There are many excellent films that focus on England’s struggle for survival during World War Two and one of the best of them is The Imitation Game (2014), starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing. He and his team eventually “broke” the code for each of several Enigma machines used by the Germans to communicate top secret messages.

So just how important was he? Winston Churchill said that Turing made the single biggest contribution to Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany and its Axis partners. “Not one of the biggest, or really bloody huge, or damned near incalculable, but the single most estimable contribution of any person, period.”

Captain Jerry Roberts, who worked with Turing at Bletchley Park and who was in a position to see firsthand exactly how his and his colleagues’ codebreaking interacted with the rest of the war effort, says “without him we would have lost the war.” Roberts told the BBC:

“You have to understand the measure of what Turing did. Early in the war, in 1939, he had broken the Enigma used by the Luftwaffe and the German army but he’d been unable to break the naval Enigma.

“In 1940/41 the German U-boats were sinking our food ships and our ships bringing in armaments left, right and centre, and there was nothing to stop this until Turing managed to break naval Enigma, as used by the U-boats. We then knew where the U-boats were positioned in the Atlantic and our convoys could avoid them.

Roberts asserts, “If that hadn’t happened, it is entirely possible, even probable, that Britain would have been starved and would have lost the war.”