Breaking ENIGMA: A Polish Contribution

Canada Free Press ^ | Tuesday, February 14, 2006 | David Dastych

[Anne_Conn]

"While all historians agree that the interception of German secret traffic by the Allies was a major factor in the ultimate victory in World War II, for many years, even after the declassification of official wartime documents on the subject, the role of Poles was either totally ignored or skimmed over with only vague references in historical literature." (Witold K. Liliental, Ph.D., Montreal, Canada in Everyone's War, Great Britain, 2000).

[CarrotAndStick]

Somewhat related:

New book on Indo-British WWII agent


http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1578045/posts

[E Rocc]

Most of the history books I've read mentioned the role of the Poles in breaking Enigma. Tom Clancy even mentioned it in The Hunt For Red October, in a subplot that didn't make the movie.

-Eric

[colorado tanker]

Agreed. I've known about this for a long time. Unfortunately, the Poles didn't get to exploit this success because the Germans occupied them after the West handed Hitler the Rhineland and Munich and Stalin sold them out.

[DTA]

ping

[Malesherbes]

Good article. I recently saw an Emigma on display in Warsaw, and it may have been the original given to Buzek in 2000, tho' I'm not sure of that. The Poles became aware of the importance of cryptography during their 1920 war with the Bolsheviks. By the summer of 1939 they had a highly sophisticated and secret operation going in a forest near Pyry just south of Warsaw. It was there that they gave the amazed British and French copies of Engima -which set off a chain of events that had much to do with Germany's ultimate defeat in WWII.

[Iris7]

Personally I believe the initial cracking of Enigma by Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski the most remarkable intellectual feat of the 20th Century.

British "Codes and Cyphers" (official code breakers) article

Accessible and thorough, NON-technical

Wiki articles, look correct to me

Technical, written by a mathematician

This is a thorough look at the subject on CD.

[SirTaurus]

Distributed computing cracks Enigma code
what took them years was done in months with open source software.

[Iris7]

"..what took them years was done in months with open source software."

Looks like computers came from WWII code breaking, Turing and Von Neuman, Colossus and Eniac. The first big real time application, SAGE, was run on late model Forrester and Olsen Whirlwinds.

The Whirlwind began building in 1945 as I recall, and ended with SAGE, where each computing center had two CPUs each using, count them, 55,000 vacuum tubes. 12AU7s as I recall. Whole new vacuum tube technologies had to be developed to increase CPU uptime but two were still needed. All 55,000 tubes were replaced all at once by tubes made in one lot and by an interval determined by extensive statistical analysis made on the same lot of tubes installed in the machine for failure likelyhood probability functions. 110000 12AU7 tubes each putting out maybe 15 watts apiece or over one million watts of heat.

[Iris7]

Incredible flaws in Enigma algorithm and even more flaws in their crypto procedures. Extremely fun WWII crypto simulators here.

This guy can not be broken at all, nohow, no-when, even by quantum computing (if such a thing exists) and it was deployed in 1943.

SIGSALY

[Recovering_Democrat]

I read "A Man Called Intrepid" years ago--it had quite a bit about ENIGMA in it; before reading Intrepid I had no idea how prevalent the Nazis were on U.S. soil.

Makes me glad Bush is hunting the Al Qaeda jackasses down here in the homeland, too.