured U-boats, though never fast enough to prevent destruction of its secrets, but Gallery had a trained team ready to go. The author delivers a rousing account of its success. Though Lachman doesn't claim that the capture of U-505 shortened the war, it was a genuinely heroic act that the author recounts capably. A satisfying World War II history.

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April 29, 2024
This energetic history from journalist Lachman (A Secret Life) recounts the pivotal seizure of a German submarine and its Enigma cypher machine in 1944. The crews of two U-boats previously captured by the British had trashed their Enigma machines, so securing an intact one had become a top Allied priority. A U.S. naval task force devised, and rehearsed for three weeks, a complex plan to prevent a U-boat crew from destroying its machine. Involving a nine-man boarding party conducting a rapid series of actions with flash-bangs and tear gas, the opening and closing of various vents, valves, and hatches, and the defusing of booby traps, the plan was successfully put into practice—somewhat off-script, as the Germans had already abandoned ship—on June 4, 1944, with the taking of submarine U-505. Setting the stage for the main event, Lachman illustrates the peril of the Atlantic theater by narrating several other high-octane engagements. He also provides jaunty character sketches of the action’s key participants, including Hans Goebeler, a German who came close to foiling the plot by almost scuttling U-505 with a well-placed leak, and the Americans who boarded the dangerously damaged sub and managed to keep it afloat. Brisk yet evocative descriptions—the captured sub smelled like “diesel fuel” and “human body odor”—contribute a vivid sense of place. It’s an exciting account of a daring military maneuver.