Brilliant timing - I visited the National Museum of Computing (the computer museum that’s next to the actual Bletchley Park house) 2 weeks ago as Ruth Bourne was giving a talk while stood at the reconstructed Bombe. It was incredible to hear firsthand from someone who had been a part of this war effort.
She couldn’t even tell her mother what she worked on as the news would be “all round town within minutes”.
Gee, that sounds like an interesting visit. And it looks like it opened in 2007. I'd bet the US' most notable computer museum is the CHM in California. It would be nice if we had a public museum for computing like the UK's. Although I suppose there might not be much difference in practice.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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/...
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?
Not to take away anything from Allied codebreaking efforts, I find that _Axis_ codebreaking efforts (against the Allies) before and during WW2 are underdocumented. I suspect some of this underdocumentation may be due to the Allies continuing to use WW2 cipher equipment into the Korean War.
TL;DR The Germans also built their own cipher analysis machines and were able to decode a substantial amount of Allied message traffic.
The thing the allies did know and the Germans largely ignored was the fact that their Ciphers could be vulnerable. They tested them. Despite some pockets of dissent the Germans thought enigma was totally secure and never subjected it to proper analysis from their side. Also the German hierarchy during the war made it difficult for dissenting voices from the ranks to be heard on these topics.
Donitz was one exception. He suspected the allies were breaking enigma and hence the security of the naval enigma's was increased. I believe he advocated for more changes but was stopped or ran out of time.
After the war the allies sent in teams of intelligence operatives to assess how much the Germans knew about allied codebreaking and intelligence efforts. What they found was that the secrecy of Ultra worked and held throughout the war.
Those interested in knowing more about the role of the Polish mathematicians / cryptographers in the breaking of Enigma may want to check out a new book: "X, Y & Z: The Real Story of How Enigma Was Broken" by Dermot Turing (Alan Turing's nephew), published by The History Press (2018).
Here's a review of the book at Nature News and Comment [1]
Coincidentally, this article came up while I'm listening to the audio book Cryptonomicon where they are talking about Turing's bike with a bent spoke and weak link in the chain, and relating it to how the Enigma works, while they're taking a bike ride at Bletchley Park. My fourth time through the book, this time with my daughter reading it.
They captured a Uboat without the Germans finding out and kept the sailors hidden away in prison camps so the Nazis didn't know we'd captured an Enigma and codebooks for it. Another fascinating story about how all Allies came together to defeat the Axis.
[+] [-] spongeb00b|7 years ago|reply
She couldn’t even tell her mother what she worked on as the news would be “all round town within minutes”.
[+] [-] wyldfire|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yesenadam|7 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] NeedMoreTea|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] herodotus|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] baud147258|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Isamu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avhon1|7 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_X4DmxCWTc
[+] [-] kiwijimm|7 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] oh_sigh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] basementcat|7 years ago|reply
TL;DR The Germans also built their own cipher analysis machines and were able to decode a substantial amount of Allied message traffic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_code_breaking_in_World_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cipher_Department_of_the_High_... [3] http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/ETO/Ultra/SRH-009/SRH009-6.h...
[+] [-] kiwijimm|7 years ago|reply
Donitz was one exception. He suspected the allies were breaking enigma and hence the security of the naval enigma's was increased. I believe he advocated for more changes but was stopped or ran out of time.
After the war the allies sent in teams of intelligence operatives to assess how much the Germans knew about allied codebreaking and intelligence efforts. What they found was that the secrecy of Ultra worked and held throughout the war.
James
[+] [-] sohkamyung|7 years ago|reply
Here's a review of the book at Nature News and Comment [1]
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06149-y
[+] [-] linsomniac|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] interlocutor2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SEJeff|7 years ago|reply
They captured a Uboat without the Germans finding out and kept the sailors hidden away in prison camps so the Nazis didn't know we'd captured an Enigma and codebooks for it. Another fascinating story about how all Allies came together to defeat the Axis.