Poland gives Brits key to breaking WW2 Enigma 78 yrs ago TODAY
From the early 1930s Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski of the famous Polish Cipher Bureau worked on cracking German coding machine Enigma, which they first managed to do in 1932. Jul 25 marks 78th anniv of Polish passing Enigma know-how to Allies.
Five weeks before Germany's September 1939's invasion of Poland, due to looming war and construction adversities caused by financial shortages, Rejewski and his team, passed a decade worth of Enigma work to French and British intelligence on a meeting held July 25, 1939 at Polish codebreakers' hideout in Warsaw-Pyry, fully convinced it would soon come in handy for the Allies. In the history of military co-operation this unconditional and selfless act of sharing with other country's intelligence top secret data and elaborate know-how was unprecedented.
By July 1939, Polish mathematicians had already been breaking Enigma codes for over 6,5 years, with the Polish breakthrough cracking to have taken place as early as the end of 1932.
According to late Tony Sale, former MI5 engineer, historian and first Bletchley Park Museum curator, although the British were aware that Enigma had been adopted by the German Navy in 1926 and later by the rest of the German Forces, "unfortunately did not recognise, as the Poles did, that a cryptographic attack on Enigma traffic required a completely different approach to that with which the British had been so successful in the 1914-18 War. Then it had been linguists that had achieved the success with non-machine generated codes and ciphers. Now it was the turn of mathematicians and scientists".
It was not until "after the Polish revelations in 1939", Sale goes on, that "it was decided (by British authorities - PAP) to recruit mathematicians (...)", among others, Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman and John Jeffreys in order to work on Polish-delivered know-how and hardware, including wheel internal wirings with German machine replicas.
Also former British ambassador to Poland, Robin Barnett, during his 2014's address pointed out "Breaking the Enigma code undoubtedly saved thousands of lives and shortened the war. And the Polish contribution was crucial", adding that "In the UK, a man called Dilly Knox (present at the Pyry meeting and reported as being angry at Polish mathematicians' success - PAP) tried to break the cipher using traditional paper based methods (...) In France, Major Bertrand of the Deuxieme Bureau applied panache and arranged for someone to steal the code books. But it was Poland that realised that only mathematicians could break the code".
Barnett added "of course, it was a Polish team of mathematicians led by Marian Rajewski, who ultimately succeeded. This allowed Alan Turing to develop the ‘bombe’ which could crack the most complex codes". British ambassador went on to underline it was "yet another example of how Poland contributed so much to the allied victory in World War Two". "We will remember them", concluded Barnett.
Polish genius mathematicians were excluded from the cooperation with the British team, yet their achievements were widely applied by England's famous Bletchley Park centre to read encrypted messages throughout World War Two.
The intelligence the British gained from Polish Enigma decoders in July of 1939, enabled creation of what was later known as Ultra, and greatly contributed to defeating Germany in WWII.
According to experts, breaking Enigma codes might have shortened WW2 by 2-3 years, having saved dozens of thousands of lives.
Initially, however, for the lack of success at Bletchley Park, further meetings with Rejewski, Rozycki and Zygalski were necessary so that the British could learn how to effectively apply Polish methods of decoding Enigma. The proper rendez-vous took place in Paris in Jan, 1940, around the same time that Rejewski team decrypted first wartime (Luftwaffe) Enigma message at the Polish-French Bruno station. The momentous decryption was carried through by means of the so-called Zygalski-sheets, punched at Bletchley Park, basing on Polish intel.
The Polish genius did not, however, come out of thin air, yet was a result of years of hard work and dedication to the matter. While studying mathematics in Poznan in 1929, Rejewski underwent secret cryptology training at the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau, whose staff he joined in September 1932. The Bureau had been unsuccessful in decoding Enigma messages and delegated Rejewski to deal with the matter late that year; it took Rejewski no more than a few weeks to find the machine's secret internal wiring, due to which subsequently, he and his two colleagues developed a number of techniques for the decryption of Enigma. The same year, Rejewski constructed sight-unseen first replica of Enigma and until 1939 a few dozens of such devices were home-produced by Polish team, mostly in their base in Warsaw-Pyry.
Among Marian Rejewski's contributions are a cryptological catalogue derived from a cyclometer which also he had invented, and the so-called cryptologic bomb to later significantly influence Alan Turing in constructing his BOMBe.
Rozycki's so-called "clock method" influenced the famous Bletchley Park's 'Banburismus' method, with Zygalski sheets having been crucial in the first wartime Enigma breaking.
All those independent ways of decrypting Enigma machine along with copies of the German Enigma were passed by the Polish side, as Tony Sale writes, "to the utter astonishment of the French and British", at a meeting in the Kabackie Woods near Pyry just outside Warsaw, on July 25, 1939.
Shortly after the outbreak of the war, Polish cryptologists were evacuated to France, where they continued decoding messages. Rejewski and his staff had to evacuate again after the June 1940 fall of France, in 1942, Rejewski and Zygalski fled to Britain through Spain, Portugal, and Gibraltar. There they enlisted in the Polish Armed Forces and were set to solving low-grade German ciphers.
After the war Rejewski worked as an accountant in Poland. Fearing retortions from Poland's communist government, he remained silent about his wartime work for 20 years, breaking the silence in 1967, when he gave his memoirs to the Polish Military Historical Institute.
Rejewski's cryptological work earned him numerous honours and distinctions. In 2000, Poland's then President Aleksander Kwasniewski posthumously awarded him and Zygalski with the Grand Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, Poland's highest civilian order. In 2005, Rejewski received the War Medal 1939–1945 from the British Chief of the Defence Staff, and in 2012, the U.S. Military Intelligence Corps Association awarded him with its Knowlton Award.
On 11 July 2012, a plaque dedicated to the work of Polish cryptologists was unveiled in Bletchley Park. It reads:
"This plaque commemorates the work of Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski, mathematicians of the Polish intelligence service, in first breaking the Enigma code. Their work greatly assisted the Bletchley Park code breakers and contributed to the Allied victory in World War II".
The same year two other identical commemorative plaques were placed. One in London in the entrance hall of the Polish Embassy (November 2002), and one in Warsaw at the Piludski square building where the three Polish mathematicians would work (18 September 2002).
On August 5, 2014 the American Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) distinguished Rejewski, Rozycki and Zygalski with its coveted Milestone award in recognition of world-changing achievement.
A bronze monument was dedicated to the three Polish mathematicians in 2007 in front of Poznan Castle in west Poland. Each of its three sides bears the name of one of the Enigma decrypters.
Rejewski and his colleagues were the heroes of the thriller movie Sekret Enigmy (The Enigma Secret), which recounted their wartime exploits. In late 1980 Polish TV also launched a series on the same theme called Tajemnice Enigmy (The Secrets of Enigma).
Despite all due commemoration acts the Polish mathematicians' unquestionable input into solving Enigma and, through this, defeating Hitler has been oftentimes omitted on big screen productions, in books, press publications or even misrepresented therein as in 2001's flick "Enigma" where the only Polish-born character works at Bletchley Park to leak intel to Germans. The release of the film triggered an immediate protest from Polish embassy in London, demanding a disclaimer to be aired before movie screenings.
A slightly more factual approach was presented in the 2014's Oscar-winning "Imitation game", telling the story of Alan Turing. Although the film indeed mentions the Polish trace in Enigma feat, it limits itself to passing references of an "old Polish machine" and "Polish intelligence", giving almost the whole credit of breaking Enigma solely to Turing and his Bletchley Park team.
In response to decades-long discussion on who had contributed most to Enigma decryption, Marian Rejewski himself would call the British input in the process as rather "quantitative, not qualitative", referring to a British vast financial and personnel capacity that Poland had lacked at that time.
In 1979, Rejewski wrote, commenting contents of the official British Intelligence in the Second World War, "we quickly found the [wirings] within the [new rotors], but [their] introduction [...] raised the number of possible sequences of drums from 6 to 60 [...] and hence also raised tenfold the work of finding the keys. Thus the change was not qualitative but quantitative. We would have had to markedly increase the personnel to operate the bombs, to produce the perforated sheets (60 series of 26 sheets each were now needed, whereas up to the meeting on July 25, 1939, we had only two such series ready) and to manipulate the sheets".
In the book British Intelligence in the Second World War, an English historian and cryptanalyst, Harry Hinsley, suggested that Polish mathematicians had decided to share their Enigma know-how and the equipment with the French and British in July 1939 since came across "insuperable technical difficulties".
"No, it was not [cryptologic] difficulties, [...] that prompted us to work with the British and French" retorted Rejewski, clarifying it was only the deteriorating political situation that influenced the decision. "If we had had no difficulties at all we would still, or even the more so, have shared our achievements with our allies as our contribution to the struggle against Germany", noted Marian Rejewski.
Also Alan Turing's fellow-cryptologist Irving John Good in his 1993's book "Codebreakers", commenting his Bletchley Park workmates' achievements, writes about "elaborations" of Polish methods (among others, the Rozycki's "clock method") rather than "inventions".
As the Polish input in breaking Enigma has from the very beginning been belittled,
numerous controversies have over the decades arisen in regard to crediting with the decoding of Germany's Enigma cipher machine, which would have obviously been either impossible or at least come too late, had it not been for the work of Polish mathematicians Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski.
More to come... (PAP)
mb/pk
