They referred to it as “Sacricide”. This term perhaps reflects the entirety of the story contained in this book. The planned kidnapping/murder of George Washington was thought of in the same manner as killing something sacred. It is clear that to the Revolutionary soldiers that were to fight the battles that would ultimately win independence from Britain, something about George Washington went beyond the standard definition of a man.
Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch do a fair job of telling the tale. The transitions often times feel somewhat forced between chapters but this is because the writing style has adopted the curious technique of indicating the events to the reader as happening in their present time. The reader is “brought into” the story as though they are experiencing it ‘right now’. This then, therefore, demands some chapter transitions that have a bit of an old-time radio feel to them in that they feel like cliffhangers and their resolutions. Perhaps this switch to a more active voice was intentional to make the history seem “more alive”. Of course, after the present period of ‘conspiracy theory’ explosions and false information and fake news, the effect might be unnecessary. During Washington’s time as per the governor of the New York colonies working for Britain–Tryon–might have said “One need pay no heed to all these false conspiracies.” Of course, Tryon was plotting and planning vigorously. Indeed, whether Tryon or the Mayor of New York is more responsible for the plot is hard to know. The Mayor, David Mathews, later, in Canada, admits that he helped formed the plot after, of course, protesting his innocence to save his own skin. The truth is, both men stood to lose much if the colonies became independent and so naturally, they would have been willing to avail themselves of all schemes to try hang on to their positions and privileges.
We therefore are not thrust into conspiracy theory with this book but conspiracy fact. One is struck, if they are familiar with history, with the similarities between the story concerning Washington and this proposed plot, and the later version of events that occur with Lincoln. The idea of “kidnapping” Lincoln was also put forth, but in fact an execution was the outcome. This too was part of an elaborate conspiracy within the government and the army. Indeed, we find that within Washington’s ranks, there are people who are within the most intimate circles of trust that are bought-off by Britain. Washington subsequently must become a very competent spy-master and as history records did so exceedingly well. It is ironic, perhaps, that he does this not so much against the enemy directly, but against the traitors in his own causes that have no loyalties to anything other than their wallets.
The scholarship is not lacking in this telling of the tale, and it does put to rest some “legends” concerning Washington or attempts to. There is the story that during the war Washington’s own housekeeper was a spy, and so through various nefarious means someone attempted to poison his peas. A young girl in the household notices this and throws the peas out the window where the chickens eat the peas and die. Meltzer and Mensch tell us that these tales are fiction or at least their research does not support the event. Of course, we know that there are other tellings of Presidents being poisoned such as Zachary Taylor’s bowl of cherries and iced milk that may or may not have been poisoned leading to his eventual death.
We also learn how a ring of would-be counterfeiters plays into both the plot to kill Washington and also its resolution. Regular people, it seems, are being sucked into all manner of happenings due to their circumstance and their way of trying to cope with it. Once caught, almost no one tells the truth, and those that do are not believed simply because no one else is forthcoming.
Another interesting piece in the book concerns the condition of the army that Washington must train. When Washington arrives, the army is literally in rags. Perhaps this contributes to the almost “divine status” attributed to Washington since he takes this army and gradually forms it into something capable of prevailing over the British.
By way of illustration, we learn how Washington handles the incoming invasion of New York. The authors note that though it does not make for a great story, Washington loses and escapes into the night with his army. Before this though, Washington and his men manage to smuggle some cannons into position in Boston at the battle of Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill. The way in which this happens is nothing short of incredible, as the effort required is immense– stretching the bounds of credulity. This living to fight another day and unexpected victories, the British learn and the book notes, become hallmarks of Washington’s military strategy and ultimate success. If there is anything Washington is good at even though he is inexperienced as a commander, it is, we are told, knowing when he is beaten and when it is time to leave the battlefield.
If you are a casual reader of history, this book will interest you. If you are accustomed to reading history, some of the tone in the book may be off-putting since it has a flare of sensationalism in timbre. Since the target audience is most likely casual readers of history, the choice makes sense from the perspective of the authors in order to martial more sales by widening the potential audience. It does not hurt the scholarship which often does suffer from trying to engage informal readers.
One wonders what Gordon Welchman might have done or been if there had not been a war, and had he not been invited to Bletchley Park to break German codes. He might still have taught the first computer programming course. Maybe not. The type of thinking that was used in World War II, though, lead almost directly to modern day computers since one required computational power in order to break enciphered messages. Usually, those picked for this task had backgrounds in mathematics although certainly there were also those who had backgrounds in linguistics. Mr. Welchman was a mathematician by training and so received the invite. In his book The Hut Six Story he recounts his time and recollections during his time there at Bletchley. Despite this book being published in 1982, the intelligence agencies of Britain were, apparently, still miffed that he told the tale. Mr. Welchman was certainly not the first to do so but he was seemingly the only one to have his security clearances taken as retaliation. The tone of this book is not that of an author who believes he is disclosing secrets that are not a matter of public record. Rather, he is trying to correct some inconsistencies in the public record as well as add his own perspective.
To be sure, it is not an easy read. Some of this is because the terminology in the book is specific to the Enigma but more than a little of it concerns the language not being standard in the early years of code breaking and electrical engineering. The idea is fresh in the mind of Welchman since he lived it. It is a harder, though, to gain a full picture in this telling, although it is less the author’s fault and more the complicated logic that the Enigma machines were designed to embody that causes the confusion.
We learn that Welchman intuits some ways to break through the Enigma encryption scheme. Most of these methods rely on German mistakes in using the technology. Welchman then begins to organize the apparatuses and methodology and staffing that will allow him to formulate and implement a code-breaking regiment.
Toward the end of the book, we learn that Welchman is more “re-engineering” what some Polish cryptographers had surmised and most likely at the very least Welchman’s senior, Dilly Knox, likely knew something more than Knox let on about these efforts since Knox was himself a component and a quasi-legend as an “Enigma” breaker. Everyone it seems is fighting for credit and recognition concerning who broke Enigma and when. One gets the feeling, however, that Welchman really is not after any of that. He seems, initially at least, just to enjoy the thought of being able to break the codes.
There are a million interesting points in the book concerning figures like Turing and interactions and conversations that were occurring in the breaking of these ciphers. Most interestingly, Welchman reflects back on his time at Bletchley as some of the happiest time in his life and mentions that the same was true for many others who worked there. Perhaps it was the unified feeling of facing a common foe and having a sense of purpose that drove everyone to do more than they might normally was the cause of this feeling. Clearly, later on, it is not the case when Welchman publishes this work. The valued asset has become the liability. This permutation is a shame because it is evidently clear that the man loved doing the work he did.
Welchman eventually becomes a mechanical engineer predominately and oversees the construction of the “bombes” which are machines that aid in helping to break enigma codes. These machines work by brute force and by anticipating “cribs” or stylistic elements of messages that are likely to be present and therefore act as a kind of sanity check for any potential deciphers. Welchman also realizes some shortcuts that can be introduced to the calculation of the “bombes” by way of realizing the fact that some letters are encoded in a two-way relation to one another. Put bluntly if A, then B, and if B, then A. The realization involves a time factor from days to hours before potential breaks could occur.
Eventually Welchman comes to the United States and becomes a US citizen. He works for a corporation called The Mitre Corporation which specializes in secure communications for the US military. Not much of this work is discussed, but Welchman does discuss some prescient matters that he considers key if we are to keep our communication secure moving forward. Many of these issues are still present today, and involve mistakes human beings make when they are dealing with complex codes. One gets lazy, for instance, and might not scramble the settings sufficiently or else they might transmit the same message with two separate settings which allow for greater understanding and breakthroughs for those who wish to decipher such messages. Many of these insights in the computer age are self-apparent, but they were not at the start of WWII and certainly were not as evident in 1982. The weakest link in any encryption scheme will always be human beings.
Welchman dies not long after this book is published in 1985. There is a strong indication that this death might have come from being broken-hearted about his treatment after publishing this account.
Though this reading is very dry at times, it is a must for any serious student of WWII and encryption or even modern computer programming. Once one begins to adapt the language to a more modern idiom, the kinds of problems Welchman tackles are still the ones being tackled today.
Some books are phenomenons. The Hitchhiker’s Guide is a cult classic. Once in awhile, a reader might review some previous works with a new eye. For instance, the last time this reviewer read this work, Douglas Adams was alive. He now, sadly, no longer is having died in May 2001 shortly before the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Adams spanned a long career of writing about science fiction and contributed to the venerable TV series Doctor Who. The Hitchhiker’s Guide was meant to be first a radio show and so it was therefore a script. It was only a book incidentally.
A more mature reading of Adams’s work proves to have borrowed extensively from the Bible. This “Biblical Theme” is a running current throughout his work. It is not a stretch to say that everything written here is an exercise in absurdity. Adams takes more than a few pot shots at religion, although he attempts to play these shots off as being part of “how the universe works”. There is a certain “Mark Twain” type of mechanism at work here, though, because a lot of what Adams is saying as jokes are actual things that are happening. It is clear he is borrowing from the Bible, the search for the shipwreck of the Titanic, a lot of “conspiracy theories” about “lizard aliens” and a host of other bits and pieces that formed the matrix of the latter-half of the 20th century. Twain would famously travel to Israel and write about how no living person would want to live there in their right mind only to be used as a mouthpiece of prophecy since Israel would literally be a thriving country not all that long after his death. Sometimes, the joke is on ourselves even when we think the joke is on everyone else.
Interestingly Adams hated his characters from Arthur Dent to Ford Prefect to Zaphod. He became defined by the success of these characters, but he was also imprisoned by them.
As a collective work, the Hitchhiker’s Guide does not cohere together fluidly or well. There is a lot of repetition. There are large gaps that are not explained. Indeed, the book reads a little like one had a stroke, and then came back and forgot whatever was being written about before other than some broad recollections. In between times the main characters are most often drunk. This is maybe not terribly surprising, since the idea for the book came to Adams when he was laying drunk in a field starring up at the stars–or so we think. Adams establishes very early on that he is not a reliable storyteller or fact-keeper. He is aware of his contradictions in his work, and he informs the reader that this is mostly “their problem”.
Among all this insanity is some quite witty writing combined with some actually surprisingly good prose. The story that does cohere together is entertaining in about the length and duration one would want a radio show to be. It is juvenile, and it is sacrilegious, but it is also, at times, genuinely amusing. Yet, in this amusement one begins to tire of the merry-go-round whirlwind of absurdity. One starts to crave a plot that actually means something other than buffoonery. This is the nature of nonsense writing such as the Hitchhiker’s Guide. Nothing is especially enriched at a soul level for having read the work. It was entertaining.
An interesting technical point concerning Adams was that his last message in his forum read thusly:
Re: Mac OS X
I was going to wait till the summer to install it, but I succumbed and installed it last week. It takes a little getting used to, old habits are hard to reform, and it’s not quite finished (what software ever is), and much of the software that’s out to run on it is Beta.
But…
I think it’s brilliant. I’ve fallen completely in love with it. And the promise of what’s to come once people start developing in Cocoa is awesome…
Two weeks later, Adams was dead after heaping praise on the “cult of Apple”.
When asked what made him pick the number 42 as the answer to life, the universe, and everything, he said he looked out his window into his garden and simply felt like that would be the right choice. Did Adams die after eating the forbidden fruit? Even Marvin would have had to have appreciated that universal joke although Adams, at the age of 49, probably was not laughing.
