Lift Up Your Hearts!

Station X: Decoding Nazi Secrets by Michael Smith (TV Books, 1999)

Writers like Michael Pollan, John McPhee, and Rowan Jacobsen can take the oddest subjects and weave them into a riveting story.  Would that any of them had written Station X!  Michael Smith has a riveting story:  the long-kept secret of the codebreakers that revealed so much of Axis strategy and tactics during World War II.  The facts themselves kept me reading the book, but I'd have finished it in a day if it had been written as I'm sure it could be.  Without a doubt it's a story worth knowing, and you can get a taste of it from Wikipedia.

I had heard, of course, that the British had cracked the Germans' supposedly uncrackable Enigma Machine in WWII, a fact that only became known much later—the techniques were still being used in the Cold War—leaving participants from the lowest level to Winston Churchill unable to talk about what they did during the war.  Here are a few things I didn't know:

• The success was not due to a "big break" that solved the problem once for all, but to many little breaks that added up and to much tedious work—work and breaks that needed to be repeated and achieved every day.  In addition to serious mathematics, cracking the codes required intuition, imagination, guesswork, and persistence.  Old-fashioned, flesh-and-blood spying played a significant role, and good ol' human mistakes (such as starting a message with the very recognizable "Heil Hitler!") were essential.

Success depended very largely on German operators ignoring the rules.  "We could usually break things when we identified the human error and that was what it was all about," said Mavis Lever.  "If the Germans had kept to the rule book and done it properly, as they were instructed to do, then of course we wouldn't have been able to get it out."

Among his many achievements, Tiltman had helped to crack the cipher used by the Japanese naval attaché in Berlin, assisted by the latter's tendency to begin each of his reports with the phrase:  "I have the honor to report to your excellency that..."

• Cracking the codes began during World War I.
• The Poles made the first critical break, providing both irony and concern later, during the Cold War.
• Bletchley Park workers were a motley crew of brilliant and eccentric folks.  The initial group consisted mainly of liberal arts professors, on the grounds that codebreaking primarily required language skills.  When mathematicians were brought in they and their work were viewed with suspicion:  what could they possibly contribute?
• Many of the Bletchley Park appointments were made by word of mouth, someone knowing someone else who might be helpful.  But some recruitment strategies cast a wider net:  They arranged for the Daily Telegraph to hold a timed crossword puzzle contest for any reader who was interested.  Those who solved the puzzle in under 12 minutes were then secretly invited for an interview for Bletchley Park.
• The Bletchley Park group was largely non-military, and functioned best (or functioned at all) because they were not treated as military personnel.  There's an important place for military discipline, structure, drill, and authority, but not when the most essential element of your efforts is creativity.  The military was at first suspicious of these peculiar civilians, and did not think their work could have any value.

There was also to be a number of custom-built brick blocks to house the necessary expansion.  But there was still no sign of the manpower needed to fill them.  The armed forces refused to let fit, young recruits join intelligence.  They were needed to fight the war.

At the beginning of April 1940, shortly before the invasion of Normandy, the OIC [Operational Intelligence Center] ignored Hinsley's report, derived purely from [decoded] traffic analysis, of an unusual build-up of German naval activity in the Baltic.  As a result, the British were caught completely unawares by the German occupation of Norway.

Two months later, Hinsley reported that a number of German warships were about to break out of the Baltic.  Again he was ignored.  It was to lead to one of the Royal Navy's worst disasters of the Second World War, the sinking of the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious.

"For about a fortnight beforehand,  I pretty well rang the OIC once or twice a day and said:  'Look you ought surely to pass a signal out on this.  Can you possibly pass a signal out?,'" Hinsley said. ""They showed some interest.  But were not sufficiently convinced to send a warning to the Home Fleet."

On June 7, 1940, the Glorious and her two escort destroyers were spotted by a German flotilla....

On that day more than ever, I was saying to the duty officer: "For goodness sakes, can't you just persuade them to send an alert or even 'It may be the case'?" He said:  "I can't because first of all my traffic analysis group doesn't agree with your interpretation.  It doesn't see the point, doesn't see there's any evidence, and secondly my boss, the chief of the OIC, will not go to the operational chaps and say send this kind of signal out on your kind of information."

The next day HMS Glorious and her two escort destroyers ... were sunk with the loss of 1500 men.

American Bill Bundy, a law student from Harvard, recalled:

I don't expect ever to work in a group of people that was more thoroughly dedicated and with a range of skills, insight, and imagination that the Bletchley people had....  There were to mathematicians.  There were those very competent people who ran the mechanics of the thing.  It was an extraordinary group, and that was true right across the board in [Bletchley Park], whatever system of selection they used, and I've heard lots of narratives and lots of colorful stories about it, the result was an extraordinary group of people in an extraordinary organization.

Their whole structure was one where you might readily find a major working under a lieutenant or under a civilian, somewhat younger.  Whoever was in charge was the person who had been judged to be more effective at doing it.  It was meritocracy in spades and without regard to where you came from or whether you were a man or a woman, although I think we had a very large majority of men in the senior positions.  But we had absolutely superb women in a lot of key roles.  It was very much integrated in that sense and every other, and it was the only way to do it really.  The old remark attributed to Churchill, "I told you to leave no stone unturned, but I didn't expect you to take me literally," certainly did describe the varied and in some cases rather raffish British civilian contingent.

• Given the enormous value of Bletchley Park to the war effort, it is appropriate to note that much credit for Hitler's defeat goes to the "inferior, defective" people he was trying to eliminate:  not only were a number of Jews on team, but Alan Turing, father of artificial intelligence and a crucial part of the BP code-breaking efforts, was a homosexual who was later stripped of his security clearance and subjected to "chemical castration."
• Another member of the team (of no particular concern to Hitler that I know of) was Peter Hilton, the math professor who was at the University of Central Florida when Janet was, and whose classes never fit into her schedule, despite efforts to make that happen.
• Colossus, one of the machines developed for the code-breaking work, was the world's first programmable electronic computer.  "It was not a universal computer, the universal machine having been spec-ed out in mathematical terms by Turing after the war," [Donald Michie] said.  "But it was semi-programmable, it had some of the properties of a universal computer, and it was a first in terms of high-speed electronics by a very wide margin."
• The British managed to turn every German spy they caught in Britain into a double agent.  I find that remarkable.
• Eventually, the military began to respect and profit from the information provided by the code crackers.  D-Day would have gone quite differently without the Bletchley Park work.  (emphasis mine)

There were gaps in the information provided by Ultra [for D-Day].  The codebreakers had been unable to provide a precise location for 32nd Panzerdivision which was defending the vital British objective of Caen and held up Montgomery's advance for more than a month. l They had also missed the presence of a German infantry division defending Omaha Beach.  But these were the only blank spaces in an otherwise complete and detailed picture of the German order of battle.

• Unfortunately, they then got careless, believing the German cause to be lost long before Hitler thought so.

The evidence about what turned out to be the Battle of the Bulge began in September 1944 and went on until December 16 when the attack happened.  If anybody had ever thought of putting all the bits of information together they would surely have come to the conclusion that there was going to be an attack.

• The codebreakers did better work once they knew that their puzzle-solving was saving lives and making a difference in the war effort.  But there was a downside, too.

Years later, Mavis Lever took her son to see the film Sink the Bismarck.

I saw it go down and suddenly I really did feel quite sick.  I put my head down and my son said to me after a while:  "It's all right, Mummy, it's gone down." He didn't know.  But I was thinking how awful it was that one's breaking of a message could send so many people to the bottom.  But that was war and that was the way we had to play it.  If we thought about it too much we should never have been able to cope.

• Winston Churchill took a lot of heat over his supposed decision to allow the horrific bombing of the town of Coventry rather than let the Germans guess their codes had been broken.  While it's true they did go to extraordinary lengths to keep the codebreaking success a secret, such as never using the information directly unless they could engineer a way to make it plausibly obtained through other means, the problem at Coventry was of a different nature.

In their communications, the Germans used code names (covernames) that began with the same letters as the British towns they were supposed to represent.

[T]he failure to recognize one of these covernames was to embroil the Bletchley Park codebreakers in the controversy as to whether or not Churchill allowed the devastating bombing raid on Coventry in mid-November 1940 to go ahead rather than risk letting the Germans know that Enigma had been broken.

However, it was believed by the Air Ministry that the actual target was elsewhere.

It was only later that anyone realized that the use of the previously unknown codeword Korn, the German word for corn ... was in fact the covername for Coventry, which the Germans spelt with a K.  While with hindsight the Air Ministry's dismissal of Coventry as a potential target is evidence of the poor coordination of intelligence within Whitehall at the time, it was certainly not ignored to protect the codebreakers' secret.

Because the techniques were still an active part of the Cold War, the Official Secrets Act kept the truth hidden for years, despite the damage to Churchill's reputation.

• Some of the consequences of the post-war secrecy were more amusing:

The extent of the British codebreakers' wartime capabilities was so fantastic, that although the Germans were warned by their own experts that it was possible, they refused to believe it.

After the war, Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers travelled to Germany to find out if there was anything that the victorious Allies could learn from the Nazi technological research programs.  When one of the Germans they met showed them a Lorenz cipher machine, they had to pretend they did not know what it was, Flowers recalled.

"This chap then explained how it worked and said didn't we think it was a marvelous machine and we all said yes.  'But nevertheless,' he told us in an incredulous voice, 'Our codes people said the enemy could break these messages in two years." I asked him if he had changed the machine after two years.  'Oh no,' he said.  'Our factories were so disorganized by the bombing that we weren't able to make anmother machine.  But it was safe, absolutely safe.'  That was quite a moment," Flowers said,  "It was a great temptation to turn to Turing and wink."

Station X may not be the riveting book it could have been, but the story is too good to miss.

Half the Church: Recapturing God's Global Vision for Women by Carolyn Custis James (Zondervan, 2011)

I've reviewed three of Carolyn Custis James' books before (When Life and Beliefs Collide, The Gospel of Ruth, and Lost Women of the Bible); this is her most recent and I'm happy to say our library added it to their shelves at my request.  I'm not even going to attempt to rank the four, but just say that Carolyn James isn't losing any steam.  She continues fleshing out her discoveries concerning a Biblical view of the role of women, not only in the church but in all creation.  This time her vision was inspired and enhanced by her reading of Half the Sky (Kristof/WuDunn).

As usual, and despite her own assurances to the contrary, I think James underestimates both the difficulty and the importance of full-time, long-term motherhood, and is in danger of heaping still more burden and guilt on those who are already struggling.  I truly get her position that  "marriage and babies" is an insufficient—downright paltry—vision of God's overall plan for his daughters, implying that the young, the old, and those without husbands or incapable of bearing children are second-class citizens in God's Kingdom.  However, I believe that a vision of childrearing as only a short interlude in one's life is also deficient, and that James misses important contributions of those who have committed to large families (now defined as more than two children), childrearing as full-time work, and homeschooling.  She also appears not to understand how difficult and intellectually challenging it is to do well in such a profession, and how little such people are respected by society (including most churches). 

But that is not James' battle, and one cannot cover all bases in every book.  What she does cover, she handles superbly.

As usual, here are a few random quotations, to give you a feel for Half the Church, and to remind my future self of what's inside.

Literary experts tell us every good story has conflict. ... In fact without conflict a story has no plot. ... Which made me wonder, if God is the master storyteller—the creator of story—and if conflict makes the story, is there conflict before Genesis 3?  ...  If humanity had never fallen into sin, would we be living in a plotless story now?  For that matter, will heaven be plotless?  Is conflict only and always destructive and the result of fallenness?  Or is there a healthy, necessary, constructive variety of conflict that creates a gripping plot and is designed to make God's image bearers flourish and grow?  (pp. 66-67)

Conflict brings out the leader in us, transforms our lives from the mundane to the cosmic, and by God's grace forges us into more compassionate, selfless leaders.  Conflict in our stories isn't in the way; it is the way—to becoming better leaders, better image bearers, to creating a better story—to the fulfillment of the Story.  (p. 97)

I saw a billboard the other day that simply said, "God is not angry."  I get the point:  it was put up by a church wanting to emphasize God's grace to a hurting world, and no doubt frustrated by those who view tragedies as God's punishment.  But it's missing so much.  My immediate reaction?  "What?  God looks on child abuse and sex trafficking and mass murder and is not angry?  What kind of a god is that?"

People speak of the "angry God of the Old Testament" without considering why he is angry.  Yet anyone reading the Old Testament prophets who speak for him will quickly discover that God is outraged by injustice—when the powerful prevail over the powerless and the privileged over the disadvantaged, when his image bearers are, in any way, dishonored.  (p. 163)

From the beginning of my ministry, I made a conscious decision not to take a public position on the ordination of women.  My focus has been on calling women to go deeper in their relationship with God (instead of trying to subsist spiritually on a light theological diet)/.  My work centers on women in Scripture who are strong female role models of courageous gospel living, and on casting a vision for twenty-dirst-century women and girls that extends from the cradle to the grave, irrespective of their preferred debate camp.  We are God's image bearers, ezer-warriors for his gracious kingdom, and full-fledged members of the Blessed Alliance.

From what I can see, women and girls are a rich and largely untapped goldmine—a powerhouse of blessing, and gifts for the church, of strength and wisdom for our brothers, and of enormous good for the world. ... Taking sides in the debate seemed an unnecessary distraction that would take me off mission and cost me half my audience—something I am unwilling to do.  (pp. 159-160)

Our strengths and gifts are not worth much if we allow them to lie dormant.  To be honest, it's actually dangerous to think God created us to lean on others.  If we do not hone our gifts and live on the ready instead of in a default mode of looking to others, in a crisis or under pressure we are at a loss to use our voices, make decisions, stand our ground, or take the initiative that our circumstances demand.  This isn't theory, for even as I write these words I know several women who at this very moment are overwhelmed because the person they have always depended on is gone or unable to take care of things.  (pp. 94-95)

The Proverbs 31 woman is introduced as a "woman hayil"—the same Hebrew word used for Boaz and signifies "strength" and "power" like that of an "elite warrior similar to the hero of the Homeric epic."  The meaning, however, gets lost in translation, for whenever hayil applies to a woman in the Bible, translators have opted for softer English words ("virtuous," "excellent," "capable," or "noble character").  These words don't begin to do justice to the meaning.  (p. 129)

James is at her best when talking about what she calls the Blessed Alliance:  men and women, the two halves of God's Image on earth, working together, side by side, to accomplish God's purposes, each part being essential to healthy and effective enterprises.  In marriage, yes, but ever so much more than that:  indeed, in everything.  Without both male and female we cannot possibly reflect God's image and fulfill his vision.

God designed the world to stand on two load-bearing walls.  The first load bearing wall is God's relationship with his image bearers.  Without this vital relationship, we are cut off from our life supply—homeless, stranded souls in the universe, left to guess at who we are and why we are here.  The second load-bearing wall is the Blessed Alliance between male and female.  According to Genesis, male/female relationships aren't simply necessary to perpetuate the human race and make life pleasurable and interesting.

Male/female relationships are strategic.  God laid out his game plan in Genesis, and the team he assembled to do the job was male and female.  men and women working together actually predates men working with men and women working with women.  It would be one thing if God confined this male/female team to home and family and then mapped out the remaining territory into separate spheres for men and for women.  But he didn't do that.  Their mission—together—is to rule and subdue the whole earth on his behalf.  Men and women together.  Our relationships with God and with each other are the load-bearing walls of God's original design.

This foundational truth elevates the seriousness of the Blessed Alliance well beyond men "making room" for women and trying to tweak the system here and there to keep us happy.  Much deeper kingdom issues are at stake than resolving debates over disputed passages, deciding who's in charge, resolving conflict, defining his and her roles, and dividing the proverbial pie so everyone gets their fair share.  God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone." This statement means our brothers cannot be the men God created them to be or do the job God is calling them to do without their sisters.  Together, we are God's preferred method of getting things done in the world.  He created his image bearers male and female, blessed them, and spread before them the global mandate to build his kingdom.  (pp. 138-139)

The Enemy's first assault was beyond brilliant and wildly successful.  With a single temptation—firing one shot—the Enemy targeted both load-bearing walls.  It was a direct hit.  One lethal blow brought down the twin towers of God's kingdom strategy.  (p. 140)

I include the following quote strictly for my wonderful, spelling-challenged daughter, who repeatedly writes "unphased" when she means "unfazed."  You are in good company:  it happens to excellent writers with professional editors, too.

Ruling and subduing remind us of our noble calling to care for all creation, but somehow we remain unphased. (p. 52)

And just so I can end on something relevant to the book itself—indeed, it sums up Half the Church quite well:

We must not forget that it is still "not good for the man to be alone."  Men are impoverished and hampered in fulfilling their God-given callings without the honest, full collaboration of their ezer-sisters.  Kingdom opportunities are missed and suffering spreads because not everyone is on high alert or accepts responsibility for what is happening in our world.  It is not godly to hold back our gifts and to know less (or pretend we know less) so that men can lead.  When women bring less of themselves to the task at hand, men are overburdened and we squander our gifts.  (p. 164)

We're currently undergoing some home phone renovations, so if you need to contact us, please do so via e-mail, cell phone, Facebook, or here.  Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE 2/19:  The home phone is working now (thanks, Lime Daley!) but we'll be making changes now and then over the next week, so you can still resort to the above contact methods if necessary.  (You know I prefer e-mail most of the time, anyway.)

Our anthem, February 16, 2014:

Come, Christians, Join to Sing arr. Carlton R. Young

(Sorry, still no acceptable YouTube version.)

Thanks, Jon, for finding this.  From where I sit (the office next door) this is enough like Porter's frequent phone meetings to have me (almost) rolling on the floor laughing.  (No, I will not say ROFL.)

Our anthem for Sunday, February 9, 2014.

 The Lord's Prayer (Benjamin Harlan, Harold Flammer A8674)

I'm sorry for the lack of YouTube video, and even sorrier that you don't get to hear our own talented cellist, but you can hear the anthem, complete with cello part, at the JWPepper link above.

"I don't want to eat" has almost never been a problem in our family!  Nonetheless, this article on ending mealtime battles caught my eye, and it has some wisdom in it, so I'm passing it on.  I can sum up what I like about it in a couple of quotes.

It's dinnertime and my 4-year-old son is deep in play. When I announce that dinner is ready he makes his own announcement: "I don't want to eat, Mommy."

I tell him five words that avoid the food battle that he wants me to engage in: "You don't have to eat."

This is the rule in our house but it is followed by a second rule that everyone follows, regardless of wanting to eat or not. I tell him that family dinners are about being with family, and not just eating, so we all have to sit at the table.

What I like most about Ellyn Satter's Division of Responsibility in Feeding, is it gives parents and children very specific jobs in the realm of feeding. Parents are in charge of deciding what is served at meal time, when meals occur and where. Children get to be in charge of choosing what to eat and how much from what is offered to them.

So when my children complain about what I make for them, I always remind them that they can choose not to eat it. And I make sure to include at least one or two items they are likely to accept. This gives them some control, melts away the tension, and makes them more likely to try it....

This strategy puts more onus on the parents to make sure all the food offerings are nutritious:  if the meal on the table includes chips and soda, a strategy of letting your children decide what and how much to eat from the offerings appears a lot less wise.  Nor would I include anything not part of the family meal among the offerings, i.e. no chicken nuggets when the rest of the family is eating chicken tikka.  But letting them choose proportions (including nothing) from a good meal sounds like a reasonable strategy for giving children autonomy within secure boundaries.

I wonder:  if I had not been required to eat a portion of everything served, would I have learned to like vegetables sooner than I did?  Very early on I developed the tactic of swallowing my vegetable bites whole, with great gulps of water, like pills.  (Peas are particularly easy.)  My parents were willing to insist I eat the veggies, but would not go so far as to require me to chew and taste them.  If, instead, they had simply been offered as part of the meal, and I had observed my parents enjoying it all, might I not have tried them now and then, thus developing the taste for certain foods that eluded me until later in life?  I'll never know, but I like this strategy better.

... to point out to our Northern friends that our temperature was a record-breaking 86 degrees today.  Last week was winter.  I guess the groundhog thing doesn't work south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Our anthem for Sunday, February 2, 2014.

God Watches Over You (Joel Raney, Hope Publishing C5581)

Our anthem for Sunday, January 26, 2014.

Down to the River to Pray (arr. Sheldon Curry, Daybreak/Hal Leonard 08743261)

From LarkNews.com, one of the best 404 File Not Found errors I've come across.

In one way or another, we covered a lot of bases with our church music last Sunday.  It was a wild ride.  But that's one thing I like about our church.  From Deck Thyself My Soul with Gladness to Shout to the Lord, from What Star is this with Beams so Bright to How Great Thou Art, from There's a Wideness in God's Mercy to a couple I'll highlight:

First, our choir anthem, Praise His Holy Name by Keith Hampton (earthsongs).

We arrived early at church, and having discovered that the processional hymn was a new one to us, I plunked it out on the piano several times before the director arrived.  It may sound easy, but it is decidedly not if you've never heard it before.  Mercifully, he took it down a whole third from what is written in our hymnal.

I would never have guessed that Lift Every Voice and Sing was an African-American song, much less the "Black National Anthem" as it is sometimes called.  Not knowing the tempo at which it is apparently usually sung (judging by the YouTube recordings I listened to), I took it at a faster clip, and would have guessed it to be a World War I era song, or maybe something from the Salvation Army.  If you listen to it and note that the middle part sounds like the more militant parts of Les Miserables, be assured that this was written in 1899/1900 by James Weldon Johnson and his brother John Rosamond Johnson.

The experience reminded my very much of singing with grandson Joseph, who chooses hymns not by name, but by number, providing an interesting tour through the more obscure parts of the hymnal.  Fun!

UPDATE 11/2/19 Once again, the automated updating of Flash videos to iframe cut out a chunk of the post, but I don't have time to worry about it now.

Nunsense was written in 1985, but neither of us had seen it until Sunday.  We went to the performance at Sanford's Wayne Densch Performing Arts Center because our friend Linda was the music director for the show.  As it turned out, we knew one of the main cast members, too—a friend of Heather's from high school.  She played Sister Hubert and did a fantastic job.  Everyone did a great job, actually, though some had better enunciation than others, so we didn't always get the jokes because we didn't catch all the words.

A few of the jokes were less than family-friendy, but they'd probably go over the heads of anyone who shouldn't hear them, and compared with much of what can be seen today, the show is fitting for—well, for a convent!

Afterwards we had a (too) quick bite to eat at the Willow Tree Café.  German food is not normally my favorite out-to-eat meal, but this was excellent and I'd love to have an excuse to go back.

We had the Gourmet Potato Pancakes and the Sausage Sliders from this menu.  Both were worth repeating, although next time I may want to try the Reisen Bretzen.

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets, even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry.  He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'here lived'.  — Martin Luther King, Jr.