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Like all movies, especially Hollywood movies, it is a terrible presentation of history. As another Engima related example, the film U-571 decides that presenti

Like all movies, especially Hollywood movies, it is a terrible presentation of history. As another Engima related example, the film U-571 decides that presenting the real British capture of a U boat and its Engima machine won't do at all, so it was the Americans what did it. How else to perpetuate the Hollywood idea they win all wars single handed? ;) Most of the history books after Nigel West's in the late 1980s cover the major Polish role in the story properly with more details. Until West, and the coverage after his book, histories essentially presented the official GCHQ authorised history. They omitted huge details, and enormously significant events and people like Tommy Flowers and Colossus remained almost completely unknown, even in Britain. A couple of Colossuses were sent to GCHQ at the end of the war, everything else was smashed to pieces and officially "forgotten about". Which is why Tommy Flowers and others received little to no acknowledgement of their role during their lifetimes. Which is a fine way to thank people who played such a huge part in winning the war, and creating the post-war world.

Godel_unicode 8y ago
The real u571 was sunk by depth charge and is totally unrelated to the plot of the movie. The movie is loosely based on a combination of the u505 which was in fact captured by the US Navy, and the u110 which was captured by the Brits. The u505 is often left out of the story by the British in keeping with their love of not acknowledging American involvement in the Wars.
- orf 8y ago
  I don't think we love to leave out the American involvement in WW2 at all. There is a huge community of military enthusiasts in the UK and they almost exclusively have American military equipment. My father owns a classic Willies jeep for example. I just think we prefer to talk about the parts we played, just as any country would.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  u505 was 3 and a half years later in mid 44, and was notable only for gaining current code books. That saved time to crack as by that stage of the war Enigma was being routinely broken. Coming in the week of D Day, of course that proved important. u110 in 41 provided a breakthrough in that it provided warning of 4 rotor naval Engima long before their introduction. It meant Bletchley had already started preparing for 4 rotor by the time it was introduced. It was the trigger for work on the 4 rotor bombes. There were other U boat captures. American involvement is impossible to play down - convoys were critical to our survival, and there were tens of thousands of Americans based here for much of the war. I'm often just as disappointed when Hollywood plays fast and loose with mainly US operations like Guadalcanal or Midway. Even so Hollywood movies rarely attract the outcry U571 did at the time of release.
M2Ys4U 8y ago
What surprised me to learn when I was at the NMoC earlier in the year was that there's still information relating to Colossus that GCHQ won't release, and probably never will.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  What surprised me most was just how successfully it was suppressed. Bletchley was a decaying set of mostly forgotten huts that did Enigma code breaking in the war and the surface of the story was barely scratched. I got especially interested in Bletchley and WW2 history right about the time the two or three significant books started coming out in the 80s. Gordon Welchman, another of the little known geniuses, moved to the US after the war to teach MIT's first computing course. He later worked on encryption for the US military. He wrote the Hut 6 Story in the 80s, the NSA didn't approve of his book, so he lost security clearance and was forbidden to talk about his own book or his involvement. There is a fascinating interview somewhere out there on the web, with some of his relatives, about him having a surveillance tail in his late seventies! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Welchman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Welchman
- lostlogin 8y ago
  Is there speculation on what this might be? It’s hard to imagine what it might be, though to be kept hidden it must surely be something bad relating to the allies?

Godel_unicode 8y ago

The real u571 was sunk by depth charge and is totally unrelated to the plot of the movie. The movie is loosely based on a combination of the u505 which was in fact captured by the US Navy, and the u110 which was captured by the Brits. The u505 is often left out of the story by the British in keeping with their love of not acknowledging American involvement in the Wars.

orf 8y ago
I don't think we love to leave out the American involvement in WW2 at all. There is a huge community of military enthusiasts in the UK and they almost exclusively have American military equipment. My father owns a classic Willies jeep for example. I just think we prefer to talk about the parts we played, just as any country would.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
u505 was 3 and a half years later in mid 44, and was notable only for gaining current code books. That saved time to crack as by that stage of the war Enigma was being routinely broken. Coming in the week of D Day, of course that proved important. u110 in 41 provided a breakthrough in that it provided warning of 4 rotor naval Engima long before their introduction. It meant Bletchley had already started preparing for 4 rotor by the time it was introduced. It was the trigger for work on the 4 rotor bombes. There were other U boat captures. American involvement is impossible to play down - convoys were critical to our survival, and there were tens of thousands of Americans based here for much of the war. I'm often just as disappointed when Hollywood plays fast and loose with mainly US operations like Guadalcanal or Midway. Even so Hollywood movies rarely attract the outcry U571 did at the time of release.

M2Ys4U 8y ago

What surprised me to learn when I was at the NMoC earlier in the year was that there's still information relating to Colossus that GCHQ won't release, and probably never will.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
What surprised me most was just how successfully it was suppressed. Bletchley was a decaying set of mostly forgotten huts that did Enigma code breaking in the war and the surface of the story was barely scratched. I got especially interested in Bletchley and WW2 history right about the time the two or three significant books started coming out in the 80s. Gordon Welchman, another of the little known geniuses, moved to the US after the war to teach MIT's first computing course. He later worked on encryption for the US military. He wrote the Hut 6 Story in the 80s, the NSA didn't approve of his book, so he lost security clearance and was forbidden to talk about his own book or his involvement. There is a fascinating interview somewhere out there on the web, with some of his relatives, about him having a surveillance tail in his late seventies! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Welchman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Welchman
lostlogin 8y ago
Is there speculation on what this might be? It’s hard to imagine what it might be, though to be kept hidden it must surely be something bad relating to the allies?