WHO CRACKED ENIGMA? BREAKING THE NAZI SECRET CODE MACHINE

Fabien Tillon, illustrations by Lelio Bonacorsso

(Nouveau Monde, 116 pages, 2022)

Beyond the fighting, the outcome of World War II was also—and perhaps above all—played out in the intelligence offices; and if the Allies won the war, it was partly thanks to the decoding of Enigma, which the Germans used for their military transmissions. However, Enigma was nothing less than the most complex coding machine ever invented, with a scale of possible combinations of the order of a billion billion . . . The comic book Who Cracked Enigma? tells the story of this extraordinary adventure spanning years, whose heroes were spies but also mathematicians and crypto-analysts from all over Europe.

A Polish mathematician, Marian Rejewski, opened the way in the early 1930s. Thanks to complex calculations, he began to identify repeating patterns of letters and was able to bring out bits of meaning. But soon the German army invaded Poland and he had to flee, which cut short his research. The British secret services took over, under the aegis of Alan Turing. In 1942, they succeeded in breaking the code. Their discovery would change the course of the war—and of history.

With a scenario that reads like a spy novel, and a classic line of drawings, this graphic rendition of Dermot Turing’s book is sure to please readers of all ages, and shine a light on one of the most successful intelligence workforces.

Dermot Turing is an English lawyer and historian. He is the author of the acclaimed biography Prof (Pitkin, 2016), about the life of his uncle, Alan Turing. His fascination with the history of Enigma led him to write X, Y & Z: The Real Story of How Enigma Was Broken (The History Press, 2018)—the book from which the comic book is adapted.

Fabien Tillon is a French comic book writer. He won the Sunflower Prize at the Angoulême Festival with his album Les Mèches courtes (Vertige Graphic, 2010), and the Amerigo Vespucci Prize for Roi du Vent (La Boîte à Bulles, 2021). He has also written essays on comics.

Lelio Bonaccorso is an Italian cartoonist and comic book teacher. After several collaborations with DC Comics and Marvel, he has notably worked with Marco Rizzo in Italy and with Loulou Dedola in France, with whom he published Le père turc (Glénat, 2018).