The Emperor's Codes: The Thrilling Story of the Allied Code Breakers Who Turned the Tide of World War II

Tells important story of British contribution to breaking various Japanese codes and the Allies victory. Overall narrative informative and well written. One criticism of the book is that there are too many first person narratives regarding living and working conditions. These slowed down the reading and understanding of the overall narrative.

The story is way more complicated and interesting than I knew. It was interesting to read about the various competing interests even though they were on the same side.

Interesting historical pice about how we won the war by breaking the coded messages. Fascinating information I never knew. Good read.

Very well researched narrative of Great Britain's contributions to the effort to break Japanese codes during WWII. At times, it reads a bit like a military history, mentioning this unit and that and saying they made valuable, but undetailed contributions as well. But at other times, it provides remarkable and previously unheralded material on the role of women in the effort and on the impact of the personal lives of the men and Romeo involved. Well worth the read!

I could have won the war with these guys! Amazing how they had to work the entire war and never really totally break the codes.

Very interesting, if overly detailed, story of the role of code breaking in the Pacific theater in WWII. While I consider myself knowledgeable on the subject, I knew almost nothing about the Pacific theater efforts. I was surprised at the British contribution and the extent of how petty turf battles prevented much of the coordination between the US and the UK. There was much discussion of how complex the Japanese codes and cyphers mainly because of the complexity of the Japanese language. Even the "morse" code was very much different from what we were accustomed. I was surprising to me that most of the Japanese communication encoding was done by human rather than machines. My only problem was the level of detail of the codes without any tutorial on the terms being used.

I am a history buff and especially around D day focus on WWII. I had no idea of any of this except for the Battle of Midway. The way the code breakers worked was fascinating and seemingly impossible. The differences they made were huge. So disappointed in the petty actions of some of the leaders.

Fascinating story of breaking a wide range of codes used by the Japanese. There is a small section walking through the process of breaking the codes, describing aligning the groups by "additive", guessing common words to try out different additive values, validating with various other sources, and gradually building up the underlying code books. The collaboration, or lack of collaboration, between Britain and the US Is a major theme. The book uses the device of lengthy quotes or excerpts from memoirs of from hundreds of individuals involved, which paint a clear picture of life during the war at Bletchley, Washington, Melbourne, and more interesting, at many forward and field posts in India, Ceylon, and throughout the Pacific region.