The Poles Solve ENIGMA...Placed in Broad Historical Context

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	• Enigma: How the German Machine Cipher Was Broken and How It Was Read by the Allies in World War Two (Foreign ... Wladyslaw Kozaczuk Univ Pubns of Amer, 1984 - 348 pages average customer review:based on 6 reviews
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highly recommended

Personal and Technical Account of Greatest Secret of WWII

The greatest secret of WWII is that the Allied Governments were able to read the German coded transmissions. This was often on a "Real Time" basis. The history books are being revised due to acknowledgement of this great technical feat.

The book is a combination of personal account and technical review of the people intimately involved in the origins of the codebreaking. It is about the Polish mathematicians and students who first "cracked" the Enigma Code, and how they protected the secret, evolved with the changes for several years before the war started, and how they jump-started the British efforts on the eve of the German Invasion of Poland.

Compelling reading, both from the personal and mathematical side. You do NOT need math to appreciate the impact of these unsung warriors.

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Unique Book on Enigma and Cryptanalysis

The best part of this book is Appendix C, in which Marian Rejewski describes how he and his team broke the original Enigma machine, first with paper and pencil, then with primitive "punch-cards" and finally with electrically-driven "bombes". The level of detail here is unique, and the description allows non-mathematicians to follow the Poles' progress. Because it wasn't the English who originally cracked the Enigma; it was the Poles. And Rejewski was "The Man".

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The origins of the Ultra secret

After World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill told King George VI: "It was thanks to Ultra that we won the war." The western Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, called Ultra a "decisive" contribution to victory. A leading light of Britain's Bletchley Park Ultra (Enigma-decryption) operation wrote in his 1982 book, "The Hut Six Story": "Ultra would never have gotten off the ground if we had not learned from the Poles, in the nick of time, the details... of the German military... Enigma machine, and of the operating procedures that were in use."

This book details how mathematician-cryptologist Marian Rejewski, in late December 1932, assisted by documents obtained by French Intelligence, reconstructed the German Enigma machine; and how he and his mathematician colleagues, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski, developed techniques and equipment to keep pace with the evolution of the Enigma's components and operating procedures.

On July 25, 1939, a bare 5 weeks before the outbreak of World War II, the Poles initiated French and British intelligence representatives into the secrets of Enigma decryption. It was this that made possible the subsequent massive wartime British cryptologic effort that altered the course of World War II.

Miraculously Rejewski survived the war, for another 35 years till 1980, to produce an impressive body of papers and interviews--virtually all included in appendices and chapter notes to this book--documenting Poland's prewar and wartime cryptologic achievements. (This volume is much more than a mere translation of Kozaczuk's original, skimpily documented 1979 Polish-language book "W kregu Enigmy.") This book has aptly been called "the Bible" on the fundamental Polish contribution to Enigma decryption.

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The Polish perspective on Enigma

This book tells the story of the Polish breaking of the German Enigma code before WWII and thru the early part of the war. The famous English Enigma work was based on the earlier work performed by 3 Polish mathematicians. This book tells how the Polish broke the code using mathematics (not a captured machine as is commonly thought) and details the methods used to decrypt messages when settings were changed. There is a lot of (Polish) patriotic pride in this book which occasionally gets in the way of the content, but it is an excellent book nonetheless. It includes an appendix in which the mathematician who originally broke Enigma explains exactly how he did it which is especially interesting.

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The Poles Solve ENIGMA...Placed in Broad Historical Context

The author Kozaczuk summarizes the facts: "As far as the first phase--fundamental to all further work--is concerned, it has been shown that the solution to ENIGMA, in all its manifestations during the years 1933-39, was a purely Polish achievement. The mathematical methods, Polish ENIGMA doubles, and ancillary technology, when passed on to the British, enabled them to exploit this achievement in record time." (p. 95). Among non-Polish sources that recognize the fact of the Polish achievement (although not necessarily without errors), Kozaczuk, in an Appendix towards the end of this book, discusses two books reviewed by Marian Rejewski (p. 257). In another Appendix, Christopher Kasparek and Richard Woytak provide further evidence for the same (p. 225). Finally, this book goes beyond ENIGMA by providing a good deal of auxiliary historical information.

Much of what has been written in the west about the German codes is sheer nonsense. For instance, the account of Poles physically stealing an ENIGMA machine from the Germans is a cock-and-bull story (p. 292). Unfortunately, the British seemed to feel no need to acknowledge their ENIGMA debts to the Poles (pp. 207-208). It is even more disturbing to read that, after Polish agents had stolen the components of a fallen V-2 rocket in German-occupied Poland and had arranged for these to be flown to England, British agents attempted to forcibly take away these components from the Polish agents. (p. 192).

There were about 10 to the 103 power different possible combinations in ENIGMA (p. 24). But, although machines may be ostensibly infallible, humans are not. The Germans had designed ENIGMA with certain intuitively-likely internal configurations, entered information into ENIGMA a stereotypic manner, and often got careless. Evidently, the Germans never had a clue that ENIGMA had been broken (p. 89).

There are ironies in this book. One of these is the fact that the Polish General Staff, thanks to ENIGMA having been solved by the Poles years earlier, had been able to identify 80-90% of the Wehrmacht forces surrounding Poland in August 1939 (p. 61, 66), yet this was of little military benefit to Poland in the massive ensuing German attack, as the promised French attack on Germany (p. 75) never materialized. Later, the Polish cracking of ENIGMA probably had played a more important role in the Allied victory in the Battle of Britain than the disproportionate number of "kills" inflicted by skilled Polish pilots (p. 187). The successful sinking of the Bismarck may owe to the Polish solution of ENIGMA no less than the tiny Polish destroyer Piorun having drawn the Bismarck's fire and thereby stalled for time. (p. 202). Still another irony is evident in Photo 13, which shows Hitler at his victory parade in Warsaw. The Fuhrer was strutting within sight of the building in which the Polish mathematicians had solved the ENIGMA before the war, thus sealing Hitler's eventual doom.

No account of espionage would be complete without discussion of traitors and collaborators. Of course, not all Polish service to the Germans was consensual. Far from it: "Volksdeutsche were citizens of various European countries, of German extraction, who, during the German occupation in World War II, officially declared themselves to be of German nationality and served the German authorities. In Polish Silesia and Pomerania, the Germans also used terror to force the populace of Polish descent to sign the Volksliste." (p. 221). Also, Kozaczuk writes: "Surveillance of a person suspecting of collaborating with the Germans was very difficult under occupation conditions." (p. 215). Although of course not written in this context, this fact addresses those who attack the Polish Underground for not assassinating more Polish informers involved in the denunciation of fugitive Jews.

It is clear that renewed German aggressive plans against Poland had long predated the rise of Hitler to power. Already by the late 1920's, all of the German political parties supported the wresting from Poland of those territories that had been under Prussian rule beginning with the time of the Partitions (p. 2). By the early 1930's, the Germans were actively and openly undermining Poland's half-rights to Danzig (Gdansk) (p. 11).

Finally, Kozaczuk provides a good description of the infamous Pawiak prison during the German occupation: "Named for its proximity to ulica Pawia--Peacock Street--the old czarist prison, built in 1829-35, would be blown up by the Nazis in August 1944, after they had processed one hundred thousand Poles--20 percent of them women--through it, murdering 37 percent of them outright and sending nearly all the rest to concentration camps." (p. 214).

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