Polish codebreakers Antoni Palluth (left) and his cousin Sylwester stand in front of a chart of North African military operations in 1942, when they were working with French intelligence officer Gustave Bertrand in southern France. Palluth set up a business making electronic equipment, including radios the size of a credit card for Polish secret agents. After the 1920 conflict, Ciężki became leader of a radio-intelligence unit. Maksymilian Ciężki and Antoni Palluth were among those signallers. Jamming the Russians’ radio communications bought enough time to secure and save the city. Signallers decoded a telegram from Red Army military commander Joseph Stalin, which indicated that an attack on Warsaw was imminent. Polish skills in cryptography and radio engineering came together during the 1920 Russo-Polish War. Turing unearths a remarkable tale of intellect, bravery and camaraderie that reads like a nail-biting spy novel. Many original Polish papers were destroyed, but the mathematicians’ families have shared personal letters. After the war, military documents were scattered across Europe, and key French records were declassified only in 2016. The Poles shared their secrets with French and British intelligence services before and during the Second World War - the letters X, Y and Z were shorthand for the French, British and Polish codebreaking teams, respectively. In his book X, Y & Z, Dermot Turing, the great mathematician’s nephew, tells the gripping story of a band of Polish mathematicians who figured out much about how German Enigma encoding machines operated, years before Alan Turing did. But as with all breakthroughs, many more people laid the foundations. Bletchley Park, UK - the secret centre where it all happened - rightly gained its place in history. This deluge of knowledge shortened the war. From 1940 onwards, Turing and his team engineered hundreds of electronic machines, dubbed bombes, which decrypted the thousands of missives sent by enemy commanders each day to guide their soldiers.

X, Y & Z: The Real Story of How Enigma Was Broken Dermot Turing The History Press (2018)Īlan Turing’s crucial unscrambling of German messages in the Second World War was a tour de force of codebreaking.

Books about alan turing and enigma