Code breaking in the Pacific

摘要

I was excited to review this book, and I was not disappointed; the book is "weird" in a really good way. The publishers classified the book as a computer science book, and, of course, they are not wrong. But it is also a history book and perhaps falls under a few other classifications as well. It is a well-deserved companion to the seminal text by David Kahn, The codebreakers [1], and will enjoy a place right next to it on my shelves. This book is about cryptanalysis in general and the history of cryptanalysis in the Pacific theater during World War II. It is an important contribution to both the history of the war and the history of cryptanalysis development, as well as an interesting text on techniques of cryptography and cryptanalysis. (In that, I am not troubling the reader with the differentiation between cryptography and ciphering; this is a review and not a text.)