The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz

The headquarters of Allied codebreaking in World War II, charged with intercepting secret communications of the Axis powers. It was located in a country estate in Buckinghamshire. Crucially in The Splendid and the Vile, code breakers at Bletchley decipher a German radio transmission that alerts Jones to the German knowledge of navigation beams (70). 

A sudden, swift, and overwhelming military attack, usually using tanks and aerial bombardment. The word is a shortening of the German Blitzkrieg, “lightning war,” which denotes a swift, focused attack using maneuverable forces and relying on speed and surprise to overwhelm and produce psychological shock in the enemy. The Nazis relied on this technique for a quick victory over their opponents with minimal loss of soldiers and artillery. “The Blitz” is the popular designation for the Nazi aerial bombardment of Britain during 1940-41 that forms the heart of the book. 

A technique of receiving radio signals and rebroadcasting them on the same frequency to confuse enemy navigation. The British used this technique against the Luftwaffe. 

The Luftwaffe—the German air force—developed a technique of detecting and guiding aircraft using radio waves or beams. They based this technique on one often used in commercial aircraft to guide planes at short distances. The Germans refined this technique to work at much longer distances. This technique at first gave the Germans the upper hand over the British, and so the British (with the help of Lindemann and Jones) developed a method of intercepting the beams, known as meaconing.