Badass of the Week: Odette Hallowes

She was born in France in 1912. When World War 2 began she was married to an Englishman and living in Somerset, England with her husband and three young daughters.

She volunteered for war duty, put her three daughters into a convent school, and was infiltrated into France as part of the "Spindle" network on October 31, 1942.

On April 16, 1943 she was arrested by the Gestapo. Classified records released in 2003 indicate that her toenails were pulled out and she was branded with hot irons.

She refused to talk.

The Gestapo sometimes took pictures of their victims before execution. This unfortunate soul, whose name is lost to history, is probably a Resistance agent.

Odette was sent to Ravensbruck, the women's concentration camp, for execution. She somehow survived the war and was awarded the George Cross.

She is not the only woman to have received the George Cross, but she is the only woman not to have received it posthumously.

She is on the right. The George Cross is the blue medal.

After her liberation by the American Fifth Army, she later said, "The first night of my release was unforgettable. It was a glorious night, full of stars and very cold.

"The Americans wanted to find me a bed for the night, but I preferred to sit in the car.

"It was so long since I had seen the night sky."

Odette Hallowes died in 1995.

There is more in William Stevenson's book "A Man Called Intrepid".

Release of classified records, in The Telegraph.

Her obituary, in The Independent.

Fatal Vision

Probably the last appeal for former Green Beret doctor Jeffrey MacDonald, serving life for the 1970 slayings of his wife and two young daughters.

A terrific account in the WaPo:

Rule No. Five: Keep Your Foot Off The Trigger

Comic book cover, from Boing-Boing.

Marines vs. Rome, The Movie

It's the 35th MEU against the Roman Legions. My money's on the Jarheads.

From Boing-boing.

The Terror Of La Porte, Indiana

Fascinating account of a female serial killer who was responsible for at least 25 murders and possibly twice that many. And who may have escaped justice.

Neatorama.

H.P. Lovecraft Box Lunch

Boing-Boing.

New Book

I read the first three chapters here. It's pretty good.

h/t boing-boing.

Mosquitos

I'm reading "The Traveller's Tree" by Patrick Leigh Fermor, a reprint of his 1950 account of a voyage through the Caribbean. Staying at the Hotel des Antilles in Guadeloupe, he was besieged by insects, even under mosquito nets, and wrote,

Joan's plan - still, alas! as I write, no more than a plan - of sleeping chained to a chameleon seems to be the only practical way of neutralizing the unceasing siege of the insect world. With this alert little basilisk camped on one's bosom, suitably camouflaged to melt into the slumberwear; prepared, at the faintest buzz in the surrounding ether, to fire half a yard of tongue at the foe, and swallow it without blinking an eye, one might snore the night peacefully through. Not otherwise.

Delightful book, so far, but contemporary readers might be a little put-off by the author's attempts at amateur ethnology.

Discworld Amigurumi

via Neatorama.

Colossus

Colossus Mark II had 2,400 valves

I just finished reading this book about WWII codebreaking at the legendary Bletchley Park site in England. The cracking of the Enigma codes is well known, but BP also worked on another Nazi cipher system that the Brits code-named "Fish". This was a family of encrypted teletype machines using 5-bit baudot code (32 characters, or, actually, 31 characters and one "null" symbol).

The Enigma machines used three or four 26-contact wired wheels to scramble the text. The Fish machines used 12 wheels, all of different sizes, all of which were co-prime (i.e. not sharing any factors) to produce an enormously long pseudo-random key sequence. This 5-bit key, added to the 5-bit plaintext in the "exclusive-or" (XOR) manner, produced the ciphertext. To decipher, the recipient just added the key to the ciphertext in the XOR manner to reproduce the plaintext. All of this was done automatically, using punched paper tape. The Fish machines could be hooked up to landlines or connected to a radio transmitter, and the latter is how BP came to intercept them.

The Brits cleverly deduced how the machine was designed without ever having seen one and devised ingenious paper-and-pencil methods to break the code and read the plaintext. The Nazis changed the key every day at midnight, and the BP nightshift would desperately try to extract the key. Once the key was known, any intercept that day could be decoded using the "Fish" analogue machines built at BP. Most of the cryptanalysts at BP rarely saw a decrypted message; they didn't have to. They were interested in extracting the key.

But as the war progressed, the Nazis continually upgraded the security on the "Fish" until BP's paper-and-pencil solutions were taking several days, then several weeks to complete. This was costing Allied lives, so automated methods were devised, the first being "Heath Robinson" devices (we would call them "Rube Goldberg" machines). These were high-speed paper tape readers that could run two message tapes synchronously at about 30-mph and compare them for statistical anomalies. This put BP back in the business of reading the messages on a daily basis, for a while.

Better operator security eventually outran the Heath Robinsons, and an all-electronic method was suggested by Thomas Flowers, on loan to BP from the British telephone system, where he had designed and installed the first all-electronic telephone switching system in Britain. Flowers designed the first Colossus computer, a 1500-tube (the Brits call them "valves") behemoth, to search for statistical anomalies a thousand times faster than the Heath Robinsons. The "Colossi" were built on an emergency basis, 'round the clock, the men literally sleeping in the shop when they weren't working. There were eventually eleven Colossus machines. Flowers was already designing improvements into the next unit before its predecessor was out the door. The last Colossus was delivered to BP just as the war was ending.

The most interesting thing I gathered from the book is that the legendary mathematician Alan Turing was not involved in the design or operation of the Colossus at all. He worked on Enigma codes only.

This color photo is of a modern replica of a WWII Colossus at Bletchley Park, all of the originals having been destroyed at the end of the war (Churchill is said to have specifically ordered that they be broken down into "pieces no bigger than a man's hand"). Although there are rumors that one or two may have survived at GCHQ or NSA, and used for training. After the war, captured Fish machines were used by the French and also by the East German "Stasi", which considered them unbreakable. They were phased out in the 1960s.

The level of secrecy imposed by the British Official Secrets Act makes the American NSA look like a relative blabbermouth: details of the Colossus were not declassified by the Brits until October 2000. At the end of the war, the British cryptographers wrote a secret report on their work, knowing that it would not be released during their lifetimes. It included this rather poignant description of the Colossus:

It is regretted that it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the fascination of a Colossus at work; its sheer bulk and apparent complexity; the fantastic speed of thin paper tape round the glittering pulleys; the childish pleasure of not-not, span, print main header and other gadgets; the wizardry of purely mechanical decoding letter by letter (one novice thought she was being hoaxed); the uncanny action of the typewriter in printing the correct scores without and beyond human aid; the stepping of the display; periods of eager expectation culminating in the sudden appearance of the longed-for score; and the strange rhythms characterizing every type of run: the stately break-in, the erratic short run, the regularity of wheel-breaking, the stolid rectangle interrupted by the wild leaps of the carriage-return, the frantic chatter of a motor run, even the ludicrous frenzy of hosts of bogus scores.

I wonder what it sounded like?

UPDATE: My prayers have been answered:

Rooms Packed With Books

Boing-boing.

The New Travails of Huckleberry Finn

Hilarious! And fully OSHA-compliant!

via boing-boing.

Sexy Sci-fi Covers

From boing-boing.

Top Ten Bookstore Cats

This is #6, Asimov. He lives at Seek Books in West Roxbury, Mass. The store specializes in science fiction, fantasy and horror.

Mentalfloss via Neatorama.

Books And Bullets

Libraries And Bars

They're bars with books! LOTS of books!

Via Neatorama.

The Girl Who Played With Fire

The second book of the trilogy is as good as the first.

What an unforgettable character! I want a T-Shirt that says "WWLSD?" (What would Lisbeth Salander do?)

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

There's a story in publishing that the author William Makepeace Thackeray picked up Dumas' The Count Of Monte Cristo one morning at 6 AM and couldn't put it down again until 11 PM that night. Maybe Thackeray was just a slow reader; we're talking about a 1300-page novel. But it does have quite a reputation as a compulsive page-turner.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is another. I just finished it in two sittings. It has elements of:

The Silence Of The Lambs - horrific, sadistic serial killer (or killers?)
Psycho - who's that in the basement?
Laura - is the victim really dead?
Klute - two badly mismatched investigators are played for fools by Mr. Big
The Big Sleep - fabulously wealthy old-money family has secrets to keep
Pulp Fiction - say hello to Zeke

Quite a read and highest recommendation. Fantastic.

Toilet Paper

There's a meme rattling around, "What reading matter is in your bathroom?"

Here's an actual photograph:

Top Ten Post-Apocalyptic Novels

The Road
The Stand
Y: The Last Man
A Canticle for Leibowitz
The Drowned World
The Passage
World War Z
The World Without Us
The Day of the Triffids
The Last Man

From Time Magazine.

The Road was about the darkest ride I've ever had in a book. Every ten pages or so I had to put it down and go to the front door, just to make sure that everything was OK. Whew!

But they missed Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank and Pulling Through by Dean Ing, plus Lucifer's Hammer, On The Beach and Level 7.