FULLY BOOKED -Friday Morning Talks: WW2 Codebreaking and Intelligence – People and Places – with Ron Koorm

Please note that this talk is now fully booked. If you would like to be put onto a waiting list for any potential places, please contact [email protected] 

Join us for our Friday morning talk, where Ron Koorm will talking to us about some of the key people and places involved globally during the 2nd World War. 

Ron was commissioned to write a glossary on WW2 codebreaking in three parts, the first for release in summer 2024 is subtitled ‘People and Places’. This is not just about what happened in the UK, but also across Europe, and the world at the time. It aims to give a better understanding and balance to the reader and researcher of what really happened in the build-up to the war, the war itself, and some post-war developments. Some of the research on People and Places impacting on gathering intelligence from the enemy and trying to break the enemy ciphers will be discussed in this talk.

Although there will be famous people and places included, others will be much less known to the public. Thus, people who operated codebreaking machines at outstations, engineers, mathematicians, military officers, Y-station personnel, politicians, and others all played a part, and many of them were outside the UK. Some were inventors and innovators, either of machines or of systems and processes. A brief selection of people and of places will form part of this talk, and may give those attend the inspiration to find out more, in their own time.

The build-up to D-Day, June 1944, is an interesting period, inasmuch intelligence gathering and decoding enemy messages became critically important to the allies. The activities and preparation proved largely to be successful, but it was not all plain sailing. It could have so easily gone wrong, so risk and reward had to be considered in detail, and balanced.

Part of the content of the talk will discuss some of the options that the Allies had at the time, and also the enemy perspective of the allies, too.

This talk will take place onsite in the Museum’s Learning Centre and is included in Museum admission or Annual Membership.

Advance booking required – Please note that this talk is now fully booked. If you would like to be put onto a waiting list for any potential places, please contact [email protected]