January 21 1980
The Press Democrat, Santa Rosa, California, Monday, January 21, 1980
BEATING THE CODE by George Koltanowski
In Ultra Goes to War (1978, McGraw-Hill) its author, Ronald Lewis, says that Harry Golombek, Stuart Milner-Barry and Hugh O'Donel Alexander were very important members of the team which broke the Nazi Enigma code (referred to as the “Ultra Secret”).
In September, 1939, the British team for the International Chess Olympian was in Buenos Aires. It had just qualified for the final when war broke out.
“With visions of London in flames,” Stuart Milner-Barry recalled, “most of us did not think we could go on playing chess.”
And so, on the blacked-out and unconvoyed Alcantana, which happened to be leaving Argentina on the night of their decision, the team returned safely to England—their only alarm coming from a porpoise which Milner-Barry, watchkeeping at night, had mistaken for a U-boat.
Had the ship been torpedoed, the whole course, of World War II could have been changed. For the British chess team, composed of a group of talented and patriotic players, was later credited with a large part in one of the most crucial undertakings of the war, the breaking of the Nazi Enigma code.
They were men of quality.
Stuart Milner-Barry, and undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, had been a British boy champion at chess and became president of the British Chess Federation. He later occupied high posts in the British Treasury and was knighted. Alexander had obtained a first in mathematics at King's College, Cambridge.
For a quarter of a century he maintained a position as Britain's leading chess player. The third of the remarkable trio was Golombek, a recognized international chess master, who represented Britain in no fewer than nine Olympiads, and who, like Milner-Barry, was later knighted.
