Re: Wartime science... ( FWDED from J.V. Field )

 
> Dear Dr Postranecky,
> 
>      I'd be grateful if you would forward this to the list.
> 
>    Thank you for the letter to The Times about the alleged  scrapping of the
> Colossus machines at the end of WW2. At the risk of telling everyone what
> they already know, I am making one more attempt to kill a silly story.
> 
>    What the letter says is largely false. The story that Churchill ordered the
> destruction of all the Colossus machines is not only implausible but
> provably untrue.  Pieces of two Colossus machines were used for the
> Manchester machine (we have a minute from Max Newman requesting permission
> to take the pieces from Bletchley Pak, in the summer of 1945). And another
> document, also in the National Archives (UK), written in 1974 by D. C.
> Horwood, one of the engineers who worked on the original Colossi, and who
> went to work at GCHQ after the war, a document declassified in 2004, tells
> us that at least two Colossus machines were taken to Eastcote and then to
> Cheltenham, where he does not say what they were used for. Details will be
> found in the forthcoming edition of the General Report on Tunny (to be
> published by Wiley this year).
> 
>   It is obviously fair enough to doubt that Churchill was in all respects a
> flawless leader even in wartime, but this particular story is simply not
> true.
> 
> Yours sincerely,
> 
> J. V. Field
>