The Imitation Game: The Story Of Alan Turing

More people died during World War Two than any other war to date. Perhaps that is the reason why Hollywood has made, and is still making, many movies about World War Two. One movie called The Imitation Game, focuses not on the battlefield, but on the lesser known code breaking done by Alan Turing in the war. His team’s success helped the British foil the German’s war plans and had a major impact on the outcome of the war. The Imitation Game tells the story of Alan Turing and his team’s codebreaking in a way that is a useable source of learning in the classroom because it shows the work and intelligence that happen behind the scenes and before the battles.

The movie introduces Alan Turing, a genius mathematician from Cambridge University in

The contraption is often classified as an electromechanical machine (“Bombe”). The gadget is 8 feet wide, 7 feet high, and 2 feet, deep (“Bombe (U.S.)”). On the outside, there were numerous dials and knobs to indicate part of the message it had decoded (“Bombe (U.S.)”). The Bombe Machines (69 in total were built during the war (“Bombe”)) were being used to crack about 84,000 messages each month (Copeland). However, the British did not react to all of these messages to hide the fact that they broke the Enigma code. If the Germans knew, they would create a new code, rendering the Bombes useless. In addition, the British rarely spoke about the Bombe, as very few officials actually knew about it. A lot of the sensitive information, such as enemy locations or attack plans, was codenamed ULTRA (“Bombe”). The Nazi’s would often use U-boats to target Allied ships trying to cross the Atlantic with supplies or food, as the Nazi’s tried, and actually had some success in starving England. Winston Churchill said “the only thing that really ever frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril” (Copeland). Years after the war, Turing really was arrested for being gay and given a choice between going to prison or being put on chemical treatment to “cure” his homosexuality. Turing chose the latter. Two years later, Alan Turing was found dead in his bedroom from cyanide poisoning which many believe was suicide(Hodges). All of the codebreaking done by the British was kept a secret until many years after the war. Today, many people consider Alan Turing a World War 2 hero. It is estimated that the Bombe shortened the war in Europe by two to four years. Experts conclude that if the war had continued for 2 or 3 more years, as many as 14 to 21 MILLION more people could have been killed (Copeland). Those numbers cast a shining light to help anyone understand the significance of what