Honour for overlooked Poles who were first to crack Enigma code

http://www.smh.com.au/world/honour-for-overlooked-poles-who-were-first-to-crack-enigma-code-20121009-27b9y.html

by wglb • 14 years ago

106 17 14 years ago

smh.com.au

jgrahamc• 14 years ago

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.... and in Polish: http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/hist/history/inpolis...)

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.

NickPollard2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

Agreed.

fwr• 14 years ago

It's a touchy subject in Poland, it's generally not accepted that anyone other than the Poles deserves any recognition and any mention of the actual state of history gets you shifty looks. So while the world is starting giving credit to Rejewski's team, the broad audience here is just now discovering that it wasn't solely their work.

majke• 14 years ago

> It's a touchy subject in Poland, it's generally not accepted that anyone other than the Poles deserves any recognition

Hmm... Think of it differently:

- Poland regained independence because president Wilson [1] (hurray for USA)

- Poland was expecting British and French help early in the second world war (boo to UK / France)

- Poland was left under Stalin's influence after the war (boo for UK / USA)

Now mainstream media rarely mentions polish contribution [2] [3] [4] to war efforts. Allow us to complain. We like to complain.

And yes, we would like to be recognized, and complaining is pretty much the only thing we can do about it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson#The_Fourteen_Po...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No._303_Polish_Fighter_Squadro...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/II_Corps_(Poland)

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Polish_Armoured_Division

Update 1: Added final sentence.

Update 2: Also relevant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Total_... (especially the rightmost column)

wildmXranat• 14 years ago

All fine points. Whenever this topic is brought up, I personally take the time to straighten the overwhelming view based on lack of or misinformation about these three mathematicians.

In-fact, there is a positive to all of this - via discussion and constant correction of what isn't widely stated, we are promoting the actual facts. This in my point of view is and will be the eventual success contributing factor. I'm not involved in the matters of how official statements, literature and such should be amended to promote this more, but if there is an overwhelming misunderstanding of how and what exactly happened - it's worthwhile doing so.

wglb2• 14 years ago

Wasn't there a section in Kahn's The Codebreakers telling of how at least one of the Polish fellows joined the codebreakers at Bletchley, but was put off onto menial tasks for the rest of the war?

stonekeeper092• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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

stonekeeper092• 14 years ago

That would have been my misunderstanding from what the tour guy said.

mturmon• 14 years ago

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...) 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.

mtts• 14 years ago

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?)

zandor• 14 years ago

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...

adaszko• 14 years ago

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

Honour for overlooked Poles who were first to crack Enigma code

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