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The Secret Listeners

Autor Sinclair McKay
en Limba Engleză Hardback – oct 2012
Behind the celebrated code-breaking at Bletchley Park lies another secret.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9781845137632
ISBN-10: 1845137639
Pagini: 352
Ilustrații: 1 black & white illustrations
Dimensiuni: 163 x 239 x 33 mm
Greutate: 0.73 kg
Editura: AURUM PRESS

Notă biografică

Sinclair McKay writes regularly for the Daily Telegraph and The Secret Listeners and has written books about James Bond and Hammer horror for Aurum. His next book, about the wartime "Y" Service during World War II, is due to be published by Aurum in 2012. He lives in London.

Recenzii

'A fascinating read' Milton Keynes Citizen 'McKay's focus is rather on the personal experiences of the individual Y Service operators - it brings home not only the reality of what these people were doing but also the daily privations endured with remarkable resilience by so many in that war. As with those at Bletchley, the silence of that generation, their disciplined restraint for decades afterwards, is as impressive as their achievements. They felt the powerful pull of common cause and (mostly) had the privilege of knowing that their contribution was significant. Awful as it was for much of the time, for many nothing that followed ever quite lived up to it. We should be grateful that the survivors are talking now.' -- Alan Judd Spectator 'As McKay argues in this well-told story, the Y Service has been "sadly and curiously" uncelebrated. Yet were it not for all those encoded messages relayed with such care, the codebreakers at Bletchley would have had little to go on. It was their efforts that made the revolutionary leaps of Bletchley possible. They should be commemorated properly as having played their parts in one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century, he says. And he has done them proud.' -- Brian MacArthur Daily Telegraph 'Sinclair McKay has gathered together memories, from published works and from interviews with surviving veterans. This book is full of delightful episodes.' The Book Dad 'Sinclair McKay's account of this secret war of the airwaves is as painstakingly researched and fascinating as his bestselling The Secret Life Of Bletchley Park, and an essential companion to it.' Daily Mail 'Their contribution enabled the code-breakers to achieve their break-through, something that, in turn, shortened the war and saved countless lives.' Good Book Guide 'The veterans who monitored radio traffic and transcrived Morse code are given full, overdue credit in this intriguing book' Saga Magazine 'Author Sinclair McKay has once again unearthed a fascinating compendium of memories from surviving veterans whose vital contribution to the war effort had been shrouded in secrecy.' Bicester Review 'The Secret Listeners draws our attention to the important contribution made by modest, patriotic men and women engaged in war work where individual decorations were rarely awarded and secrecy demanded that even their closest relatives were denied an insight into their contribution to the Allied victory.' Times Literary Supplement 'McKay's story of the wireless interceptors is one of willing amateurs and gifted eccentrics, of patience, accuracy, and endurance. A fine book with a genuinely new angle on a familiar topic, full of vivid and fascinating characters.' Military History Monthly

'A fascinating read' Milton Keynes Citizen 'McKay's focus is rather on the personal experiences of the individual Y Service operators - it brings home not only the reality of what these people were doing but also the daily privations endured with remarkable resilience by so many in that war. As with those at Bletchley, the silence of that generation, their disciplined restraint for decades afterwards, is as impressive as their achievements. They felt the powerful pull of common cause and (mostly) had the privilege of knowing that their contribution was significant. Awful as it was for much of the time, for many nothing that followed ever quite lived up to it. We should be grateful that the survivors are talking now.' -- Alan Judd Spectator 'As McKay argues in this well-told story, the Y Service has been "sadly and curiously" uncelebrated. Yet were it not for all those encoded messages relayed with such care, the codebreakers at Bletchley would have had little to go on. It was their efforts that made the revolutionary leaps of Bletchley possible. They should be commemorated properly as having played their parts in one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century, he says. And he has done them proud.' -- Brian MacArthur Daily Telegraph 'Sinclair McKay has gathered together memories, from published works and from interviews with surviving veterans. This book is full of delightful episodes.' The Book Dad

'A fascinating read' Milton Keynes Citizen 'McKay's focus is rather on the personal experiences of the individual Y Service operators - it brings home not only the reality of what these people were doing but also the daily privations endured with remarkable resilience by so many in that war. As with those at Bletchley, the silence of that generation, their disciplined restraint for decades afterwards, is as impressive as their achievements. They felt the powerful pull of common cause and (mostly) had the privilege of knowing that their contribution was significant. Awful as it was for much of the time, for many nothing that followed ever quite lived up to it. We should be grateful that the survivors are talking now.' -- Alan Judd Spectator 'As McKay argues in this well-told story, the Y Service has been "sadly and curiously" uncelebrated. Yet were it not for all those encoded messages relayed with such care, the codebreakers at Bletchley would have had little to go on. It was their efforts that made the revolutionary leaps of Bletchley possible. They should be commemorated properly as having played their parts in one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century, he says. And he has done them proud.' -- Brian MacArthur Daily Telegraph 'Sinclair McKay has gathered together memories, from published works and from interviews with surviving veterans. This book is full of delightful episodes.' The Book Dad 'Sinclair McKay's account of this secret war of the airwaves is as painstakingly researched and fascinating as his bestselling The Secret Life Of Bletchley Park, and an essential companion to it.' Daily Mail 'Their contribution enabled the code-breakers to achieve their break-through, something that, in turn, shortened the war and saved countless lives.' Good Book Guide

Descriere

Behind the celebrated code-breaking at Bletchley Park lies another secret. Before the German war machine's messages could be decoded - turning the course of the war in a campaign like the Desert War - thousands more young men and women had to locate and monitor endless streams of radio traffic around the clock, and transcribe its Morse code with a speed few have ever managed since. They were part of the "Y"- (for "Wireless") Service: the Listening Service - an organisation just as secret as Bletchley Park during the war, but nowadays still little-known and unrecognised.

Without it, however, the Allies would have known nothing of the enemy's military intentions. Now, in the follow-up to his Sunday Times-bestselling The Secret Life of Bletchley Park, through dozens of interviews with surviving veterans, Sinclair McKay chronicles the history and achievements of this remarkable group of people. Whereas Bletchley Park was a claustrophobically close community crammed into a single Buckinghamshire mansion, the Listening Service went wherever the war went - which was all over the world.

Its listeners might be posted to bustling Cairo to listen in to Rommel's Eighth Army, or Casablanca in Morocco, or Karachi for the Burma campaign, or in one case even the idyllic Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean to monitor Japan - or they might be sent to congenial Scarborough or Douglas in the Isle of Man to listen in to German submarines. To men and women often hardly out of school such exotic postings were life-changing adventures - even the journey out could be an epic voyage of troopships, flying boats and Indian railways - and the challenges not merely arduous night shifts of 12 hours of dizzying concentration, but heat so intense the perspiration ran into your shoes, or snakes in the filing cabinets. In all of them it bred self-reliance and broad horizons rare to their generation, while many found lifelong romance in their far-flung corner of the world.

Now the hidden story of the Y-Service and its vital contribution to the war effort can be told at last.