As a code breaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, Jerry Roberts was one of a small team which was ultimately able to read the German high command’s most secret cipher, used by Hitler and his generals to discuss military decisions taken at the very top of the command chain. The single most crucial secret revealed by this, with the vital assistance of the Colossus computer, was the knowledge that Hitler had been persuaded by British ruses that the Allied invasion of Occupied France in the summer of 1944 would take place not in Normandy, but in the Pas de Calais. Forces which could have been available to counter the Normandy landings were therefore held back in northern France on Hitler’s orders.
Roberts