The post said the Poles "captured" and Enigma machine. This is a Cold War fiction. The reality is that Rajewski and others figured out the damned thing by pure brute intellect and this description of the machine: "It has tuning disks inside, lights on top marked with letters, a keyboard, and jumper wires plugged in to holes below the keyboard." There was also knowledge of pre-War commercial encryption machines that used turning wheels and made in Germany.
My own personal opinion is that the Polish cracking of Enigma gave NSA mathematics that allowed decryption of machine cyphers even as late as the air raid that nearly killed Kaddafi. That is why the story of the Polish cracking of Enigma could not be told until recently, since cyphers now are based on good mathematics. Rajewski and the boys did something as amazing as Einstein. Nah. More amazing.
Boy, am I a crypto nut!
Memories of dark days - and a bear
POLAND was the first victim of Germany's ruthless `Blitzkrieg'. Heavily outnumbered and outflanked on three sides, the Poles defended themselves for six weeks.
German planes attacked not only military and industrial targets, but also hospitals, schools and innocent civilians, trying to escape eastwards. We fought alone while the Western allies remained passive, though they were supposed to give us support.
More than that, the Soviet Union, with which we had non-aggression treaty, stabbed us in the back and in collusion with the Germans, divided Poland between themselves.
Almost immediately, the Polish underground, called the Home Army, comprising eventually half a million men, women and youngsters, began to operate. They performed acts of sabotage and attacked communication lines and smaller German garrisons.
At the same time a Free Polish Army was formed in France of émigrés and men who by various ways managed to escape to the West. In the Norwegian and French campaigns, two Polish Infantry Divisions, one Rifle Brigade and one Armoured Brigade took part. The Rifle Brigade distinguished itself capturing the important port and city of Narvik.
The first Polish Grenadier Division supported the French on the Maginot Line, Lagarde and Rhine-Mosel Canal. The second Rifle Division covered the retreat of the 45th French Army Corps and eventually was interned in Switzerland.
The units in Brittany and remnants of the two divisions made their way to the Atlantic coast and were evacuated to Britain. So, too, did the Polish Government and the Supreme Command and established themselves in London. The re-organised first Polish Army Corps guarded the Scottish east coast against a possible German invasion. Further south, an armoured Division and a Parachute Brigade were formed which played an important role in the later invasion of the Continent.
At the same time the Polish Air Force was reorganised in France. It embraced some 7,000 men and women and played a vital part in the defence of Britain. In the Battle of Britain, Polish airmen destroyed 1,300 German planes. One in every nine German planes shot down then was the victim of a Polish airman.
Eventually the Polish Air Force comprised of 10 fighter squadrons, four bomber squadrons and one artillery observation squadron. In all, the Polish Air Force destroyed 1,120 German planes, dropped 17,708 tons of bombs and mines over Germany. Polish Transport Command pilots delivered to the RAF 12,084 aircraft. A special unit, stationed in Italy, delivered supplies to European resistance fighters and flew 440 times to Poland with supplies to the Home Army.
In 1941, in Syria, an Independent Carpathian Brigade was formed from Poles who escaped there through Hungary, Rumania and Balkan countries. The Brigade fought in Tobruk and Gazala and later formed the nucleus of the third Carpathian Rifle Division.
In March 1942 the Division was incorporated into the second Polish Corps. That was possible because Poles, captured in 1939 by the Russians, were released when Germans attacked their former allies, the Soviets.
Hungry, skeleton-like people flocked from all over Russia to the recruitment centres. There they were fed, clothed and partly armed. Thousands perished from cholera and hunger. The Russians wanted to send them immediately to the front. Fortunately, under Allied pressure, they permitted them to be evacuated to the Middle East where the second Polish Corps became part of the eighth British Army.
The Second Polish Corps was composed of three infantry divisions, one armoured brigade, an Army Artillery Group and all the services, including women secretaries, telephonists and drivers. (One of them was my present wife who used to drive a huge lorry).
After a period of extensive training in the Middle East, the Corps landed in Italy, where they fought to the end of the war. Poles captured Monte Cassino opening the way to Rome, fought on the eastern side of the Italian Peninsula, taking, among others, the important port of Ancona and ended their campaign by liberating the city of Bologna.
At the same time the first Armoured Division, formed in Britain, fought in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany. The division took part in the battles of Falaise and Chamboix, ending its victorious march in Wilhelmshafen, taking the important German naval base.
Losses
In September 1944, the first Polish Parachute Brigade took part in the battle of Arnhem, suffering heavy losses because it was dropped in a wrong place while its artillery and heavy weapons were dropped somewhere else.
Polish Underground in France supplied the Allies with important information about the Germans, while the Polish Home Army did the same. They even managed to send to London a whole `V-2' rocket.
The Polish Navy fought in the Baltic and North Sea and escorted convoys of supplies from the United States and Canada to Russia. The Navy had two cruisers, 10 destroyers, several minesweepers and eight submarines. Polish Army cryptologists, stationed in Bletchley Park, played an important part in breaking the German secret code, which enabled the Allies to know every German plan well in advance.
On a lighter note, I would like to tell you about the most famous Polish `soldier', the brown bear called Wojtek (pronounced Voytek). Our soldiers found an orphaned cub while passing through the Iraqi mountains.
Bottle-fed
They bottle-fed him while later he developed a special liking for beer. During the battle of Monte Cassino Wojtek helped their masters to carry ammunition. The picture of him doing that became the 22nd Supply Company's badge.
When the second Polish Corps was evacuated to Britain, Wojtek had to be sent to the Edinburgh Zoo where he remained to his death. When visited by Poles and called by his name, Wojtek jumped up and waved his paw.
My wife and I will, as usual, proudly march on Remembrance Sunday with our British colleagues.
~~~
John Kerry's typewriter used in medals hoax
From 1928 onward Polish Intelligence intercepted German Radio transmissions using a new cipher system which was eventually identified as coming from an Enigma machine.
Polish Intelligence had obtained examples of the commercial Enigma machine but quickly found that the German Enigma was different in detail from the commercial version.
The Polish Mathematicians
Polish Intelligence were initially unable to break the German Enigma traffic, however driven by the imperative of finding what the Germans were up to, they, uniquely among other nations at that time, decided to try a mathematical approach. In 1932 a team of young mathematicians was set up. It included Jerzy Rozycki, Henryk Zygalski and Marian Rejewski (all of whom were products of the notable flowering of Polish mathematics in the 1920s and 1930s).
Rejewski quickly showed that mathematical techniques could be used to attack the problem of finding the message key by exploiting the German's cryptographic error in repeating the message key at the start of a transmission.
The problem that still had to solved was the internal wiring connections in each wheel. In this Polish Intelligence were helped by the French. The French were very interested in assisting Poland because they also were disturbed by the rise in German militancy and wanted an ally on Germans Eastern flank.
In 1931 and 1932 the French cryptographer Gustave Bertrand obtained priceless information about the German Enigma from a spy, Hans-Thilo Schmidt, known by the code name Asche. The French were unable to use this information to break into the German Enigma traffic. It was also passed to the British who were also at this time unable to break into Enigma. Finally Bertrand passed the information to Polish Intelligence who had not revealed how far they had got with their attack on Enigma. This information, which included German operating instructions for Enigma and two sheets of monthly key settings enabled Rejewski to deduce the internal wheel wiring for all three wheels, but only after he had made an inspired leap of imagination. The problem was the order of the 26 wires connecting the keyboard to the fixed entry disc at the right hand end of the three wheels.
In the commercial Enigma, which the Polish team possessed, the wiring order clockwise round the entry disc was the order of the keys on the keyboard, QWERTZUIO... Rejewski had realised that the wiring order must be different on the German Forces Enigma, but had no way of finding out what the order was. The inspired leap of imagination was to suppose the Germans had, in their logical way, just used ABCDEFG... as the order. He tried this and it worked and he could now work out from his equations the internal wiring of the three wheels and the reflector.
The deduction of the internal wiring of the wheels was a spectacular feat by Rejewski. It enabled the Polish cryptographers to build replicas of the German Enigma machine which could then be used to decipher the intercepted Radio messages once the Enigma configuration and the message settings had been deduced.
At this point Neville Kerry interceded, insisting the Polish cryptoanalysts stop reading "other gentlemen's mail".
The brown bear "Kojak" [older meaner brother of Wojtek] was unleashed and summarily ate Lord Neville-Kerry.
Virtual Bletchley Park--The Breaking of Enigma by the Polish Mathematicians
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John Walker began giving the Soviets U.S. crypto manuals, keylists, messages in 1967, and, with Jerry Whitworth and Michael Walker, continued until 1985.
They should have been cat shot for the crew of USS Nimitz, Michael's last assignment.
Traitors should suffer.
~~~
