One of the most mind-boggling things (of the many mind-boggling things) about World War II was the revelation of The Ultra Secret with the publication of F. W. Winterbotham's book in 1974. Fully 29 years after the war was over.
The secret was this. At the start of the war, during the German invasion of Poland in 1939, a German cryptographic machine, code-named Enigma, fell into the hands of the Polish cryptographic service. On Poland's defeat, the Polish cryptographers brought the machine with them to work for British intelligence.
British intelligence then set up a code breaking facility in Bletchly Park. (The Code Breakers of Bletchly Park, movie: Enigma.). Working for them there was one Alan Turing a mathematician and genius. In order to break Enigma's mechanical code, Alan Turing in effect invented a digital computer.
Once the code was broken, the Allies could read the encrypted messages of both Germany, Italy, and eventually Japan. In affect, the Allied generals could read the mail of their Axis counter-parts and anticipate almost exactly what they were going to do. It cast a new light (to say the least) on the supposed daring do of the Allied generals. The gambles the Allied generals took turned out to have been more calculated than had been previously thought. This is Kilvinsky's Law to the max. ("The New Centurions," Joseph Wambaugh: "if a guy uses his fists, you use your stick. If he pulls out a knife, you use your gun and cancel his ticket right there.")
But the most interesting thing about this incident is that a major piece of world history - the true date of the invention of the digital computer - had been kept under wraps for 29 years! And in the modern age! This casts a shadow on what we think our collective ability is to know and understand what has actually happened in recent history.
C.S. Lewis once made a point that you can't really know what happened about anything in history until all of the players have written their books and another set of players have read all the books and sifted through them in a reasoned manner. On-scene news reports and immediate commentary on them contain the least amount of information.
Journalist Malcome Muggeridge (1903-1990) made another point in his biography, Chronicles of Wasted Time. He tells us that the average journalist of his pre-Watergate era (1930's and on wards) did not take himself or herself as seriously as today's counterpart does. Scratch the average journalist of his day, and you'd find an Ernest Hemingway wanta-be. I.e., an adventurer and writer of fiction, unconsciously filtering the momentous events of the day through his or she own limited consciousness and emic reality (See emic catagories vs. etic catagories.)
Muggeridge said that when a new news event occurred in his day - lets say a rebellion in a European colony - the first journalists to arrive on the scene would look over the situation (and not too deeply) and start assigning white hats and black hats to the actors according to their own inclinations. There after, every journalist that followed would lazily pick up the same threads as the previous journalists and keep on reporting according to the categories originally assigned to the players, whether they were still valid or not. Their editors back home probably played a part in this because of their need to keep a narrative "straight" for the folks back home. The bottom line is that heat-of-moment news reporting is often not only inaccurate, but also highly distorted.
To these observations of Lewis and Muggeridge, we can now add the problem of state secrets. If there is one thing the Allies really learned from WW II, its the importance of maintaining highly classified high technology - and keeping things from the general public for as long as possible.
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