Cryptanalyst on British Postage Stamps
A 92-year-old World War II Bletchley Park codebreaker has had a set of commemorative stamps issued in his honor.
Comments
Bob: In what scenario could World War II have ended in an allied victory =without= Soviet armies occupying eastern Europe afterwards?
Jim Russell • April 26, 2013 12:49 AM
Damn. When I saw the headline in my RSS feed, I thought this was going to be a story about steganography on stamps being discovered by a current cryptanalyst.
Very cool that they got around to this while Jerry is still alive, though.
Vles • April 26, 2013 6:36 AM
@SM – They stopped Patton, they could have let him go on a few more miles…
Bob T • April 26, 2013 8:07 AM
@SM – For one, by not including the Soviet Union in the Lend Lease program which supplied the Soviets with over 11 billion dollars worth of goods. Without it, they couldn’t have carried on as they did. Another would be by not supplying them with intelligence. Without it, the Soviets and Nazis would have still slogged it out to the death anyway, just farther east. Maybe all the way to Moscow.
Vles: When Patton had to stop due to lack of supplies, Soviet armies already occupied most of the Baltic states, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. (Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Eastern_Front_1943-08_to_1944-12.png)
Bob: Less successful Soviet armies makes it more likely that the invasion of France ends in a horrible failure, and more likely that the Germans win or cause Stalin to make peace.
To both: But even if the Anglo allies had conquered Germany while the Eastern Front was still in Poland, who would occupy eastern Europe: the small American and British armies (which as it happens had their hands full with France, the Low Countries, half of Germany, and Italy) or the large Soviet army which was closer and could not return home immediately due to a famine?
Bob T • April 26, 2013 12:25 PM
“who would occupy eastern Europe”
The eastern Europeans would. Why would eastern Europe need to be occupied at all? They didn’t do anything. They were the victims of deals between more powerful nations. That’s just imperialist thinking to assume that eastern Europe needed to be occupied. The British and French gave part of Czechoslovakia to Germany. The Soviets thought they had a deal with Hitler to divide Poland for crying out loud. They were just as rotten as Hitler. And we didn’t occupy France, per se, we just helped them get their “stuff” back together.
Czerno • April 26, 2013 12:32 PM
Roosevelt was unconsionably too eager to please Stalin ; alas! for poor Poland in particular.
Remember WW2 was started by the coordinated invasion of Poland by Hitler AND Stalin ? Unfortunately, in the conferences after victory, your mister Roosevelt didn’t require nor even wished to talk Staline into restitution.
In spite of Churchill’s objections even.
Consequently, to this day, Russia and Ukrain are occupying a large part of Poland’s territory whose integrity was in principle guaranteed by the Allies.
Bob T • April 26, 2013 12:33 PM
Oh yes, and the Famine in the Soviet Union was brought on by the agricultural policies of Stalin. Maybe if they had been beaten back more the Commies back in Moscow would have come to their senses and knocked that numb nut off. Not only that but many returning soviet prisoners of war were executed or sent to Gulags on suspicion of having been corrupted by the Nazis or by the western allies. A good read would be “The Gulag Archipelago,” by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
Jon • April 27, 2013 7:33 AM
You guys are all nuts. The brilliant minds at Bletchley did an incredible job and the stamps are to recognise that, not to start a debate about whether the intelligence was used at the right time or in the right way. That’s a completely unrelated debate and nothing to do with the codebreakers.
Neuromancer • April 28, 2013 2:48 PM
Bob and others if the Soviet attack had been less successful and reduced the effectiveness / increased the cost of D day the Ruhr and Berlin would have been Nuked flat.
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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
Bob T • April 25, 2013 3:56 PM
Too bad it helped the Soviets. I guess you would have to ask how it might have been different if it took just a little longer to destroy Hitler’s evil regime, than not having murderous oppressive Soviet backed regimes in eastern Europe for the next 45 years. I don’t know, I guess I hate collectivists of all stripes.