34. The Man Who Saved British Cities, Dr. R. V. Jones

34. The Man Who Saved British Cities, R. V. Jones

I did not know [that Coventry would be bombed.] The Enigma had not [been] broken that night in time, although it had by the following morning…but that was too late. So I couldn’t tell him where the target was.

From Dr. R. V. Jones, SIS science advisor, in The Secret War, a BBC television production

Nigel West concludes that

…it is easy to see how …various authors, ignorant of the work of Air Intelligence or the full background of COLD WATER, should have concluded…that the Prime Minister [Winston Churchill] had made a deliberate decision to protect ULTRA’s future at the expense of a city in the Midlands. In the event Churchill presumed he had no need to order the evacuation of Coventry as he had good reason to believe that adequate counter-measures were available: so far as he knew, the German bombs would fall, but on empty fields.

[Nigel West (1985). A Thread of Deceit: Espionage Myths of World War II. New York: Random House. ISBN: 0-394-53941-9]