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Reviewed by André Kesteloot, N4ICK, ARRL Technical Advisor
If you enjoy old tube radios, World War II stuff, true espionage stories with lots of fascinating details and photographs of wonderful communications equipment, this book is definitely for you. What Geoffrey Pidgeon has put together is a book replete with personal memories, photos of people and equipment he worked with while enrolled in MI-6 during WW II, and chapters written by specialists such as Siegfried Maruhn, an Enigma operator for Rommel's Afrika Korps (who eventually ended up, in 1988, as the White House correspondent for several West German newspapers) or based on extensive debriefings of long-time MI-6 employees such as Pat Hawker, G3VA, of RadCom Technical Topics fame.
In 1942, the author joined Section VIII of MI-6 as an apprentice and found himself working at the Bletchley Park/Hanslope Park complex, where Enigma-encrypted German Abwher transmissions were intercepted, deciphered, labeled "Ultra" and finally relayed--by riders on motorcycles--to a very few authorized readers. The author rose through the ranks, first drilling holes in metal chassis, then wiring radio sets, and finally installing them in automobiles and airplanes. The book also includes introductory chapters, to name but a few, on British Intelligence through the ages, encryption, black propaganda and a 500 kW medium-wave transmitter originally built by RCA for WJZ in New Jersey but eventually installed in the UK.
This volume--an album that has taken six years to compile and produce--is a remarkable compendium of human stories related to these heroic years when the interception of radio transmission to and from spies of both sides would determine the outcome of gigantic battles and decide the survival, or death, of tens of thousands of men.
One of the appendices is devoted to the description, with many photographs, of the various transmission sets that were issued to British agents working overseas. Old timers, in addition to watering at the mouth over the photographs of "suitcase transmitters" sporting RCA metal tubes and beautiful dials, will relish the photographs of the 1940 Packard Sedans that were converted to mobile wireless units, each fitted with a short-wave transmitter built at Bletchley Park and an HRO receiver.
If, perchance, your bookshelves were to be, like mine, already saturated, this book could certainly find its place on the coffee table.