The section soon proved its worth during the Polish-Soviet War of As a result, the Poles were able to keep one step ahead of their enemies and eventually emerge victorious from the conflict after the decisive Battle of Warsaw.
After their victory, it was clear to the Poles that successful interception of enemy traffic was one key to securing success in any future conflict. In , the German Navy began broadcasting a new type of encrypted message that baffled the Poles.
Where the Russian messages had been crude and easy to decipher, these new messages appeared impenetrable. It would later emerge that the Navy had switched to encrypting and sending messages by the German-invented Enigma machine. Enigma was a whole different ball game. Designed at the end of the First World War by German engineer Arthur Scherbius, the Enigma was a commercial cypher machine that would later be adapted for military use by all branches of the German armed forces. Resembling an oversized typewriter, the purpose of the Enigma machine was to encrypt messages by scrambling them into supposedly indecipherable strings of random letters.
Each letter was then written down and once the whole message had been scrambled, it was sent via morse code to the operator of a second machine.
This operator would then enter the garbled message into his machine and a reflector inside his Enigma would reverse the rotor process, lighting up the original letters that had been entered into the first machine. A plugboard attached to the front of each military version of Enigma further complicated matters by changing each letter typed into the machine before it was altered by the rotors. When Enigma messages started to be picked up by the British, the French and the Poles, linguists were set to work decoding them.
These efforts proved fruitless, but the British in particular carried on regardless. The Poles, on the other hand, realised they needed to change tack.
Read more about: Hitler What if D-Day had failed? But for all their brilliance, they would need a little help from their friends. In France, the equivalent of the Cypher Bureau was headed by military intelligence officer, Gustave Bertrand. Only two of the three mathematicians survived the war. After the war, Rejewski went back to Poland but Zygalski stayed and became a maths lecturer at Battersea Technical College.
Even though none of the three served at Bletchley, staff there work hard to make sure the enormous significance of their work is recognised.
Mr Gallehawk said: "We make a very important point of taking [people] on the tour round past the Polish memorial and explaining the Polish connection. The Polish Day will also include dancing and food, themed talks, the showing of a film about Krystyna Skarbek, a Polish Special Operations Executive agent and a Battle of Britain fly-past. Frank Carter will discuss The Zygalski Sheets, an account of how the code was broken before the war.
Tunny machine rebuilt for gallery. Memorial set for war codebreakers. Bletchley Park texts to go online. In , he agreed to supply Langer with German military documents if the Poles would pass back decrypted German messages.
One of those documents, passed on by Schmidt, was a manual for Enigma. Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski relaxes in the French chateau where the codebreakers were working to crack the Enigma machine codes in They discovered that a panel added to the front of the machine altered the settings, although they still could not tell how the device was wired.
They set about collecting coded messages and applied their wits to find clues. Sometimes the senders made telling mistakes. The German soldiers might use simple sets of three letters, such as QQQ, to broadcast the settings to the receiver. Occasionally, the messages could be guessed: for instance, they often said maschine defekt.
By , in the run-up to war, the German military was tightening its communications. In October that year, the senders began to reset the Enigma machines daily. The team developed tools to work through the hundreds of permutations, including punched cards and a mechanical device with rotors that mimicked Enigma, which, for uncertain reasons, the team called a bomba. Both concepts were later used and developed by Alan Turing.
The Poles wanted to pass on their knowledge. Initially angry that they had beaten him to it, Knox later sent the Poles a silk scarf printed with a horse-racing scene to concede that they had won. Rudolf Stallmann — code name Rex — was a German card-sharp who spied for the French intelligence service. Credit: Christie Books. The British immediately ramped up codebreaking efforts at Bletchley Park; within a few months, Alan Turing had re-engineered the bombes to work more quickly.
The Polish insights saved him a year of work. When war broke out, the Polish radio-intelligence unit was wound up. The codebreakers buried their notes and machines and fled. Some ended up in Algeria, the rest in France working for Bertrand, who had set up a radio-intelligence group in a chateau in southern France. As valuable assets, the codebreakers were not allowed to fight. Touching photographs in the book show them joking with each other and spending time with girlfriends amid the devastation.
After the war, they settled in Scotland.
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