I’m grateful to Mark Baldwin for his energetic and englightening lecture on the use of the Enigma machine, and for the brief opportunity to touch those keys myself and see how the rotors work. The first Enigma machine to come into the possession of British Intelligence in wartime was captured in May 1941, not February 1941 as in this novel. I hope readers will give me a little poetic license over this slight anachronism. The timing of The Enigma Game was dictated very strictly by some of the less sensational events of Code Name Verity; when I sat down to write, it was already “canon” that Jamie had lost his fingers and toes to frostbite after ditching a Blenheim in the North Sea sometime before March 1941. Perhaps Felix Baer’s Enigma machine was kept especially secret, or got snarled in administrative red tape, as Jamie worried it might. British Intelligence did make some shocking blunders; it’s not impossible.

It’s increasingly the case that my novels feel collaborative rather than an individual effort, and I owe a debt of gratitude to my international team of editors: Hannah Allaman, Emily Meehan, Lynne Missen, Ellen Holgate, and Lucy Mackay Sim, particularly Hannah and Lucy, who whipped this book into shape over three intense drafts. I’m also grateful to the talented writer Catherine Johnson, who graciously made time at short notice to give a careful reading of my manuscript and share her experiences as the daughter of Jamaican and British parents. And of course I would not be the writer I am today without the continued support of my agent and dear friend, Ginger Clark. The same is true of my husband, Tim Gatland, who pointed out that I needed to run the Aberdeen rail line inland around my fictional RAF Windyedge, and who accompanied me on more than one reconnaissance flight along the North Sea coast of Aberdeenshire, even indulging me in a landing at “Deeside.”

And I want to acknowledge and remember the Blenheim airmen who inspired me and for whom my heart is eternally sore, in particular the young crew of 21 Squadron’s Blenheim R3914: pilot Harry Collinge, observer Douglas Osborne, and wireless operator/air gunner Albert Moore. They were all between twenty and twenty-three years of age when they lost their lives on the night of 26–27 November 1940, crashing into a hillside in the north of England on their way home from an attack on a power station in Cologne, Germany. They were off course and didn’t have a working radio. Their plane was seen in flames before it hit the ground, but since they made it back to Britain they may well have been shot down by British antiaircraft gunners, mistaking them for the enemy in the dark.

LEST WE FORGET.

Elizabeth Wein

Mt. Gretna, Pennsylvania

July 2019

Further reading: