It is wrong to ascribe to Alan Turing (Letters, 25 June), brilliant as he was, the breaking of the Enigma codes. The Poles had already done this, saving Bletchley Park nine months' work. Turing and colleagues developed an electromechanical machine called the Bombe (another Polish idea), enabling Enigma messages to be broken on an industrial scale. Eventually, 217 such machines worked 24 hours a day to do this.
Bletchley's other challenge was the breaking of the more complicated Lorenz codes, containing messages between Hitler and his high command. The breakthrough – now seen as one of the greatest intellectual achievements of the war – was made by Bill Tutte and colleagues. To exploit this breakthrough, a system for rapidly decoding Lorenz messages had to be devised. Tommy Flowers' team at Dollis Hill explained to Bletchley the benefits of valve-based, electronic digital processing and by the end of 1943, the first 1,500-valve Colossus computer arrived. Later, 2,500-valve mark 2s also arrived. They decrypted the D-Day arguments between Hitler and his Atlantic Wall defenders. Colossus revealed that 70% of Hitler's Panzer divisions were held at the Pas de Calais (against Rommel's advice), expecting that the real D-Day invasion would be there.
Tommy Flowers was known as "the clever cockney"; it wasn't just Oxbridge dons who helped win the war and shorten it, according to Eisenhower, by two years. Nor should we forget the 9,000 other staff, two-thirds women, who also served at Bletchley Park.
Michael Saunders
Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire
• Professor Rowan-Robinson says it's been estimated that Turing and his team shortened the second world war by two years. However great the value of Turing's work, it is surely time to nail this absurdity. The second world war ended in Europe when the Russian tanks arrived in Berlin. Why would they otherwise have been delayed for two years?
Dr John Harper
London
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