Polish contribution to wartime codebreaking celebrated at Allied intelligence centre

Poland's Marian Rejewski, one of the main contributors to Allied wartime codebreaking, is celebrated at Bletchley Park.  

Marian Rejewski as second lieutenant in the Polish Army in Britain. i

Photo: CC/Wikimedia

Poland's Marian Rejewski (1905-1980) was one of the main figures in the breaking of the German "Enigma Code", an achievement that historians have said may have shortened the Second World War by years. 

However, as the saying goes, "Success has many fathers but failure is an orphan" (often attributed to Italian thinker Giambattista Vico). English-speaking films such as Enigma (2001) and The Imitation Game (2014) made only token references to Polish contributions. 

Still today, the British Imperial War Museum downplays the Polish contribution and misleadingly attributes the invention of the codebreaking "Bombe" to Alan Turing who in fact based his developments on earlier Polish inventions. The Encyclopaedia Britannica states:

The Bombe was derived from a device called the bomba—Polish for “bomb”—that was invented in Poland during the 1930s.

Today Bletchley Park, centre of Allied codebreaking during WWII, has celebrated the contribution of Rejewski, one of the Polish mathematician-codebreakers, and event naturally celebrated by the portal BritishPoles.uk:

It is tomorrow! Come to Bletchley Park and discover the life and works of Marian Rejewski, one of the Polish cryptologist who broke the Enigma Code used by the German army (many years before Alan Turing).
It was estimated that Poland's input in breaking the Enigma code helped… pic.twitter.com/hfquhAXxfP

— British Poles (@britishpoles) July 19, 2024

Sources: BritishPoles.UK, Imperial War Museum website, IMDB

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