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Can historians quantify Turing’s impact on the course of the war? They certainly cannot
claim with any great confidence that what Turing did shortened the war, as the atom bomb
example illustrates only too well.^14 But in the twenty-first century we can at the very least give
a reasonably complete account of what Turing actually achieved during his years at Bletchley
Park—a picture largely denied to twentieth-century historians due to the blanketing official
secrecy.
Turing’s anti-Enigma bombes, together with the Turingery-inspired code-cracking algo-
rithms that ran on Bletchley Park’s anti-Tunny Colossus computers, supplied the Allies with an
unprecedented inside view of the enemy’s military thinking. In particular, Bletchley Park had
an unrivalled window on German counter-preparations for the looming D-Day invasion of
France, which was launched in June 1944 from the beaches of Normandy.
If Turing had not broken U-boat Enigma, this invasion of mainland Europe, ushering in
the final stage of the war, could have been delayed by months, even years. This was because the
gigantic build-up of the necessary troops and munitions in the southern English ports facing
France could not even have begun while the Atlantic sinkings continued unabated. Without a
break into the submarines’ messages, the invasion would have had to wait until the Allied navies
hunted down the U-boats by conventional means.
Incalculable consequences
Any delay in the invasion would have been strongly in Hitler’s favour, since it would have given
him more time to prepare for the coming attack from across the Channel—more time to trans-
fer troops and tanks from the Eastern Front to France, and more time to fortify the French
coast and the River Rhine, the most crucial of the natural barriers lying between the invasion
beaches and the German heartland. Also, more V1 drones and more rocket-propelled V2 mis-
siles would have rolled off the production lines, to rain down on southern England and wreak
havoc at the ports and airfields needed to support the invading troops.
History records that the Allied armies took roughly a year to fight their way from the
Normandy beaches to Berlin. In a counterfactual scenario, in which Hitler had had more time
to consolidate his preparations, this struggle might have taken much longer—twice as long,
maybe. That translates into a very large number of lives. At a conservative estimate, each year of
fighting in Europe brought on average about 7 million deaths.
Returning to the atom bomb example and to the difficulties of counterfactual history, the kill-
ing might still have ended in May 1945, even in a scenario that saw Tunny and U-boat Enigma
remaining unbroken throughout the war. Nevertheless, this colossal number of lives—7 million
had the war had continued for another year, 21 million if, owing to the Atlantic U-boats and a
strengthened Fortress Europe, the war had toiled on for as long as another 3 years—do most
certainly convey a sense of the magnitude of Turing’s contribution.
Turing, the digital warrior, stands alongside Churchill, Eisenhower, and a short glory-list of
other wartime principals as a leading figure in the Allied victory over Hitler. There should be a
statue of him in Central London among Britain’s other war heroes.