From an article at the Telegraph (Article)
“Deciphering the German system is believed to have shortened World War Two by two years and saved countless lives.
But few people realise that early Enigma codes had already been broken by the Poles who then passed on the knowledge to Britain shortly before the outbreak of war.”
“I think there was an audible sigh in Polish cinemas when our contribution was reduced to just one line.”
Dr Grazyna Zebrowska
They even taught Turing how to build electro-mechanical devices which simulated the workings of the Enigma machine and enabled operators to cycle through one possible setting after another.”
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“The Enigma machine was invented by German engineer Arthur Sherbius at the end of the First World Wat(sp) and were used by the military and government of several countries. The British had struggled to work out how to crack the early Enigma machines, and by the early 1930s the Poles were way ahead.
Poland’s main codebreakers were Jerzy Rozycki, Henryk Zygalski and Marian Rejewski who joined the Polish General Staff’s Cipher Bureau in Warsaw.
While Britain still used linguists to break codes, the Poles had understood that it was necessary to use mathematics to look for patterns and had broken some of the early pre-war German codes.
They had then taken a further step by building electro-mechanical machines to search for solutions, which they called “bombes”.
On the eve of war in 1939 Bletchely codebreakers Alastair Denniston and Dilly Knox met with members of the Cipher Bureau at a secret facility in a forest in Pyry near Warsaw to share their knowledge.
Alan Turing, also later visited the Polish codebreakers and used their knowledge to develop his own “bombe” capable of breaking the more complex wartime Enigma codes.
But the Poles have received little credit, most notably in the recent film The Imitation Game, where their contribution was dismissed with a single sentence.
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Full text of the article: (Article)
