UK, Ireland /
Britain... What the Poles did for us. [444]
Simply passed on. Interesting...
Well not to the Brits anyway, French were first in line. Poles were deciphering German messages as early as of January 33 and in February of the same year the Polish Army's General Staff placed an order at the AVA Radio Workshops based in Warsaw to build military Enigma doubles to Rejewskis’ specifications. Most of his reverse engineering work was based on a description of the militarized Enigma machine, as well as old key tables. In July 39 one of the working models of Enigma machines was passed on to the French on Chief-of-Staff Lt.-Gen. Waclaw Stachiewicz orders who authorized the Cipher Office to share all their knowledge on Enigma with the allies. As a result both French and the Brits got Polish-made clones of the Enigma machines, but the Brits got theirs in the beginning of August 39 when General Stewart Menzies was given a copy of Enigma machine.
If Poland gave them the answers on a plate, why were thousands of people used each day to search for patterns and manually decrypt messages?
People were manually decrypting messages at Bletchley Park and behold the breakthrough they achieved when British all of a sudden begun to read the Enigma coded messages in mid August of 1939 right after Stewart Menzies got his Polish Enigma clone. I wonder why and how?
But at least a Brit invented computers as a result.
In December of 1938 Germans upgraded their Enigma machines with 2 extra ciphering rotors as a result Poles required using 60 instead of only six cryptological bombs and same number of paper sheets sets to read the German messages. In case you wonder what cryptological bomb is you will find it to be a mechanical device designed by Rejewski for the purpose of breaking the enigma code. One can argue that his device is a pseudo computer and a precursor of the computer as a result of working on the Enigma code but that would be a weak argument, after all what is the computer? Is it a machine in modern sense of the word? On the other hand if computer is the idea of mechanical device to do some kind of calculation then once again this honor would probably go to the British inventor Charles Babbage almost a full century before.
I can see how reading the book "The Ultra Secret" would give you the idea that it was the Brits who broke the Enigma code. Author of this book also made a lot of claims which are simply lies. Unable to overcome the fact that General Menzies was given a copy of Enigma machine he claimed that Poles had stolen it from Germans thanks to some Polish agent who was in Germany. Polish contribution to the breaking of the Enigma code is not very well known in the West but to downplay it like Mr. Winterbotham did in his book "The Ultra Secret" just proves that you do not have to be factual to be published and still be considered an authority on the subject or reader for that matter any wiser for reading it. Polish historians are also partly to be blamed for this but in their defense I would have to state that promoting the fact that Poland had friendly relations with Britain and France prior to and during the war was not in ruling communists interest not to mention the fact that it would not sit well with the Soviets. An author of this story would have to include the fact of Polish Cipher Office cooperation with the French Deuxieme Bureau. According to the ruling communists, for the general public it was enough to know that Soviets liberated half of Europe from the fascists' and capitalist states like Britain and France are our enemy not our friends, therefore such work would never have seen the light of day.
The Poles should be thanking their lucky stars the Brits stepped in, albeit belatedly.
Don’t fool yourself, it was not to help Poland. If that was your motivating factor Yalta would have never happened. As for thanking our lucky stars, who needs enemies when we have friends that would sell you out at their leisure and then claim that it was all for you. Ridicules don’t you think?
