One Day in August: Ian Fleming, Enigma, and the Deadly Raid on Dieppe

‘A lively and readable account’ - Spectator

‘A fine book … well-written and well-researched’ - Washington Times

In less than six hours in August 1942, nearly 1,000 British, Canadian andAmerican commandos died in the French port of Dieppe in an operation thatfor decades seemed to have no real purpose. Was it a dry-run for D-Day, orperhaps a gesture by the Allies to placate Stalin’s impatience for a secondfront in the west?

Historian David O'Keefe uses hitherto classified intelligence archives to prove that thiscatastrophic and apparently futile raid was in fact a mission, set up by Ian Fleming ofBritish Naval Intelligence as part of a ‘pinch’ policy designed to capture material relatingto the four-rotor Enigma Machine that would permit codebreakers like Alan Turing atBletchley Park to turn the tide of the Second World War.

‘A fast-paced and convincing book … that clears up decades of misinformationabout the ignoble raid’ - Toronto Star