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Enigma: How the Poles Broke the Nazi Code (Polish Histories)

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Poles were instrumental in breaking the German Enigma code. I am glad that this part of not really known history is being popularized in English language. I have to admit I am not a person who likes reading a military history. But this book is so interestingly written - with the whole background of the impending war and also with some sense of humor whenever possible. It tells the story of how Polish mathematicians got involved (much earlier than the mathematicians of other countries, also Great Britain) into the work on breaking the code and how they build the machines which were helping to solve the codes. When the war n Poland became imminent they simply gave these machines to their French and British allies. Their difficult stories how they continued working on decoding German secret messages and how some of them survived while others died during the war. The book contains also a separate chapter about English code breakers and how they helped to win the war. Even their personalities are described. Interesting read!

I doubt that one American in a thousand has heard about how the Poles cracked the inscrutable German Enigfma code, and thus contributed mightily to the Allied victory.

Unfortunately the code-breakers were unable to help Poland, their native land, but unselfishly transferred their knowledge to their British and French allies.

This book deserves wider publicity !

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 to the 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).

Enigma: How the Poles Broke the Nazi Code (Polish Histories) This is an adsorbing and fascinating account of how the Polish cryptanalysis team started after WWI in intercepting and decoding German secret radio transmissions by developing their own "enigma" machine. It details the history of French involvement and British aloofness toward something that was NIH (not invented here) and therefore deemed of no use to them. It also shows the distrust between the Allied partners in WWII of sharing the decoded information and how to apply it. It shatters the belief that the British broke the "Enigma" code.