
Polish codebreakers 'cracked Enigma before Alan Turing' - danielam
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/12158055/Polish-codebreakers-cracked-Enigma-before-Alan-Turing.html
======
munin
Anyone who wants more of a history of WW2 crypto that extends the cast of
characters beyond Turing (and the cast was significant and varied) should read
"Battle of Wits"
([http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743217349](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743217349))
the historian who wrote it wrote it after a large NSA declassification in
1996.

What's even more extreme about the Polish codebreakers, a story you would read
in Battle of Wits, is that they were evacuated from Poland to France after the
invasion of Poland, and then stayed in occupied France working in secret for
the Allies as part of the occupation government. They posed to the occupation
government as the occupation governments signals intelligence system but
secretly supplied GC&CS with information they intercepted from the continent
(which the Allies had a lot of trouble doing only from the UK).

They did that for years, when they tried to evacuate themselves to Spain, a
few of them were captured, interrogated, and did not give up the goods about
either the invasion or the secret of Enigma. If you want wartime crypto heroes
you would have a hard time doing better than Jerzy Różycki, Henryk Zygalski
and Marian Rejewski.

~~~
douche
I'll second the recommendation. That's a really fantastic book.

~~~
rrauenza
Another good book, but broader than just Enigma, _The Code Book_ by Simon
Singh:

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Code-Book-Science-
Cryptography/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Code-Book-Science-
Cryptography/dp/0385495323)

~~~
kyzyl
I'll second the recommendation. That's a really fantastic book.

------
stevetrewick
Looked for a 1990s publishing date, but apparently this really is contemporary
because :

 _> Diplomats say Poland's key part in the deciphering the German system of
codes in WWII has largely been overlooked_

Except for being mentioned, sometimes in great detail in every single account
- popular and technical - I've ever read and underneath every internet article
on Enigma since comments were invented and being basically the first thing any
cipher geek brings up when Enigma is discussed anywhere on the planet.

But apart from _that_ , yeah, totally overlooked.

~~~
MatthewWilkes
In fairness, the polish contributions were completely sidelined in The
Imitation Game.

~~~
colmvp
Wouldn't be the first time Hollywood glossed over contributions for a better
story.

Regarding Argo: “In the movie, Canada and Ottawa didn’t exist,” said Kenneth
D. Taylor, who was the Canadian ambassador to Iran at the time and helped six
Americans who escaped from the American Embassy as it was overrun by militants
to flee the country. “It’s a great film, it’s great. But at the same time it
was a Canadian story that’s been, all of sudden, totally taken over by the
Americans. Totally.”

~~~
strictnein
That's a little much to say Canada doesn't exist at all. It was pretty well
established in the movie that they were at the Canadian embassy.

------
cognivore
I originally learned about the Enigma from Len Deighton's "Blood, Tears, and
Folly" ([http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Tears-Folly-Objective-
World/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Tears-Folly-Objective-
World/dp/0785811141)). In it he doesn't even mention Turning, and gives full
credit to the Polish code-breakers. I thought the recent focus on Turning was
more of a "Hollywoodazation" of the event than anything else.

~~~
anovikov
They cracked only the older 3-wheel version of the machine. And their
achievements were all well known to the Brits, they just didn't help after 4th
and 5th wheel was added, along with other complications.

------
ianopolous
My grandfather worked at Bletchley park (used to play chess with Turing) and
when he saw "The Imitation Game" he said it was nothing like working there. He
said they were all much more respectful and wouldn't yell at each other like
in the movie.

~~~
mdn
My Grandfather (Max Newman) was also at Bletchley Park. From 1942. Who was
your Grandfather? Which Hut did he work in? Perhaps they met or knew each
other.

~~~
ianopolous
:-) His name was Gordon Preston. He also worked in the Newmanry, so yes they
did work together! :-)

------
ENTP
When I was at Bletchley 4 years ago, we were told all about the Polish
mathematicians. There's even a statue/tribute to them there.

------
osullivj
My understanding is that the Polish team cracked the three rotor Enigma.
Turing & co extended that work to four rotor plus plug board.

~~~
bewaretheirs
They reverse-engineered the machine sight-unseen (determining the permutation
wired into each rotor) and cracked the original way that per-message settings
were sent.

A daily key was used to encrypt the "indicator" which determined the initial
state of the machine for the rest of the message. Initially, the indicator was
repeated (ABCABC); it turns out that if you collect a bunch of indicators,
this repeated structure allows you deduce the rotor wiring and also to
determine what the key of the day is and thus read all the traffic.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma#Re...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma#Rejewski.27s_characteristics_method)

Gradual changes to German practices (different key management, additional
rotors to choose from, etc.) increased the work required to the point where it
was beyond the limited means of the Polish cryptographers alone, but shortly
before the start of WWII they started working with French and British
cryptographers and gave Bletchley Park a running start.

~~~
Animats
Exactly. The Polish cryptanalysts cracked the cypher, and even built the
prototype bombe. But the technology had to be scaled up for production.

That scaleup is the real story of WWII cryptanalysis. Prior to WWII,
cryptanalysis had been a few people in offices working by hand. During WWII,
on the Allied side it became an industrial operation. Bombe key-testers were
built in quantity by the British Tabulating Machine Company and National Cash
Register. They were spread around England, so that no one bombing raid could
take out more than a few. The US had a big machine cryptanalysis operation at
Arlington Hall, and another one in Hawaii. There were radio intercept stations
all over Britain, and the US had ones on Pacific islands.

See NSA's history of WWII cryptanalysis.[1] They credit the Poles; Turing gets
a mention. Gordon Welchman's contribution, the "diagonal board", which reduced
the effort required by a factor of 26, is seen as more significant.

Turing didn't like the NCR machines. The British bombes just stopped when they
got a hit, and someone had to copy down all the wheel positions by hand. NCR's
machine was faster and had a printer. When the machine got a hit, it would go
past the hit (because the contact drums were spinning too fast to stop
instantly), back up, slowly go foward to find the hit again, stop, print the
wheel positions, and restart.

More automation followed. The Enigma was a hand machine, and someone had to
copy the output by hand as the lamps lit up. The US cryptanalysis operation
had a machine driven from paper tape to do that job, once the keys had been
cracked.

Turing thought this automation was unnecessary.[2] But once it was all
working, info about German submarine positions was flowing through the system
rapidly, and within months, so many German submarines had been sunk that
Donetz abandoned the Battle of the Atlantic.

It took a huge industrial operation to bring this off.

[1]
[https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/center_crypt_...](https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/center_crypt_history/publications/wwii.shtml)
[2]
[https://www.nsa.gov/about/_files/cryptologic_heritage/public...](https://www.nsa.gov/about/_files/cryptologic_heritage/publications/wwii/solving_enigma.pdf)

------
gambiting
Well, it's the same as everyone using the name "Marie Curie" even though every
Polish child will tell you her proper name was "Maria Skłodowska-Curie". Curie
was her husband's name, and she explicitly used both names on all of her work,
yet it's almost unknown that she was Polish in the West.

~~~
hartpuff
> yet it's almost unknown that she was Polish in the West

Sorry, this is complete nonsense.

I can only speak as someone from the UK, but I'm willing to bet almost every
schoolkid has heard of Marie Curie, and everyone who has heard of her knows
that she discovered polonium and knows why it is called polonium.

I'd be surprised to find out the rest of Western Europe is any different.

~~~
gambiting
Well, I live in the UK now and every single person I asked what nationality
she was said "uhm..........French?". I'm sure a lot of people know that she
was Polish, but it's certainly not a common knowledge, given that the Polish
part of her surname is omitted from nearly every mention of her I saw over
here so far.

~~~
hartpuff
> every single person I asked what nationality she was said
> "uhm..........French?

Well French isn't a bad guess, is it, considering she moved to France, married
a Frenchman, became a French citizen, took his French name and probably spent
most of her life in France?

Ask people what nationality Einstein was and many will say American, despite
his German name, which is also not necessarily incorrect.

That doesn't change the fact that most people who learn about Curie or
Einstein at school probably learn about their origin. That people don't
remember everything they learn at school isn't particularly remarkable.

As for polonium, it's practically a pub quiz question who invented it and why
it's so named.

> the Polish part of her surname is omitted from nearly every mention of her I
> saw over here so far.

Where her Polish name is being "omitted" I suspect it's more for reasons of
simplicity than any 'Western' conspiracy to keep Poland down.

~~~
Mark222
> Well French isn't a bad guess, is it, considering she moved to France,
> married a Frenchman, became a French citizen, took his French name and
> probably spent most of her life in France?

You make it sounds like she did it out of choice, like someone who would take
a nationality out of kinship, but the reason why she moved to France have
little to do with French sympathies but more prosaic reasons:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_curie#Early_years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_curie#Early_years)

> After Russian authorities [Poland was partly controlled by Russia at the
> time] eliminated laboratory instruction from the Polish schools, he [MC's
> Father] brought much of the laboratory equipment home, and instructed his
> children in its use.[11]

> Unable to enroll in a regular institution of higher education because she
> was a woman, she and her sister Bronisława became involved with the
> clandestine Flying University, a Polish patriotic institution of higher
> learning that admitted women students.[10][11]

> Maria made an agreement with her sister, Bronisława, that she would give her
> financial assistance during Bronisława's medical studies in Paris, in
> exchange for similar assistance two years later.

Also, as per wikipedia:

> While a French citizen, Marie Skłodowska Curie (she used both
> surnames)[6][7] never lost her sense of Polish identity. She taught her
> daughters the Polish language and took them on visits to Poland.[8] She
> named the first chemical element that she discovered‍—‌polonium, which she
> isolated in 1898‍—‌after her native country.[a]

~~~
hartpuff
That's interesting, but I wasn't making any insinuation about why she became
French. I was simply giving reasons why "French" wasn't an unreasonable guess
for people to make.

------
jloughry
Frank Rowlett, a cryptanalyst breaking Japanese codes at the Navy Annexe in
Washington in the 1930s, accidentally invented computers when he haywired some
conditional branch circuits into an IBM card sorter [1]. He was only trying to
solve his problem, and was working in a classified area, so almost no has
heard of him today. There is a relevant xkcd, of course [2].

[1] Frank B. Rowlett, _The Story of Magic: Memoirs of an American Cryptologic
Pioneer_ , ISBN 978-0894122736 (1998)

[2] [https://xkcd.com/664/](https://xkcd.com/664/)

------
orionblastar
Yes the Polish code breaking was underplayed in The Imitation Game and reduced
to just one line. Turing built a more complex version of the Polish Bombie
machine to crack a more complex version of Enigma.

~~~
andrzejsz
Doesn't surprise me because only english are great :)

~~~
keithpeter
More to do with Hollywood wanting a short easy story.

Much detail about the huge operation that did not involve the Turing character
directly was left out or reduced. Most in the UK who have read anything about
the use of cryptography in the second world war know about the Polish
contribution.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28167071](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28167071)

I've read most of Kahn's history of code breaking (2006 edition) which was
originally written before the Bletchly Park project was publically
acknowledged and I found out about the US cracking of Japanese codes using
machine assistance but not what we would recognise now as an electronic
computer. Kahn's book is handy for historical depth - this whole
cryptography/cryptanalysis thing has been something of an arms race from the
invention of radio onwards.

~~~
kristopolous
I loved how they made it look like known plaintext cryptanalysis was some kind
of breakthrough months in the process when the reality is that was the job
description - the initial premise of bringing him onboard was based partially
on that. KPAs date back to at least the 1800s and were at least well-
documented by then, if not also well known.

But really, that lovely movie messed with the timeline all over the place. I
talked with the screenwriter at the Hammer museum about it ... he said "it
makes a better story" without any reservations. I had to agree.

~~~
jacquesm
Better stories should not trump accuracy. After all future generations are
likely to see this 'better story' as the real one, such accuracy should be
preserved where possible.

------
ggchappell
This seems a little odd.

Yes, Alan Turing looms large in the public consciousness; his various Polish
contemporaries, not so much.

But to anyone who has looked into the history of these events, the work of the
Polish is no secret, nor has their story been "lost".

For example, some years ago I visited the National Cryptologic Museum[1] in
Fort Meade, MD. They were very clear that the enigma code was cracked
primarily through the efforts of Polish cryptologists.

[1] Highly recommended. They have -- among many other interesting things -- an
actual enigma machine, and _they let you type on it_! (Well, they let _me_
type on it, anyway.)

~~~
kybernetikos
Bletchley Park has a memorial to the Polish codebreakers too. Another spot
worth a visit. [http://en.tracesofwar.com/article/11049/Polish-Memorial-
Blet...](http://en.tracesofwar.com/article/11049/Polish-Memorial-Bletchley-
Park.htm)

------
satori99
This is a good short summary of the accomplishments of the WWII Polish code
breakers;

[http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/virtualbp/poles/poles.htm](http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/virtualbp/poles/poles.htm)

------
wildmXranat
The Polish mathematicians were truly great. It was Rajewski and crew who broke
the enigma codes.

------
SixSigma
Good for them.

Personally I feel the Entscheidungsproblem was more important work but that's
not such a great story.

~~~
OJFord
Was it? Or was just Turing's method import?

------
mcguire
I realize most people are going to think of the Polish government as bandwagon
jumping, but the more we can get past the simple fairy tale versions of
history the better.

------
lazyant
There were different Enigma versions, even at the same time the different
German organizations used simpler or more complicated versions (there were 4
or 5 iirc for Navy, Army etc) the Polish broke an earlier model and Turing's
team broke the Navy one (more complicated than the one Polish broke, but
simpler than others), why can't journalists read a book or ask someone who
read a book before publishing?

------
rusanu
Enigma: The Battle for the Code[0] is a very good read. It details the Polish
achievements, the rush to save the Polish cryptographers out of France as the
it was collapsing in 1940, and then goes into details with the many more
details that gone into the cracking effort, besides Turing's team. Eg. tt
shows the importance of weather report patterns in finding cribs that short-
circuited the decryption (known clear text headers) and the importance of the
submarine captured Enigma machines that showed the disk settings in the Navy
setup (the Navy machine was much harder to crack than the Army ones). Not only
a good read, but also very educating for anyone using cryptography today!

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Battle-Code-Hugh-Sebag-
Montefio...](http://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Battle-Code-Hugh-Sebag-Montefiore-
ebook/dp/B00D8DP3ZI)

~~~
rusanu
Wikipedia
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma)
also a lot of details

------
gardano
Makes me want to re-read Cryptonomicon again. The Imitation Game movie was a
disappointment to me, after having read that book -- but I have to admit I
don't remember if the Polish contribution was mentioned in the book!

~~~
stuxnet79
Haven't read a fiction book in over two months and I'm thinking of trying one
out. Cryptonomicon has been in my Kobo for ages so it is going to be the next
book I tackle after the current book I am reading. I guess I will be kind of
cheating since Neil Stephenson's books tend to be well researched :) Hoping I
can learn a few things from it. A lot of pages though :(

------
mrsheen
też mi nowość

