I don’t go to big-release movies to “feel ‘informed’.” I go to be entertained. There’s nothing wrong with criticizing a film for its factual inaccuracies, but don’t attribute false motives for going to the cinema.
Um, what?
People (straight and gay) who have plenty of supportive friends and co-workers kill themselves all the time. Human psychology is much more complicated than you seem to think.
Alan Turing apparently did have plenty of friends and lovers, he wasn’t the autistic type that the movie (inexplicably) seems to have chosen to portray him as. His suicidal depression probably had less to do with his supportive friends, or lack thereof, than with the fact that he was being, you know, forced to take female hormones on pain of imprisonment.
Another connection that occurred to me as I was watching the closing titles: Whether or not the Bletchley group shortened the war, it certainly wasn’t by two years – If the war with Germany was still going on after the Trinity test (barely two months after VE day), the first atomic bombs would likely have fallen somewhere in Germany.
Maybe by a matter of months?
According to the biography I read on him (Turing: The Enigma), it is apparently not so certain he in fact committed suicide.
The evidence is slight: he was found dead in his bed of cyanide poisioning with a half-eaten apple near him. The conlusion drawn by the officials was that he had dipped the apple in poision, committing suicide.
However, the apple was never actually tested for poision, and Turing was, allegedly, in the habit of eating an apple before bed. He left no suicide note, and told no-one of his intentions - though he had discussed, in past years, killing himself, allegedly not as an actual plan as such.
It was certainly possible that he could have been poisioned accidentally - he used cyanide in his experiments at home (apparently his mother was constantly nagging him to cut that shit out lest it kill him - another theory raised was that, if he killed himself, it was in such a way as to give his mother plausible deniability).
The court-ordered hormone ‘treatment’ had ended some time - a year - before his death; if this was the impetus, it would have made more sense for him to have committed suicide when he was found guilty, or when his ‘treatment’ was initiated, or when it started to have an effect on him - not a year after it was over. Of course, it could be that it had delayed effects.
Allegedly, he had a rather non-depressive view of his treatment by the authorities - he was quite convinced he had done absolutely nothing of which he ought to be ashamed (which of course is our modern view), and so he did not feel an “disgrace” over being “punished” - simply viewing it as an absurd inconvenience to his work, and of course regretted its unfortunate physical effects.
In favour of the “suicide by poision apple” theory is that Turing was allegedly a big fan of the movie Snow White, and particularly loved the poision-apple scene.
Overall, despite the official verdict, it is impossible now to say whether his death was suicide or accident.
FWIW, the couple of years estimate famously derives from Harry Hinsley, the official historian of British intelligence in WWII. I’m fairly sure he very explicitly states a specific estimate somewhere, but his introduction as editor to the very good collection Codebreakers (OUP, 1993) is somewhat vague on the precise issue, while indeed acknowledging that the Manhattan Project might well have made the whole issue moot anyway.
D-Day was 10 months before Nazi Germany crumbled.
RE: two years: How did Harry Hinsley propose the Allies would have won the war 14-months before D-Day?
Well… maybe if Germany’s communications had remained entirely uncompromised, they would have been more effective at sinking relief convoys from North America to the U.K. and USSR and maybe Operation Barbarossa would have been less of a disaster, such that they’d have been in a much stronger position in 1944-45, conceivably enough to repel Operation Overlord and stall the Soviet counteroffensive just in time to get nuked in August 1945 anway…
Actually, it’s hard to picture a series of events so favourable to Germany that American nukes wouldn’t have rendered the whole thing moot sooner or later. At most, it could have radically changed the postwar environment.
He didn’t. Your question makes no sense whatsoever.
I’m not so certain.
My understanding is that the rate-limiting step in the production of nukes was the creation of sufficient enriched uranium or plutonium - when they dropped two on Japan, that was all they had at the moment, and it would take a while to produce more. No doubt under the stimulus of war that could have been ramped up, but how quickly?
Having a few nukes would no doubt have created a ghastly ordeal for the Nazi regime (plus of course the people of Europe), but if the Nazis were doing well conventionally, would it have been enough to force a regime change?
After all, the Allies were already (on occasion, when the conditions were just right) destroying whole German cities without forcing a regime change, albeit by the more laborious methods of conventional bombing. The Nazi leadership was evidently not troubled by fighting to the last, even if it meant death on a vast scale for Germans. The possibility exists of a sort of horrible stalemate - the Germans too conventionally strong in Europe for an Anglo-American landing to succeed; the Americans continuing strategic bombing on an ever-vaster scale, with the occasional nuke thrown in.
A (possible) sequence could go something like this:
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Lacking Enigma decrypts, the Allies temporarily lose the Battle of the Atlantic. England is reduced to starvation. The Allies divert all resources to re-opening the Atlantic life-line: North Africa is lost, and the Western Allies are unable to support Russia with lend-lease via the Atlantic route.
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The Germans, thus undiverted, and with access to ME oil, are able to reduce the Soviets to a peripheral, Asian power. European Soviet Union is reduced to a series of Nazi provinces; the population there is enslaved or murdered. War continues, but much further east; this colonial war absorbs much of the Nazi’s resources.
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The Americans eventually strike back. The “europe first” camp loses to Admiral King’s “Japan first”. The Americans develop nukes and crush Japan.
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For a while, a bloody stalemate; the Americans (eventually) force open the Atlantic, start using England as an ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’, use conventional and nuclear bombing to attempt to destroy the Nazi empire from the air.
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The Nazis respond by moving production around (particularly, as far east and out of range of bombers) and, where possible, underground for vital bits. The population, of course, cannot be easily moved and so they suffer horribly. Many European cities are blasted into rubble - in some cases, radioactive rubble.
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The Nazis are unable to capiltalize much on their slave-empire in the former European Soviet Union; the eastern frontier remains a huge drain (now supported heavily by the Americans over the Pacific route). The Nazis have “wonder-weapons” - essentially, two-stage ballistic missiles - capable of hitting the US but lag behind in the development of nukes.
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Eventually, the Americans build up enough strength for a cross-channel invasion, and the war enters its final phase.
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The war lasts two years longer than it otherwise would have; the destruction - in Europe and European Soviet Union - is far, far worse.
Maybe, but it’s easy to creep into alien space bat territory.
I don’t think this really does it. “Alien space bats” is all about an implausible or impossible deus ex machina to explain a divergence into alternate history - like time travellers showing up in ancient Rome to hand out machine guns.
Lacking the ability to read Nazi codes doesn’t really fit with that. It is totally plausible that the Allies could have failed to read Nazi codes.
It isn’t exactly impossible for the Allies to have lost control of the Atlantic, albeit perhaps temporarily. Allegedly, this was the battle that Churchill was most worried throughout the war. It was also a battle very heavily influenced by code-breaking (on both sides). There is a striking parallel between the Allies’ temporary inability to read codes, and doing badly in that battle.
Now admittedly, there was a whole host of Allied advances that accounted for eventual success in the Battle of the Atlantic (long-range air cover, the ‘hedgehog’, centrimic radar, etc. etc.). The question is one of timing. It is not implasuible that, had the Nazis been able to read Allied codes and the Allies not been able to read Nazi codes, the Allies could have suffered truly crippling losses before all of these advances could be brought into play in concert.
The issue then becomes - what if the Allies had lost control of the Atlantic trade (even temporarily)? It is not impossible that this could have had very serious knock-on effects.
As I’ve noted on the Dope on multiple occasions over the years, this is utterly mythical.
Components for the next weapon were being readied to be flown to Tinian and George C. Marschall was told by Groves on the 10th, the day after Nagasaki, that he expected the next bombing to be on the 17th or 18th.
Groves’s basis for this estimate was a telegram from Oppenheimer the day before (i.e. the 9th) stating when the components would leave Los Alamos for Kirtland and thence to Tinian. The high explosive lenses would leave on the morning of the 11th and the plutonium core would leave on the evening of the 12th. There was already a stockpile of the other components, like the casing, on Tinian.
The timing of the two previous attacks had been left to the military, but events were beginning to move rather fast by this stage. Truman removed that existing freedom on the 10th, allowing the military to continue with preparations for another bombing but requiring that the use of this next weapon depend on his explicit approval. Probably independently, Groves and Oppenheimer agreed to proceed cautiously when it came to shipping stuff. Robert Bacher, who had become Los Alamos’s specialist in handling completed plutonium cores, apparently had this core in the car ready to be driven to Kirtland when Groves cancelled the transfer.
Groves’s memo to Marshall is reproduced in John Coster-Mullen’s Atom Bombs (p294 in the 2006 edition I have). It’s discussed in Racing for the Bomb (Steerforth, 2002, p424) by Robert Norris and the exchanges with Oppenheimer are summarised in Critical Assembly (Cambridge, 1993) by Hoddeson et al.
As for bombs thereafter, Stimson was told in a cable from George Harrison on 24th July to expect three more in September, with rate rising to seven in December (Norris, p415). These were overwhelmingly plutonium ones. In the event, this was never achieved, but that was because the Japanese surrender removed all urgency.
However, the notion that there were only two available does go back a long way - and to a somewhat surprising source. It’s already unambiguously present in Stimson’s famous February 1947 Harper’s magazine article justifying the bombing. This was, understandably, taken as authorative about such details and the claim repeated on that basis.
(Since the article was heavily drafted by Harvey and McGeorge Bundy, one can always question its reliability on the details. It’s possible that Stimson had completely forgotten asking Harrison about the production schedule at the time.)
My apologies - I have seen this claim repeated multiple times in legitimate histories - sometimes combined with a claim that plutonium production in the reactors was curtailed or “poisioned” by the so-called “Wigner effect”, meaning that plutonium production could not be maintained until this issue was solved. If this is inaccurate, I again apologize.
I find this movie hugely ironic .
During the release of U-571, the British complained about being “Hollywoodized” out of their contribution to decoding, in that it was they rather then the Americans that recovered an Enigma machine.
So in this British movie, the filmmakers completely ignore Poland’s contributions to the effort, primarily the fact that they built the first “bombe” rather than the Brits, and that Turing’s (sizeable, admittedly) contributions were based on the Polish machine.
As a Computer Scientist with a good knowledge of Crypto, this was a maddening movie. They just got so much wrong. The timeline, the role of others, etc.
But the worst was the late “discovery” of using cribs. Which all Crypto people had been using all along. Good freaking grief. What a mess.
Throw in scenes like the Big Decision to not warn the convoy. They had minutes to decide, people, minutes! Egad.
The complete distortion of Turing’s personality was also another matter. The guy was smart and got along well with people. Co-workers and superiors generally liked him. No need to turn him into a jerk.
The rest was typical British movie-of-the-week level performances and production. (Which requires a couple of Downton Abbey actors.) Nothing spectacular. I have no idea why it got nominated for major awards.
I think the movie was nominated because of its subject matter. It has happened before that a mediocre movie was nominated (and even won) because it was on the right side of a political issue. Also, the acting and production values were good.
But you’re right - the story didn’t have much to do with reality. It was a series of manufactured crises, some of which should have been obvious even to people who weren’t already familiar with cryptography or history. For example, no government at war would leave it to the codebreakers to decide what to do with the intelligence they uncover. Also, the midnight deadline was just ridiculous - intelligence doesn’t become useless at the instant the enemy changes their encryption key.
I disliked this film on a number of levels, but mostly the false dramas and clunky, movie of the week direction (the room freezes as Turing makes his astonishing cognitive leap - pull back camera!). What a crapshow.
"Everybody knows you never go full retard. "
I’m in computer science and know Turing’s story fairly well. The Imitation Game was melodrama, and Turing wasn’t Rain Man in real life, but I still enjoyed it. I’m just glad more people at least know of Turing, his importance in history and the injustice he suffered.
Sure, most people still don’t really fully understand why he was important (“He invented computers!” is wildly inaccurate and does a disservice to von Neumann, for example) nor would they recognise the man from his portrayal, but at least it’s a start.
That last paragraph makes me wonder what you thought of the BBC documentary mentioned earlier: Cracking the Code, based on the play with the same name. I really liked it (Heck, it’s why I knew about the Imitation Game before it was a big deal.)