Comment by yesenadam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yesenadam | Hacker News Reader

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After I watched The Imitation Game lately I read about the Polish efforts, almost totally ignored in that movie and everything I'd read, as if the British invented the whole thing, possibly Turing single-handedly. The article says "based partly on an earlier Polish design" but doesn't say

Up to July 25, 1939, the Poles had been breaking Enigma messages for over six and a half years ...

The Poles' gift of Enigma decryption to their Western allies, five weeks before the outbreak of World War II, came not a moment too soon .. Gordon Welchman, head of Bletchley Park's Hut 6...writes: "Hut 6 Ultra would never have gotten off the ground if we had not learned from the Poles, in the nick of time, the details both of the German military version of the commercial Enigma machine, and of the operating procedures that were in use."

..French and British military intelligence,...had been unable to make any headway against Enigma. This Polish intelligence-and-technology transfer would give the Allies an unprecedented advantage (Ultra) in their ultimately victorious prosecution of World War II.

Also the name bombe is explained:

The first machine was built by the Poles and was a hand operated multiple enigma machine. When a possible solution was reached a part would fall off the machine onto the floor with a loud noise. Hence the name "bombe".

There is a Polish movie about that story, Sekret Enigmy (1979), but I haven't been able to get hold of it yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biuro_Szyfr%C3%B3w

Sekret Enigmy: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079878/

Like all movies, especially Hollywood movies, it is a terrible presentation of history.

As another Engima related example, the film U-571 decides that presenting the real British capture of a U boat and its Engima machine won't do at all, so it was the Americans what did it. How else to perpetuate the Hollywood idea they win all wars single handed? ;)

Most of the history books after Nigel West's in the late 1980s cover the major Polish role in the story properly with more details. Until West, and the coverage after his book, histories essentially presented the official GCHQ authorised history. They omitted huge details, and enormously significant events and people like Tommy Flowers and Colossus remained almost completely unknown, even in Britain. A couple of Colossuses were sent to GCHQ at the end of the war, everything else was smashed to pieces and officially "forgotten about".

Which is why Tommy Flowers and others received little to no acknowledgement of their role during their lifetimes. Which is a fine way to thank people who played such a huge part in winning the war, and creating the post-war world.

The real u571 was sunk by depth charge and is totally unrelated to the plot of the movie. The movie is loosely based on a combination of the u505 which was in fact captured by the US Navy, and the u110 which was captured by the Brits. The u505 is often left out of the story by the British in keeping with their love of not acknowledging American involvement in the Wars.

u505 was 3 and a half years later in mid 44, and was notable only for gaining current code books. That saved time to crack as by that stage of the war Enigma was being routinely broken. Coming in the week of D Day, of course that proved important.

u110 in 41 provided a breakthrough in that it provided warning of 4 rotor naval Engima long before their introduction. It meant Bletchley had already started preparing for 4 rotor by the time it was introduced. It was the trigger for work on the 4 rotor bombes. There were other U boat captures.

American involvement is impossible to play down - convoys were critical to our survival, and there were tens of thousands of Americans based here for much of the war. I'm often just as disappointed when Hollywood plays fast and loose with mainly US operations like Guadalcanal or Midway. Even so Hollywood movies rarely attract the outcry U571 did at the time of release.

I don't think we love to leave out the American involvement in WW2 at all. There is a huge community of military enthusiasts in the UK and they almost exclusively have American military equipment. My father owns a classic Willies jeep for example.

I just think we prefer to talk about the parts we played, just as any country would.

What surprised me to learn when I was at the NMoC earlier in the year was that there's still information relating to Colossus that GCHQ won't release, and probably never will.

What surprised me most was just how successfully it was suppressed. Bletchley was a decaying set of mostly forgotten huts that did Enigma code breaking in the war and the surface of the story was barely scratched. I got especially interested in Bletchley and WW2 history right about the time the two or three significant books started coming out in the 80s.

Gordon Welchman, another of the little known geniuses, moved to the US after the war to teach MIT's first computing course. He later worked on encryption for the US military. He wrote the Hut 6 Story in the 80s, the NSA didn't approve of his book, so he lost security clearance and was forbidden to talk about his own book or his involvement. There is a fascinating interview somewhere out there on the web, with some of his relatives, about him having a surveillance tail in his late seventies!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Welchman

Is there speculation on what this might be? It’s hard to imagine what it might be, though to be kept hidden it must surely be something bad relating to the allies?

For many, The Imitation Game is an entertaining movie. But it is a very distorted view of Bletchley Park and the code-breaking efforts that took part there. When I saw the movie, I found it very irritating (because the distortions were obvious to me). But most of the audience seemed to love it. There are many good critical articles about the movie (for example, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/12/19/poor-imitation-alan...)

I am not surprised that people working on the Bombe did not know about the Enigma: this was a huge undertaking, with many sections. The Bletchley Park "Roll of Honour" lists all people known to have worked at Bletchley, or other locations on Signals Intelligence - there are well over 12,000 names on that roll.

To me that movie's screenplay is the apotheosis of Hollywood writers' contempt for history, scientists and mathematicians, and their own audience. That the same screenplay actually won a fucking Oscar for "Best Adapted Screenplay" is a pretty sick joke.

It treats the actual facts of history as a worthless and inconvenient irrelevance. At every turn, reality is sacrificed, not even out of a necessary requirement to streamline the narrative, but because the truth fails to conform to the writer's prejudices, and the clichés of contemporary drama.

When presented with this dishonesty, writers usually issue some lame defence about reaching for a greater truth, but what they really mean is they lack the imagination or ability to distill the truth into a compelling story, or they simply don't care enough to try. So instead they feed their audiences warmed-over garbage, and win awards for it.

The Oscars are not awarded for historical accuracy. Best adapted screenplay does not mean most faithfully adapted, it just means the best screenplay which is adapted from some source (often fictional).

Hollywood is in the business of telling stories, not teaching history. If you get offended by lack of realism or accuracy, then don't watch Hollywood movies. I can't think of any Hollywood movie you couldn't criticize for twisting reality to further the narrative.

"Based on a true story" should always be taken with a large grain of salt and Hollywood itself have often satirized it - e.g. Fargo slapping a "Based on a true story" sign on a wholly fictional story, or American Hustle stating "Some of this actually happened!"

That was not his point. And I agree with him.

It doesnt have to be accurate but the script was just bad. It was basically the most typical misunderstood genius against the evil military industrial complex, with a woman lead who understands him.

Also a good adapted screenplay should adpot the most interesting unique parts, and not.just creat a generic new story with some of the same names.

The academy award is called "best adapted screenplay" and awards the best screenplay (by oscar standards) which happen to be an adaptation. Whether the adaption if faithful or improves of the source material is not a factor, only the resulting screenplay.

I'm not disputing the movie is cliched oscar-bait. That is the kind of movies the oscars awards.

Ah, the difference between best "adapted screenplay", vs. "best adapted" screenplay.

Exactly. Things like sequels as also classified as adapted. Borat got a nomination for best adapted screenplay because it was based on the character from the tv-show. But the screenplay is supposed to be judged on its own merit, the academy members is not required to have read the book or whatever.

It's terrible as to the details, but that's movies for you.

Anyone wanting to know more should read "Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence"[1]

Which the movie script is alleged to be based upon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing:_The_Enigma

And then there's Rudy Rucker's Turing & Burroughs.[0]

> What if Alan Turing, founder of the modern computer age, escaped assassination by the secret service to become the lover of Beat author William Burroughs? What if they mutated into giant shapeshifting slugs, fled the FBI, raised Burroughs’s wife from the dead, and tweaked the H-bombs of Los Alamos? A wild beatnik adventure, compulsively readable, hysterically funny, with insane warps and twists—and a bad attitude throughout.

0) http://www.rudyrucker.com/turingandburroughs/

If you want the truth, watch a documentary. Fiction has ends in mind other than transmitting facts.

But shouldn’t a biopic in particular try to really get inside its subject?

Turing wasn’t even depicted as gay in the movie (apart from a couple of random comments).

And incredibly, they didn’t cover any of the details of his death. Apparently he was obsessed with Snow White, hence the apparent suicide (or experimental mix-up) with a poisoned apple. How could you make a Hollywood movie about his life and not even touch on his connection with one of the key Hollywood milestones? It’s very strange.

Apart from that, it persistently gave the impression that Turing was a lone genius and minimized the contributions of everybody else. That’s a mis-service to everyone, including Turing, who comes across as a very poor team player.

And apart from all that, I simply didn’t think it was a very good movie, taken as pure entertainment. I know people who loved it, though, so I realize opinions vary. It’s hard to separate my opinion from my biases around the treatment of the subject matter.

Is it really a biopic though? Just not sure that was the objective of the film with respect to Turing's story. You could argue it would have seemed...gratuitous?? to allot significant time to his personal life in a movie primarily focused on telling the story (albeit with historical inaccuracies/omissions) of Turing's contributions to computer science (and more specifically to solving the enigma).

Honestly though I see your point, because they did show the flashbacks to his childhood as some sort of vague attempt at character development. Might it have been best to just not discuss it altogether? You could argue the story is "dramatic" enough without it (winning a war!). To try to do both in 1.5 hours or whatever is asking a lot.

There is precedent for all of this...it can be done and done well. The obvious comparison is "A Beautiful Mind" which takes a similar sort of framing story (brilliant academic's personal and professional life). They pulled it off there IMO and just weren't able to balance both here.

Other historical inaccuracies aside, the final scene was Turing's apparent suicide because he was castrated by the fucking government (for being gay). And the movie started with him have romantic feelings for another boy at boarding school. Turing's homosexuality seemed quite present throughout the movie I watched...

My complaint is of the “show, don’t tell” kind. We never see any other lovers, not even so much as a kiss.

The movie dances gingerly around the subject in a manner that’s the exact opposite of Turing himself, who seems to have been “out” to a dangerous degree (for the 40s and 50s). His friends warned him to be careful. None of that is in the movie.

I find the opposite is often the case.

I've just finished the Enigma part in the code book by Simon Singh (https://simonsingh.net/books/the-code-book/) and the Polish contribution to decrypting the Enigma communication (based off French intelligence work) is correctly attributed.

There's also a part on how the secret on Enigma's breaking has been kept for decades after the war, supposedly because Enigma machines had been distributed to British colonies (and ex-colonies) and British intelligence wanted to be able to decrypt their communication.

The only problem I have is that the part regarding current encryption are a little outdated. But the rest of the content is good, I've found.

>The only problem I have is that the part regarding current encryption are a little outdated. But the rest of the content is good, I've found.

How do you figure? The book ends with public key cryptography, PGP, and quantum code. Those seem about as relevant as they were in 99.

A modern introduction would explain AEAD, elliptic curve algorithms and the need for/ implementation of PFS.

In terms of specifics like PGP it would today make more sense to describe Signal which you can relate to an ordinary user by telling them that's how WhatsApp works.

The issue is not with encryption, the subjects are still relevant. What I meant is that the state of the art has changed, the situation has evolved and I would have liked to read the author's opinion on it.

>There's also a part on how the secret on Enigma's breaking has been kept for decades after the war, supposedly because Enigma machines had been distributed to British colonies (and ex-colonies) and British intelligence wanted to be able to decrypt their communication.

Not to mention any units captured by the Soviets - GCHQ wanted to make sure any use of the units by them would be decryptable as well.

GCHQ and it’s American counterparts were more interested in deceiving the Soviets into believing that they hadn’t been able to break a type of cipher unrelated to Enigma, namely the pseudo-Vernam Ciphers as embodied by Tunny/Lorenz/* Geheimschreiber* for transmitting stream-enciphered teleprinter traffic (as decoded by Colossus). Enigma was trivial by comparison and it’s insecurity was known to the USSR.

The Poles cracked the pre-war version of the Enigma, that is the point. That version had fewer rotors. Then upon the invasion the German command switched to a more secure Enigma with more rotors. So the British had both information about the new Enigma and how the Poles decrypted the older version.

No, that's not entirely correct. The version with more rotors (4) came during the war, not pre-war, and was only ever adapted by the German Navy. The rest continued using the 3-wheel version.

What the Germans did at the start was to increase the complexity (by how they wired it, etc), and the "only" problem the Poles had was that they had only 6 of their own Bombe, and they would need many more. They didn't have the resources to build them.

Edit: To my utter surprise I found there was a real Enigma machine in a tiny volunteer-run military museum in my home town.

> a Polish movie about that story, Sekret Enigmy (1979)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_X4DmxCWTc

I don't suppose you could track down subtitles too? :-)

Unfortunately, I couldn't.

I did find places to purchase the DVD, which has English subtitles. [1][2]

I also found a very detailed plot summary, if you want to watch it without understanding the language. [3]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Secret-Tadeusz-Borowski/dp/B00...

[2] https://www.rarewarfilms.com/Secret%20of%20Enigma%20%201979%...

[3] http://www.vernonjohns.org/snuffy1186/enigma%20secret%201979...

Oh cool, that's further than I got, thank you! That is very detailed.

How dare the Poles produce video contradicting our official / popular version of events? Insolence!

I think the fact that the Turing-Welchman machine is called a Bombe in a nod towards the Polish blurs the connection a bit. The British Bombe and the Polish Bomba pretty much only have the name in common. The Polish machine wasn't usable by the British by the time the Poles told them about their techniques.

However... The Polish codebreakers are without doubt the first true heroes of the Enigma story during the war. Their genius, bravery and dedication opened up breaking enigma and saved a lot of time for the British codebreakers early on. As Welchman says, the Polish provided details of the machines that helped immensely in breaking into the military enigma. That said, the British were already working on it and had in parallel come up with some of the same methods as the Poles. The Turing-Welchman Bombe was designed from the ground up to attack the military enigma and used different principles than the Polish Bomba.

This is not to underplay the Polish role in all of this. They are without doubt in my mind as much the hero's in this as Welchman, Turing and the others at Bletchley. Without them the allies would have been way behind the game at the start of the war and therefore many additional lives would have been lost. The Polish codebreakers need more acknowledgement in this story. Glad to see the new Dermot Turing book out on this subject: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Real-Story-How-Enigma-Broken-ebook/...

Thanks, James

What was it about the Poles that let them break Enigma while other countries couldn't? Mathematics talent? Mechanical talent? Luck? A desire to not be invaded and overrun by Germany?

I'm not a historian, but from what I can tell:

1. The Poles won a decisive victory in the Polish–Soviet War (1921) a war in which the Soviet's had a clear advantage because the Polish forces were able to intercept and read Soviet communication during the Battle of Warsaw [0]. This reinforced the value of such intelligence to the Polish government.

2. Poland understood it was only a matter of time before Germany or the Soviets/Russia attempted to occupy them again. They made the breaking of German and Soviet codes and ciphers a priority.

3. The Polish cryptographers understood the importance of their work. They had the shared national trauma of Germany and Russia's many attempts at exterminating Polish culture during over several hundreds years of foreign occupation. They were the best cryptanalysis in the world and they had the full support of the government and intelligence services and were dedicated to their mission

The wikipedia article on the Cipher Bureau "Biuro Szyfrów" [1] is worth reading.

>During this period, until the collapse of France in June 1940, ultimately 83 percent of the Enigma keys that were found, were solved at Bletchley Park, the remaining 17 percent at PC Bruno. Rejewski commented: "How could it be otherwise, when there were three of us [Polish cryptologists] and [there were] at least several hundred British cryptologists, since about 10,000 people worked in Bletchley... Besides, recovery of keys also depended on the amount of intercepted cipher material, and that amount was far greater on the British side than on the French side. Finally, in France (by contrast with the work in Poland) we ourselves not only sought for the daily keys, but after finding the key also read the messages.... One can only be surprised that the Poles had as many as 17 percent of the keys to their credit"

{0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Soviet_War#Batt...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biuro_Szyfr%C3%B3w

The Poles set up a cryptography program for mathematics students at Poznań University in 1929[1]. I believe Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki we're all associated with that program.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zdzis%C5%82aw_Krygowski

There was an alliance between the Polish, French, and British to work on the Enigma problem. Rejewski made a simple assumption about the connection between the keyboard and the rotors that turned out to be correct. The British did not think to make this assumption. Why, who knows. The brains of the British operation was Dilly Knox, who was smart but not a mathematician. Rejewski was a mathematician.

Rejewski was aided by a French spy, though. It's not clear how far he would have gone without that. It's neat to try and play this game of "who was first" but I think ultimately you have to give credit to the team: it was Poland, England, and France, and they each had some contribution in the early days of Enigma. However, critical to note, this work had been going on before Turing got involved with GC&CS. The alliance began around 1931, and Turing got involved with GC&CS in 1938.

The entire signals problem was also not constrained at all to Enigma. Turing worked extensively on that problem, but there were other cipher systems, like Tunny, that Turing had a much more limited role in, which was mostly a crypotanalysis result from Tiltman (the "1+2 break") and engineering work by Flowers, to create an almost-entirely-electronic vacuum tube computer (which he personally funded because Bletchely thought it was impossible).

Now that would make a great movie- or a mini-series.

If society celebrated math and science, there is a huge cast of heroes to draw from that period to tell an amazing range of stranger-than-fiction true stories. When you read the real story, Cryptonomicon seems comically small minded in comparison.

As someone who really enjoyed Cryptonomicon, do you have any good recommendations for reading the real story?

"Battle of Wits" by Stephen Budianski

"Colossus" by Jack Copeland

"Between Silk and Cyanide" by Leo Marks

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but I was under the impression that they where the first to realize that the Enigma machine wasn't able to map any letter onto itself. This being the core principle behind all of the machines built to crack the messages, guess part of the plaintext message and discard all the enigma settings which could not have produced that cipher text.

A trio of top-notch Polish mathematicians/codebreakers: Jerzy Rozycki, Henryk Zygalski and Marian Rejewski.

Poles had pretty good mathemathicians at the time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_School_of_Mathematics

Germany was considered a threat (Piłsudski even proposed preventive invasion of Germany in 1935 to France and UK, which declined).

They also had some luck guessing the rotors arrangement in early military versions, and noticed some regularities caused by German operators being lazy (repeating common phrases etc). That gave them something to start with.

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