Sickening BBC propaganda, after all this years they still pretend Enigma was cracked in England :/
Yes, this woman cracked enigma single handedly, by enlisting in school in the same year British government receiver FULLY FUCKING CRACKED enigma model and mathematical description from Polish cryptographers (Zygalski, Rozycki and Rejewski).
Poles first cracked only some versions, and only if Enigma was misused (which was common because it was convenient), then they improved the method, cracking more difficult version, and making the method more general.
Poles also built the first machine to crack Enigma (functionaly it was many enigma clones connected to each other, trying many keys at once basing on some assumptions to reduce the search space).
Then Poles sent that knowledge to French and British just before WW2, and British developed more general method, and built better cracking device.
British contribution was important too, it made cracking more versions and Enigmas used with better practices possible. But yes - it was outrageus that they pretended for decades it was they that solved the Enigma in the first place and said nothing about Polish contribution.
And the Hollywood movie was even worse propaganda, and it was created recently, when the archives weren't secret, so they don't have any excuse to show lies.
I am with you completely over British propaganda about the war. Also I think our simplified portrayal of the conflict feeds the existence of groups like UKIP as you cannot venerate the British armed forces in the world wars and at the same time denigrate immigrants, unless you have absolutely no idea of history.
For instance, if you look at lists of fighter aces and check the nationality of those who are counted as having flown in the RAF, over half of them are not from the UK. Polish pilots make up a huge chunk of them and the highest ranking RAF ace was Belgian.
Hugh Foss first outlined an attack on Enigma in 1927. By the 30s the enigma had evolved but Dilly Knox broke Enigma as used by the Spanish in 1937 before he learnt of the Polish attacks in 1938. (He had declared the German enigma unbreakable but that doesn't make his contribution trivial.) Knox later created attacks particular to the Italian naval enigma.
Turing is often credited with the lion share of fame for this stuff and its true that he was crucial in breaking german naval enigma which was the hardest used. But that pales into insignificance compared to the breaking of Tunny IMHO.
Any popular story is bound to focus on the people and their love lives more than be a technical piece.
Go to Bletchley Park and bathe in the credit clearly given to all those involved - especially the Poles - as people and not as nationalities.
You may be right about it being propaganda but I suspect it's more of a case of a sub-editor not really knowing what he/she is talking about.
The rest of the article, at least, seems ok in that it talks about her working on decipherment of the Naval codes which is true, I believe.
I do appreciate your sentiment though. I don't think it diminishes the achievements at Bletchley to highlight the value they received from others, particularly the key early work of the Polish.
The practical requirements to make a difference required a concerted network of interception stations along with dedicated cryptanalytic resources, computing experts and translators. I agree the standard explanation is crap, but it doesn't reduce the actual accomplishment of BP.
The 20 years between the wars were an amazing time in Poland. It was perhaps the best time in Polish history of mathematics, with remarkable contributions from Stefan Banach and his other Lvov friends: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Banach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lw%C3%B3w_School_of_Mathematics
Considering Polish cryptographers in England a security risk wasn't sickening; it was sensible.