7 ms·

After I watched The Imitation Game lately I read about the Polish efforts, almost totally ignored in that movie and everything I'd read, as if the British inven

• avhon1 8y ago
  > a Polish movie about that story, Sekret Enigmy (1979) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_X4DmxCWTc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_X4DmxCWTc
  • yesenadam 8y ago
    I don't suppose you could track down subtitles too? :-)
    • avhon1 8y ago
      Unfortunately, I couldn't. I did find places to purchase the DVD, which has English subtitles. [1][2] I also found a very detailed plot summary, if you want to watch it without understanding the language. [3] [1] https://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Secret-Tadeusz-Borowski/dp/B000ECX0KG https://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Secret-Tadeusz-Borowski/dp/B00... [2] https://www.rarewarfilms.com/Secret%20of%20Enigma%20%201979%20WWII.html https://www.rarewarfilms.com/Secret%20of%20Enigma%20%201979%... [3] http://www.vernonjohns.org/snuffy1186/enigma%20secret%201979.html http://www.vernonjohns.org/snuffy1186/enigma%20secret%201979...
      • yesenadam 8y ago
        Oh cool, that's further than I got, thank you! That is very detailed.
  • EGreg 8y ago
    How dare the Poles produce video contradicting our official / popular version of events? Insolence!
• baud147258 8y ago
  I've just finished the Enigma part in the code book by Simon Singh (https://simonsingh.net/books/the-code-book/ https://simonsingh.net/books/the-code-book/) and the Polish contribution to decrypting the Enigma communication (based off French intelligence work) is correctly attributed. There's also a part on how the secret on Enigma's breaking has been kept for decades after the war, supposedly because Enigma machines had been distributed to British colonies (and ex-colonies) and British intelligence wanted to be able to decrypt their communication. The only problem I have is that the part regarding current encryption are a little outdated. But the rest of the content is good, I've found.
  • boomboomsubban 8y ago
    >The only problem I have is that the part regarding current encryption are a little outdated. But the rest of the content is good, I've found. How do you figure? The book ends with public key cryptography, PGP, and quantum code. Those seem about as relevant as they were in 99.
    • tialaramex 8y ago
      A modern introduction would explain AEAD, elliptic curve algorithms and the need for/ implementation of PFS. In terms of specifics like PGP it would today make more sense to describe Signal which you can relate to an ordinary user by telling them that's how WhatsApp works.
    • baud147258 8y ago
      The issue is not with encryption, the subjects are still relevant. What I meant is that the state of the art has changed, the situation has evolved and I would have liked to read the author's opinion on it.
  • M2Ys4U 8y ago
    >There's also a part on how the secret on Enigma's breaking has been kept for decades after the war, supposedly because Enigma machines had been distributed to British colonies (and ex-colonies) and British intelligence wanted to be able to decrypt their communication. Not to mention any units captured by the Soviets - GCHQ wanted to make sure any use of the units by them would be decryptable as well.
• herodotus 8y ago
  For many, The Imitation Game is an entertaining movie. But it is a very distorted view of Bletchley Park and the code-breaking efforts that took part there. When I saw the movie, I found it very irritating (because the distortions were obvious to me). But most of the audience seemed to love it. There are many good critical articles about the movie (for example, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/12/19/poor-imitation-alan-turing/ https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/12/19/poor-imitation-alan...) I am not surprised that people working on the Bombe did not know about the Enigma: this was a huge undertaking, with many sections. The Bletchley Park "Roll of Honour" lists all people known to have worked at Bletchley, or other locations on Signals Intelligence - there are well over 12,000 names on that roll.
  • stupidcar 8y ago
    To me that movie's screenplay is the apotheosis of Hollywood writers' contempt for history, scientists and mathematicians, and their own audience. That the same screenplay actually won a fucking Oscar for "Best Adapted Screenplay" is a pretty sick joke. It treats the actual facts of history as a worthless and inconvenient irrelevance. At every turn, reality is sacrificed, not even out of a necessary requirement to streamline the narrative, but because the truth fails to conform to the writer's prejudices, and the clichés of contemporary drama. When presented with this dishonesty, writers usually issue some lame defence about reaching for a greater truth, but what they really mean is they lack the imagination or ability to distill the truth into a compelling story, or they simply don't care enough to try. So instead they feed their audiences warmed-over garbage, and win awards for it.
    • empath75 8y ago
      If you want the truth, watch a documentary. Fiction has ends in mind other than transmitting facts.
      • iainmerrick 8y ago
        But shouldn’t a biopic in particular try to really get inside its subject? Turing wasn’t even depicted as gay in the movie (apart from a couple of random comments). And incredibly, they didn’t cover any of the details of his death. Apparently he was obsessed with Snow White, hence the apparent suicide (or experimental mix-up) with a poisoned apple. How could you make a Hollywood movie about his life and not even touch on his connection with one of the key Hollywood milestones? It’s very strange. Apart from that, it persistently gave the impression that Turing was a lone genius and minimized the contributions of everybody else. That’s a mis-service to everyone, including Turing, who comes across as a very poor team player. And apart from all that, I simply didn’t think it was a very good movie, taken as pure entertainment. I know people who loved it, though, so I realize opinions vary. It’s hard to separate my opinion from my biases around the treatment of the subject matter.
• oh_sigh 8y ago
  What was it about the Poles that let them break Enigma while other countries couldn't? Mathematics talent? Mechanical talent? Luck? A desire to not be invaded and overrun by Germany?
  • jnbiche 8y ago
    A trio of top-notch Polish mathematicians/codebreakers: Jerzy Rozycki, Henryk Zygalski and Marian Rejewski.
  • EthanHeilman 8y ago
    I'm not a historian, but from what I can tell: 1. The Poles won a decisive victory in the Polish–Soviet War (1921) a war in which the Soviet's had a clear advantage because the Polish forces were able to intercept and read Soviet communication during the Battle of Warsaw [0]. This reinforced the value of such intelligence to the Polish government. 2. Poland understood it was only a matter of time before Germany or the Soviets/Russia attempted to occupy them again. They made the breaking of German and Soviet codes and ciphers a priority. 3. The Polish cryptographers understood the importance of their work. They had the shared national trauma of Germany and Russia's many attempts at exterminating Polish culture during over several hundreds years of foreign occupation. They were the best cryptanalysis in the world and they had the full support of the government and intelligence services and were dedicated to their mission The wikipedia article on the Cipher Bureau "Biuro Szyfrów" [1] is worth reading. >During this period, until the collapse of France in June 1940, ultimately 83 percent of the Enigma keys that were found, were solved at Bletchley Park, the remaining 17 percent at PC Bruno. Rejewski commented: "How could it be otherwise, when there were three of us [Polish cryptologists] and [there were] at least several hundred British cryptologists, since about 10,000 people worked in Bletchley... Besides, recovery of keys also depended on the amount of intercepted cipher material, and that amount was far greater on the British side than on the French side. Finally, in France (by contrast with the work in Poland) we ourselves not only sought for the daily keys, but after finding the key also read the messages.... One can only be surprised that the Poles had as many as 17 percent of the keys to their credit" {0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Soviet_War#Battle_of_Warsaw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Soviet_War#Batt... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biuro_Szyfr%C3%B3w https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biuro_Szyfr%C3%B3w
• Isamu 8y ago
  The Poles cracked the pre-war version of the Enigma, that is the point. That version had fewer rotors. Then upon the invasion the German command switched to a more secure Enigma with more rotors. So the British had both information about the new Enigma and how the Poles decrypted the older version.
  • Tor3 8y ago
    No, that's not entirely correct. The version with more rotors (4) came during the war, not pre-war, and was only ever adapted by the German Navy. The rest continued using the 3-wheel version. What the Germans did at the start was to increase the complexity (by how they wired it, etc), and the "only" problem the Poles had was that they had only 6 of their own Bombe, and they would need many more. They didn't have the resources to build them. Edit: To my utter surprise I found there was a real Enigma machine in a tiny volunteer-run military museum in my home town.
• NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Like all movies, especially Hollywood movies, it is a terrible presentation of history. As another Engima related example, the film U-571 decides that presenting the real British capture of a U boat and its Engima machine won't do at all, so it was the Americans what did it. How else to perpetuate the Hollywood idea they win all wars single handed? ;) Most of the history books after Nigel West's in the late 1980s cover the major Polish role in the story properly with more details. Until West, and the coverage after his book, histories essentially presented the official GCHQ authorised history. They omitted huge details, and enormously significant events and people like Tommy Flowers and Colossus remained almost completely unknown, even in Britain. A couple of Colossuses were sent to GCHQ at the end of the war, everything else was smashed to pieces and officially "forgotten about". Which is why Tommy Flowers and others received little to no acknowledgement of their role during their lifetimes. Which is a fine way to thank people who played such a huge part in winning the war, and creating the post-war world.
  • Godel_unicode 8y ago
    The real u571 was sunk by depth charge and is totally unrelated to the plot of the movie. The movie is loosely based on a combination of the u505 which was in fact captured by the US Navy, and the u110 which was captured by the Brits. The u505 is often left out of the story by the British in keeping with their love of not acknowledging American involvement in the Wars.
    • orf 8y ago
      I don't think we love to leave out the American involvement in WW2 at all. There is a huge community of military enthusiasts in the UK and they almost exclusively have American military equipment. My father owns a classic Willies jeep for example. I just think we prefer to talk about the parts we played, just as any country would.
    • NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      u505 was 3 and a half years later in mid 44, and was notable only for gaining current code books. That saved time to crack as by that stage of the war Enigma was being routinely broken. Coming in the week of D Day, of course that proved important. u110 in 41 provided a breakthrough in that it provided warning of 4 rotor naval Engima long before their introduction. It meant Bletchley had already started preparing for 4 rotor by the time it was introduced. It was the trigger for work on the 4 rotor bombes. There were other U boat captures. American involvement is impossible to play down - convoys were critical to our survival, and there were tens of thousands of Americans based here for much of the war. I'm often just as disappointed when Hollywood plays fast and loose with mainly US operations like Guadalcanal or Midway. Even so Hollywood movies rarely attract the outcry U571 did at the time of release.
• kiwijimm 8y ago
  I think the fact that the Turing-Welchman machine is called a Bombe in a nod towards the Polish blurs the connection a bit. The British Bombe and the Polish Bomba pretty much only have the name in common. The Polish machine wasn't usable by the British by the time the Poles told them about their techniques. However... The Polish codebreakers are without doubt the first true heroes of the Enigma story during the war. Their genius, bravery and dedication opened up breaking enigma and saved a lot of time for the British codebreakers early on. As Welchman says, the Polish provided details of the machines that helped immensely in breaking into the military enigma. That said, the British were already working on it and had in parallel come up with some of the same methods as the Poles. The Turing-Welchman Bombe was designed from the ground up to attack the military enigma and used different principles than the Polish Bomba. This is not to underplay the Polish role in all of this. They are without doubt in my mind as much the hero's in this as Welchman, Turing and the others at Bletchley. Without them the allies would have been way behind the game at the start of the war and therefore many additional lives would have been lost. The Polish codebreakers need more acknowledgement in this story. Glad to see the new Dermot Turing book out on this subject: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Real-Story-How-Enigma-Broken-ebook/dp/B07D98S1BQ/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Real-Story-How-Enigma-Broken-ebook/... Thanks, James