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Welcome to Legacy and the second episode of our series on Alan Turing, the story of a war-winning,

science pioneering codebreaker who suffered at the hands of the British state.

We left you in the last episode on the morning of the 3rd of September 1939, as Alan Turing

hears on the radio that Britain is at war with Germany.

The very next day, Turing gets on a train and heads to Bletchley Park, a large Victorian

estate 50 miles northwest of London, and the wartime HQ of Britain's

top code breakers. As we mentioned in the last episode, he's already been doing some part-time

work for them, but this is now full-time, and he's got a team to lead. Now the country's at war,

Turing has to sign the official Secrets Act. This means he can't discuss his work with anyone

during his lifetime, and also that it will be withheld from public knowledge for decades.

Not that he necessarily cares about this kind of thing, he's got a few other priorities.

Yes, the small task of decoding a famously unbreakable code, the Enigma. The Enigma is a typewriter-like

cipher machine used by the German military to send messages securely. And the hope is that breaking

enigma will allow Britain to anticipate enemy actions and counteract their plans.

What thereafter in particular is intel on German naval communications.

German new boats who hunt either alone or in what are often called wolf packs are inflicting

heavy losses on Allied forces at sea. And this means that vital supplies from the US are not

making their way to Britain. The German plan is to starve the country

...