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We Shall Fight in the Buttery – Oxford's War 1939–1945

Nicholas Rankin: We Shall Fight in the Buttery - Oxford’s War 1939–1945 by Ashley Jackson

Accustomed to maintaining security in its printing of exam papers, OUP began producing arcane cryptographic materials for Bletchley Park as well as reams for the Admiralty, including all Admiral Ramsay’s orders for the Allies’ seaborne invasions of North Africa, Sicily and Normandy. Elsewhere, Oxford’s scientists led the fight against German U-boats with the ten-centimetre radar, which could spot a conning tower amid the clutter of waves.The Clarendon Laboratory’s early work on nuclear fission contributed to the atom bomb. The vast New Bodleian Library building, not formally opened until 1946, became a vault for national valuables, an air-raid shelter and the headquarters of the remarkable British Red Cross Prisoner of War Postal Book Service, run by Ethel Herdman.

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