Enigma and the Poles

Chris Smith (@spy_historian) tweeted a series of tweets about the Polish contribution to Enigma cryptanalysis this morning. I copy them here, adding some comments, and then write a bit more broadly about the issue. 

CS: Polish work on Enigma was truly impressive. They broke it while the British basically ignored it because they deemed it insoluble. A waste of time.

TC: The British had broken the commercial variant of Enigma early in 1927, and an improved solution was developed in time to exploit its use by the Spanish and Italian Navies during the Spanish Civil War and subsequently. I don't think it's fair to say that they thought the military variants insoluble, but up to 1939 they had no idea how to approach the problem. Put crudely, people who broke book-based codes, and simple electromechanical ciphers couldn't break more complex machine-based ciphers.

CS: They recognised the value of machine-based approaches. Though the Bomba was rapidly rendered obsolete by upgrades to Enigma systems, the Bomba was proof of concept. Use machines to break machines. I've argued elsewhere that Enigma and Bombas were an industrial revolution.

TC: Mechanical support to cryptanalysis wasn't new: Hollerith machines had been used in Room 40 during the First World War and other machines were being proposed in the second half of 1939 as GC&CS recruited from a deeper pool. The specific Polish breakthrough was to design, build and deploy a machine that mimicked Enigma. Following Turing's meeting in Parish with Rejewski he adopted the same concept for his (otherwise very different) Bombe.

CS: The contribution of the Poles, who shared their successes with the British, paved the way for upscaling that culminated in the SIGINT phenomenon that was #BletchleyPark. The BP Trust were right to create a Polish memorial, Prince Andrew was right to gift Poland an Enigma.

TC: Although the BP Trust were wrong to give one of the Enigmas GCHQ had loaned to them to Prince Andrew to gift to the Poles … !

CS: However, it has become a trope that this Polish contribution has been largely unrecognised in Britain and the US. My argument is that this is simply untrue. In fact, from the early days of Ultra becoming public knowledge - 1974 - the Poles were recognised.

CS: It is almost impossible to find a book that doesn't recognise their *massive* contribution. Yet these same texts often state that they have been under-recognised while recognising them. It is a weird, self-replicating myth. 

TC: The problem is that the nature, and particularly the source, of the Polish contribution was either ignored or grossly oversimplified (as largely was the case with the UK's own cryptanalytic work): so little was released by GCHQ in the first twenty years after the 1974 revelation that mythology filled the gaps. 

CS: So powerful is the myth, it has caused minor international spats. The Polish ambassador to the UK complained about Polish elision and misrepresentation (arguably rightly) in the 2001 film Enigma. In 2016, the Polish state commissioned a touring exhibition to correct the record.

TC: Both Enigma and The Irritation Game played their part in reinforcing the mythology (just as U-571 ignored the UK) but Hollywood blockbusters aren't documentaries.

CS: But the record didn't actually need correcting. The early British lit on BP/Ultra was clear that Poles did the lion share of early work. See: Lewin (1978), Calvocoressi (1979), Hinsley et al (1979), Collier (1982), etc.

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Actually, Hinsley et al were wrong and their record did actually need correcting. Vol 3 pt 2 (1988), Appendix 30 (pp 945-939) was written by Joan Murray (née Clarke) and Henry Dryden, both wartime Siginters who had stayed on to work at GCHQ, and who were retained after retirement to update the version of the Polish contribution recounted in Appendix 1 of Vol 1 which was written on the basis of records and knowledge which was later proved – for example by the publication of Rejewski’s memoirs – to be incomplete. At best, I don't think it's unreasonable to have expected Hinsley et al to have done rather better first time.

CS: So where does this all come from? As ever Group Captain F.W. Winterbotham. His big splash book, The Ultra Secret (1974), which (sort of) revealed Ultra totally got the Polish work wrong. He was writing from memory and, besides, didn't know everything. Loads of that book is wrong.

CS: Yet as soon as it was published, key people in the know, not least Tadeus Lisicki, a wartime Polish intelligence officer and cryptanalyst, wrote to the papers, in 1974, to point out the Polish work. Lisicki compiled a dossier that formed the basis of important books by Poles.

TC: By Poles, in Polish, and while some were later translated, their impact was limited, not least because the authors weren't appearing at book festivals, on Radio 4 or in broadsheet review pages.

CS: Examples include Garlinski (1979), Woytak (1979) and Kozaczuk (1984). All of which have appeared in English. Newspapers, TV shows, radio comedies and even movies have made the point - though poorly in the case of Enigma. So why does this myth of anglo 'chauvinism' persist?

CS: None of this is to dispute the role Poles such as Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski played. Quite the reverse. What fascinates me is the endurance of a myth that these pioneers have been elided from English language historiography. They haven't.

I remember telling a friend, when I became GCHQ's Historian-designate in 2008, that the two things I didn't see myself getting involved in were Enigma and VENONA. How wrong I was! Enigma remains a live issue for many – perhaps most – people outside the academic Intelligence Studies community who were interested in Intelligence history.

In the British public imagination the Bletchley Park story was the acme of the Boffinry: the British had been successful in the Second World War because they had out-thought their enemies. To the list of back-room boys coming up with Spitfire, Radar and bouncing bombs, was added the super-smart mathematicians who in complete secret helped win the war by breaking all German cryptographic systems. As with the Battle of Britain, Bletchley Park became part of a mythology of plucky little Britain fighting on alone and prevailing against all the odds, in spite of the evidence. The Polish contribution became merely transactional: a Pole handing over to the British an Enigma machine which was reverse engineered.

This popular narrative would not survive unchallenged the changes in Poland after 1989: the return to democracy, Poland joining NATO and the EU, and the move to the UK of younger Poles who had learned at least some of the story of Poland's contribution to the Enigma story. A Polish/UK Historical Commission reported in the first decade of the twenty-first century and described in English for the first time the breadth and depth of the Polish contribution to intelligence across the board, while GCHQ's massive 1994-2004 release of Second World War records had been absorbed and it was possible to begin to approach the question of Anglo-Franco-Polish cooperation on Enigma rather more reasonably than had been the case previously. Pioneering work by Dermot Turing and Marek Grajek also produced new accessible historical information that could be shared in English and Polish.

The problem I found as GCHQ Historian was that while 'the record' was becoming clearer, the Polish sense of their contribution having been slighted for so long had allowed a mythological counter-narrative to develop in which the UK and France would never have come near to solving Enigma without the Polish contribution. It was for that reason that I coined the term 'Enigma Relay' to try to make two points: first, that the credit of solving Enigma belonged to the allied team, the Poles, French, British and Americans each running separate laps and passing the baton; and second, that solving Enigma wasn't something worth 100 brownie points and that each of the four nations should scrabble to establish how many of the 100 they could each claim. International Intelligence cooperation doesn't work like that; solving Sigint problems doesn't work like that. I tried the 'Enigma Relay' out on a few people and then, when Polish, UK and French Sigint representatives agreed to meet in Warsaw in 2014 to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the tripartite meeting at which the three countries agreed to share all they knew, put the 'Enigma Relay' concept into the speech given there by Iain Lobban, Director GCHQ (https://www.gchq.gov.uk/news/director-gchq-commemorates-crucial-pre-war-enigma-information-sharing-meeting-poland).

Did this resolve all of the issues? No, of course not. Narratives and counter-narratives, and mythologies, have a life of their own and accurate history will always find it hard to compete against what non-historians would like a two dimensional 'truth' to look like. But reinforcing on every possible occasion the fact that success against Enigma took a lot more than a couple of very bright mathematicians thinking great thoughts, however crucial those great thoughts were, is part of the job. And making British audiences realise that most Sigint successes since 1939 are due to GCHQ's partnerships with Sigint agencies in other countries goes beyond mere intelligence history, and, hopefully, leads people to reflect that intelligence doesn't happen in a vacuum.