Polish cryptologists' transfer of German Enigma code-breaking secrets to the British expedited the effort by several months, a critical timeframe in the course of the war, according to Dermot Turing, the nephew of Britain's most famous codebreaker Alan Turing and an author on the subject.
This significant collaboration between Polish and British cryptologists played a crucial role in deciphering the Enigma code, a major factor in the history of World War II.
Dermot Turing, along with Prof. Jacek Tebinka from the University of Gdańsk and David Kenyon from Bletchley Park, the headquarters of British electronic intelligence during World War II, recently participated in a discussion entitled "Joining Hands: Breaking the Enigma Code" at the Chelsea History Festival in London.
"What would have happened if Marian Rejewski hadn't shared Enigma information with the British in July 1939? Personally, I believe that British mathematicians would have eventually found the same path that Rejewski discovered in 1932-33. I think they would have figured it out on their own, but the problem is that it would have taken them much longer," Dermot Turing told the Polish Press Agency (PAP).
He explained that Alan Turing, who, along with other mathematicians, was recruited to Bletchley Park, was an expert in group theory, much like Poland's Rejewski. So, at some point, they would likely have arrived at the same solutions as the Poles did several years earlier.
"As for how much later it would have been, we can only speculate, but certainly, everyone agrees that many months after the July 1939 meeting where the Poles handed the British a ready-made answer," Dermot Turing said.
He added: "My guess is they would have reached it by 1941. What would this delay have meant for the outcome of World War II? It is difficult to provide a definitive answer, but it could have been truly catastrophic, and frankly, I'm terrified to think about what might have happened. Would we have lost the Battle of Britain without the contribution Enigma solution gave us? Would Germany have conquered Britain? Would we have ultimately lost the war?"
At the end of July 1939, at a meeting near Warsaw just a few weeks before the outbreak of World War II, the Poles handed the French and British one copy each of the Enigma machine, a German encryption device, along with documentation on how to decipher its settings and keys.
The cryptographic bomb created by Polish cryptologists Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski later became the basis for the machine developed by Alan Turing and British cryptologists at Bletchley Park, named the "Bomb," which enabled the interception of encrypted German messages during the war.
Dermot Turing detailed the Polish contribution to breaking Enigma and the Polish-British-French cryptographic cooperation before and during World War II in his book X, Y, Z: The True Story of Breaking the Enigma Code, published in 2018.
In 2015, he also published a biography of his uncle entitled Prof: Alan Turing Decoded.
(rt/gs)
Source: PAP