82 | 9 AT BlETCHlEy PARk
British successes in the U-boat war—where Turing was a key player—freed up the supply
routes from North America to Britain, while Hitler’s disaster at El Alamein denied him his
chance of taking the Suez Canal and capturing the precious Middle Eastern oilfields. Debilitating
shortages of fuel plagued the German military for the rest of the war.
During the build-up to the fierce fighting at El Alamein, the Bletchley Park codebreakers
were reading Rommel’s secret messages.^11 He gave them the welcome news that his tanks had
insufficient fuel to fight effectively. The codebreakers themselves had played a leading role in
bringing this situation about—for weeks their decrypts had been unmasking the cargoes of the
German and Italian ships carrying Rommel’s supplies across the Mediterranean. This intel-
ligence enabled the RAF to pick and choose the best targets. Thousands of tons of fuel went
blazing into the sea.
Ten days into the Battle of El Alamein, a broken message from Rommel to Berlin confessed
that the ‘gradual annihilation of the army must be faced’. Hitler’s response, eagerly read at
Bletchley Park, told Rommel not to yield a single step—he must, Hitler ordered, take ‘the road
leading to death or victory’.^12
what if Enigma and Tunny had not been broken?
How different would the world have been today if Turing had not been able to break Germany’s
codes?
Writing ‘counterfactual’ history is always speculative, never cut and dried—because, if some
key matters had gone differently, the overall outcome of a war, or battle, or election, might
have been very different, or might nevertheless have been just the same. If the CIA had killed
Osama Bin Laden in 2000, 9/11 might still have happened—perhaps because, following Bin
Laden’s death, one of his lieutenants would have stepped forward to take control of Al Qaeda
and implement Bin Laden’s plans.
Suppose, contrary to fact, that Turing and the Bletchley Park codebreakers had not managed
to crack the communications of the German and Italian navies in the Mediterranean, and had
failed to break the cloaked messages of the North Atlantic U-boats. What would the result have
been? The U-boats would certainly have continued to prey with their merciless efficiency on
the convoys of merchantmen, bringing precious food, fuel, munitions, and manpower from
America to Britain. Untold quantities of sorely needed materials would have plummeted to the
bottom of the ocean. Without the RAF’s depredations on his own seaborne supplies, Rommel
might even have defeated the British at El Alamein, and gone on to capture Middle Eastern oil
for Germany. Yet even so, the war in Europe might still have ended at more or less the same time
that it did—the spring of 1945—because of other counterfactual events.
For example, in 1945 America or Britain might have dropped an atomic bomb on Berlin.
Even without a European atomic bomb, and even if, thanks to tighter Axis cipher security,
Bletchley Park had not been able to break the key Enigma, Tunny, and Hagelin cipher systems,
the Allies might nevertheless still have prevailed. The German defeat might have been virtually
inevitable once Hitler took on the vast Soviet Union. Returning to the actual course of events,
Bletchley Park decrypts certainly played a crucial part on the Russian front too—most espe-
cially the intelligence wrung by Turingery from top-level Tunny messages between Berlin and
the front-line generals.^13