Polish codebreakers 'cracked Enigma before Alan Turing'
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
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.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Code-Book-Science-Cryptography/dp/...
>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.
It doesn't make a good memorial to say, 'These guys did it first'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-571_(film)#Controversies_reg...
"It’s inspired by an old Polish code machine, only infinitely more advanced. "
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.”
It was therefore of the highest strategic importance to keep the work at Bletchly secret - the unfortunate side effect was Turing's work was classified as well as other pioneers like Tommy Flower's who build the first electronic computer from valves.
However Cairncross worked in translation not code breaking and did not have access to Enigma decrypts
He is unlikely to have comprehended nor been aware of the role of the method or the role or existence of the machine - due to the excellent op-sec secrecy separating huts.
Anyone know of a good cold war history of encryption ?
There's just something awful about movie storytelling which focuses so much on the "hero" or the "incredible person" that we can't acknowledge the contribution of others in a meaningful way. I guess we love the idea of the superman inventor/genius/whatever and find it difficult to credit teams instead of people. I wish this kind of thinking would just go away.
I think it's hard to fit team storytelling into the constrains of cinema. It would be interesting to see something like the Imitation Game re-imagined as a TV miniseries developing multiple character arcs.
Could you get your grandfather to blog his memories of Bletchley & Turing ? People would be fascinated
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma#Po...
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...
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.
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_... [2] https://www.nsa.gov/about/_files/cryptologic_heritage/public...
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.
I'm not saying everyone would know, but an unsubstantiated sweeping generalization that almost nobody in the West knows where she was from is patently complete nonsense.
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.
Objectively it's hardly the most interesting or significant fact about her, is it?
As for Enigma, as others have also stated, it's virtually impossible to have heard of it without hearing about the Polish involvement, to the point where it almost seems like the British role is being denigrated.
Here's a story from 2012, for example, on a previous occasion where Poland was repeating the story that's "hardly never mentioned":
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2215003/Secrets-Enig...
But now [4 years ago], the Polish Government has launched
a campaign to highlight the important - and overlooked -
role played by its nation in solving the Enigma code.
And a brief Google on BBC site alone produces these headlines and stories:
2014 Poland's overlooked Enigma codebreakers
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28167071
2011 Bletchley Park remembers Polish code breakers
bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-14141406
2009 How Poles cracked Nazi Enigma secret
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8158782.stm
2000 UK gives Enigma machine to Poles
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/930873.stmI don't know how else to describe it, maybe if Alexander Graham Bell had another surname, say French or German, and people everywhere were using that instead, without ever mentioning Bell? Would that be an understandable example then?
>I don't know how else to describe it, maybe if Alexander Graham Bell had another surname, say French or German, and people everywhere were using that instead, without ever mentioning Bell? Would that be an understandable example then?
I think I would understand more if she had never used the name Marie Curie, or even rejected it at any point in her life (did she?) and was simply called that by other people. If she herself used and was happy with the name "Marie Curie" though, and AFAIK she was, I don't see what the issue is with her being known by that name.
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
> 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]
At least with the war encryption crackers, nationality mattered in terms of which side those individuals were fighting on.
[1] Frank B. Rowlett, The Story of Magic: Memoirs of an American Cryptologic Pioneer, ISBN 978-0894122736 (1998)
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
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.
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.
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.)
Personally I feel the Entscheidungsproblem was more important work but that's not such a great story.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Battle-Code-Hugh-Sebag-Montefio...