
Honour for overlooked Poles who were first to crack Enigma code - wglb
http://www.smh.com.au/world/honour-for-overlooked-poles-who-were-first-to-crack-enigma-code-20121009-27b9y.html
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jgrahamc
I'm glad that Poland wants to honor these people, but to say that Bletchley
Park has been overlooking them is utter nonsense.

1\. Here's what Bletchley Park says on their first history page about their
wartime role (<http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/hist/wartime.rhtm>):

"The Poles had broken Enigma in 1932, when the encoding machine was undergoing
trials with the German Army. They even managed to reconstruct a machine. At
that time, the cypher altered only once every few months. With the advent of
war, it changed at least once a day, effectively locking the Poles out. But in
July 1939, they had passed on their knowledge to the British and the French.
This enabled the codebreakers to make critical progress in working out the
order in which the keys were attached to the electrical circuits, a task that
had been impossible without an Enigma machine in front of them."

2\. There's a memorial for the Poles at Bletchley Park
(<http://www.flickr.com/photos/ell-r-brown/5109679597/>) and they have an
annual Polish day.

3\. There's a special page on the Polish contribution (in English:
[http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/hist/history/polish....](http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/hist/history/polish.rhtm)
and in Polish:
[http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/hist/history/inpolis...](http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/hist/history/inpolish.rhtm))

I do agree, however, that the 2001 film Enigma was an utter piece of crap that
depicted "Turing" as straight and a Pole as a traitor.

~~~
NickPollard
I think the issue is less with Bletchley, but more with the mainstream media
who spread the information more widely. I would expect most people on HN to be
aware of the Polish contribution, but I think that the general population (of
Britain, at least) are less aware of it.

~~~
jjtheblunt
Agreed.

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stonekeeper09
I visited Bletchley for the first time less than a week ago and believe me,
they waxed lyrical about the 3 polish mathmaticians. I've seen the memorial
they have there. I came away feeling that it was a joint effort, but you have
to remember that there were thousands of people working at Bletchley and
Turing was key in the SPEED at which they were able to break the code by
inventing the Bombe. If there's any mis-appropriation, it's not Bletchley's
fault.

~~~
hetman
The first Bombe was built by the Poles and its design later given to the
Brits. It was called the "Bomba Kryptologiczna", i.e. the "Cryptological Bomb"
because of the amount of noise it made. Turing didn't invent the Bombe, his
contribution was the improvements he made to vastly speed the process up.

~~~
defrost
And adding to the notion of teamwork and the critical importance of people in
general and not just Turing we have the oft overlooked William Thomas Tutte
[1], and Tommy Flowers [2] to remember. People seem to focus entirely on the
Enigma decrypts and overlook the Lorenz cipher "Ultra" intelligence.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._T._Tutte>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer>

------
mtts
FWIW all the points mentioned elsewhere in this thread about this having been
known for a long time among cognoscenti of Bletchley Park is duly noted

but

to me it was news. So as far as I'm concerned the Polish government raising a
stink about this, however much a symptom of Polish persecution complex it is,
is a good thing. I learned something today (among others, after a few
diversions on Wikpedia, about Wojzek the Bear - how cool is that?)

------
mturmon
These Poles are also recognized by the US National Cryptologic Museum (outside
the NSA main building, see
[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/10/a-look...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/10/a-look-
inside-the-nsas-code-breaking-museum/64039/)) in its exhibits of Enigma and
the Bombe that broke it.

It was actually in those exhibits that I first learned about the role of the
Poles in this story.

------
zandor
This book is really worth getting if you can find it somewhere for a fair
price. It's almost worth it for the appendix alone where Marian Rejewski
himself describes how they broke the original Enigma code.

[http://www.amazon.com/Enigma-German-Machine-Foreign-
intellig...](http://www.amazon.com/Enigma-German-Machine-Foreign-
intelligence/dp/0890935475)

~~~
adaszko
Thanks for pointing it out. Can one find some mathematics behind Enigma in it?

