In Europe

few footpaths bore the names of formerstreets. In Bread Street and Milk Street there grew wild flowers the likes of which had not raised their heads there since the days of Henry VIII: lilies of the valley, ragwort and others.
    The ‘little Blitz’, as the exhausted Londoners of that day called this period, began in February 1944, in retaliation for the British bombing of German cities. Then, in the final summer of the war, something happened that had not been seen before. Starting in June, little, unmanned jet planes began flying into the city: the V-1s, recognisable by the loud buzzing of their motors, then a sudden silence when the machine stopped and before the bomb fell. Suddenly Londoners were stretched to their limits again: the capriciousness of these merciless, deadly ‘robot bombs’ generated a nervousness greater than the worst of the Blitz attacks.
    A few months later, another new weapon appeared from the drawing boards of Wernher von Braun and his enthusiastic technicians: the V-2, the world's first long-distance missile. From launching pads in places like Wassenaar and the Hague in the Netherlands, the V-2 rocketed to London in only a few minutes, moving at several times the speed of sound. The V-2 was an extremely advanced weapon: the missile flew to the edge of the stratosphere and even included several ingenious guidance systems. Radar, air-raid siren, anti-aircraft fire, Spitfires – all were useless in the face of this technology. A V-2 could flatten an entire street, kill everyone who lived there. The last of approximately 1,000 V-2s struck the city in late March 1945, landing in Tottenham Court Road, on the eighteenth-century chapel of Reverend George Whitefield, at the place where the Whitefield Memorial Church now stands.
    More than 100,000 homes were demolished in London, almost 30,000 men, women and children were killed. Yet the Germans were never able to hit one of the major targets: the Cabinet War Rooms. Today the secret cellar space where the British government supervised the war is in almost the same state it was at two minutes to five on 16 August, 1945, when the lights were turned out. For decades only insiders knew of its existence, today the rooms are open to all. You can even rent them for an afternoon or an evening, to throw a party.
    This nexus, where all lines came together during the war, is no largerthan a newspaper editorial office, and that is what it resembles most: wooden desks, maps, metal lamps, red, green and black telephones, drawing pins, lengths of twine. Churchill's office had been reduced in size to allow for the flow of visitors, Lady Churchill's has actually disappeared altogether. His private room is full of maps as well, although when important visitors showed up, a curtain was drawn discreetly across the one showing the deployment of the British coastal defences.
    Even more mysterious were the sealed yellow boxes which arrived here each day, and which only Churchill was allowed to open. They contained a selection of all the intercepted German radio orders for army, navy and air force. The German high command had encrypted them ingeniously with the use of the Enigma coding machine, a device that made the secret texts completely unintelligible to outsiders. The Germans had enormous faith in their encrypting device. And they did not have the slightest clue that the Poles had laid their hands on one as early as 1928, that they had cracked the code after six years of diligent study, and that they had been sharing their knowledge with their French and British allies since summer 1939. The British perfected the decoding system with one of the first computer-like machines, the top-secret Colossus. From summer 1940 onwards, almost all of the Germans’ plans and troop movements were – within days, sometimes even hours – an open book to Churchill and a few of his confidants.
    It was only on 1 May, 1941, however, that the first complete Enigma machine fell into British hands, when three warships succeeded in driving a German U-boat to the surface with the use of depth charges. The German commander thought the valves of his submarine had been opened and that the vessel would sink to the bottom, rendering it unnecessary to destroy his Enigma and the code books. Two British seamen who had climbed into the U-boat discovered a machine which looked like a typewriter but exhibited some rather strange behaviour. Suspecting it to be a coding machine they took it back to