If you lived in Britain at the height of the war against Germany, squadrons of Luftwaffe bombers circling the sky were part of the terror of day-to-day life. Britain suffered enormously—and stoically. During the Blitz, which lasted from September 1940 until May 1941, and then returned again in 1944, London alone was hit by 71 major attacks. This is the background to David A. Price’s Geniuses at War, a methodical account of the secret British code-breakers working to decode Adolf Hitler’s wartime communications and figure out when the Luftwaffe would strike. Price recounts that over the course of the war in Britain, 52,000 people were killed by bombing raids and another 8,500 by V-1s and V-2s, winged rockets that inaugurated the age of ballistic missiles. “What you didn’t want to hear was the engine becoming silent, a signal that the machine was about to dive and detonate its 1,870-pound payload,” Price writes.
