THE KEY MAN

s he had done many times before, Harold J. Turpin spent much of the evening of December 2, 1940, in the air-raid shelter at his home in London. Three months earlier Nazi Germany had launched merciless nighttime bombing raids against London and other British cities in what would become known as “the Blitz” (short for , meaning “lightning war”). Turpin, a senior draftsman at the Royal Small Arms Factory in the London borough