Gay men who helped defeat Nazis were also often victimised because of their homosexuality.
The contribution of lesbian and gay people to the Allied victory over Nazism was not confined to those who enlisted in the armed forces. Gay civilians, too, helped defeat fascism.
Mathematical genius, Alan Turing, was the inventor of the modern computer. He designed one of the earliest computing machines, and his 1937 academic paper on the subject forms the basis of computer theory.
When war broke out in 1939, Turing played a crucial role in defeating Nazism. But it was not on the battlefield that he excelled.
Based at the government’s cipher centre at Bletchley Park, Turing cracked the top-secret German Enigma code. Knowledge of the Nazi code enabled the Allies to have forewarning of German bomber raids, and to track Nazi troop and naval deployments. This helped the Allies take counter-measures to foil the impact of Nazi offensives, and to spread disinformation to the German commanders about Allied war plans.
After the war, Turing did ground-breaking work on theories of artificial intelligence, which further catapulted him to fame. But his career was abruptly halted when, in 1952, he was arrested for homosexuality. Put on probation on condition that he had hormone injections to cure to his gayness, Turing was plunged into a downward spiral of depression and ill-health.
Two years later, he committed suicide at the age of 42. With Turing’s death, Britain lost the man who helped thwart Nazi invasion, and the world lost the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century.