Jamie Stokes: The Truth About Enigma

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against reading about Enigma – it's one of the most fascinating parts of World War II history. What confuses me about these comments is that they always assume one of two things: that I've never heard of Poland's contribution to the story, or that I have heard of it and am deliberately not appending the phrase 'Poland solved Enigma' to the end of every sentence.

I have heard of Poland's contribution to the Enigma story. A Pole, Marian Rejewski, was the first in the world to figure out how to read messages encrypted by an Enigma machine. It was a brilliant piece of work – one of the most significant examples of applied mathematics in history. Congratulations. Will anybody be satisfied by this statement? No. Why? Because that's not the point of comments about Enigma.

The thing about Enigma-themed comments is that they often feature a lot of exclamation marks. In other words, they are angry. There is always a hint, rarely clearly expressed, that Britain somehow cheated Poland over Enigma. This is sad, because the story of Britain and Poland's collaboration in the cracking of Enigma is something that should unite us, not divide us.

I'll write it again in case you missed it the first time: a Pole was the first to crack Enigma. Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of the story. It wasn't even the end of the beginning of the story. There were two problems. Firstly, Rejewski's solution was very clever, but it took a long time to read each message. This is a disadvantage when the entire German army is heading in your direction making a lot of noise. The second problem was that the Enigma machine was improved and used in different ways as war approached. This meant it took even longer to read the messages.

Almost any code can be broken. All it takes is a very large number of simple steps. Rejewski’s achievement was to find a method of skipping a lot of these steps, allowing an Enigma message to be decoded in a few hours rather than the several hundred years it would take a normal human being with a piece of paper and a pencil. Even with Rejewski’s method, somebody or something had to perform a lot of calculations really, really fast. This is where it gets interesting.

If the idea of a machine that can perform a lot of simple steps very quickly sounds familiar to you, it’s because you’re looking at one right now. This is, basically, what computers do. What Rejewski needed was a computer. Unfortunately, the Warsaw branch of Saturn hadn’t yet opened. He had an idea for an electrically powered machine that was something like a computer (he called it ‘bomba kryptologiczna’) and managed to build six of them. Then they ran out of bomba parts… and time.

Rejewski’s methods were shared with Britain and France about three weeks before war began. France quickly had its own problems with German armies, but the British took the Polish ideas and built an intelligence operation that shortened the war by years. Surprising as it may be, there are some pretty clever angols, and one of them, Alan Turing, built something he called a ‘bombe’ to tackle Enigma. This is going to be difficult for Poles to hear, but Turing’s bombe was better than Rejewski’s bomba. It did the job faster, and could be adjusted to tackle further refinements to Enigma, which the Germans were introducing constantly.

It’s a simple story really. A Pole came up with a brilliant solution to a threat to Poland. A Brit saw that solution and invented a machine that could use it in a brilliant new way. Without the idea, the machine would not have been built. Without the machine, the idea would have been useless. Fingers need not be pointed, nobody need be suspicious or outraged.

* Jamie Stokes*