Film Overview

One thousand, one hundred sixty American ships carrying supplies across the Atlantic to Britain were sunk in 1942, torpedoed by German submarines-- U-Boats--which relied upon secret radio communications. The German Navy used a coding machine called Enigma to keep its maneuvers out of the Allies' reach. The British had cracked an earlier Enigma device but not this one. The US Navy, angry at failures in the British codebreaking operations at Bletchley Park, decided to take these affairs into their own hands. They came to Joe Desch, a self-educated man known for his innovative work on thyratrons--miniature quick-firing tubes--at the National Cash Register Company in Dayton, Ohio. Desch, a civilian of German descent, was under surveillance himself even as he worked.
Desch and his team countered the Enigma with an advanced version of the British Bombe, a machine that would shorten the war, thereby saving the lives of combatants on all sides. But the pressure on Desch as he worked on this top secret mission, equal in secrecy to the Manhattan Project, would take its toll. He struggled with the moral consequences of his work--the deaths of thousands of young men.