Decisive Liberty
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She decoded ENIGMA—How a 19-Year-Old Girl's Missing Letter Killed 2,303 Italian Sailors
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She decoded ENIGMA—How a 19-Year-Old Girl's Missing Letter Killed 2,303 Italian Sailors

March 1941.

The Italian Navy's Enigma codes were unbreakable - until teenager Mavis Batey noticed something impossible.

One missing letter.

Three sleepless nights.

The result: the most devastating naval ambush in modern warfare.

While Italian Admiral Iachino commanded the Mediterranean's most powerful fleet, a 19-year-old university dropout at Bletchley Park was reading his every move.

This is the story of how intuition defeated mathematics, how a procedural error doomed an entire fleet, and how the Battle of Cape Matapan became a 2,303 to 3 massacre because someone noticed what shouldn't be there.

The Italians never discovered that someone had broken their codes.

They never learned that a teenage girl destroyed their naval supremacy in 68 hours.

She went on to raise a family and study gardens, never speaking of her wartime work until historians found her decades later.

Sometimes genius comes from the most unexpected places.

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