The Enigma Strategy

While a vanquished British Army escapes across the Channel from Dunkirk beaches, in London, Flight Lieutenant Bart Robbins, R.A.F., American volunteer Spitfire driver, decks an Air Commodore in self defense and finds himself sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment.


Later, when he is offered a full pardon and transfer to the U.S. Navy—if he will first fly a chancy mission to pick up a stolen Nazi Enigma coding/decoding Machine in enemy territory—he decides to risk it. Even when he discovers he must fly the mission in a 10-year-old racing seaplane fresh from a museum, he presses on, only just mastering the dangerous old Supermarine S.6b racer in time for the mission.


Ferried to the Gulf of Genoa aboard a Royal Navy cruiser, he takes off for Lake Maggiore north of Milan, Italy, where partisans have hidden the Enigma Machine. On landing, however, he is informed that the cruiser—his ride back to England—was torpedoed shortly after he took off. Now he is inadvertently marooned with the world’s fastest seaplane and the purloined Enigma Machine.


Thus begins a desperate struggle to somehow complete Robbins' mission before he is captured by Mussolini’s dreaded secret police, the OVRA.