Who really broke Enigma? - lecture by Sir Dermot Turing in Dublin
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- čas přidán 10. 04. 2023
- Sir Dermot Turing, renowned historian and nephew of Alan Turing, delivered a lecture based on his book "X Y & Z: The Real Story of How Enigma Was Broken" on 29 March, 2023, in Trinity College Dublin .
Drawing on recently declassified archives Sir Dermot Turing told in full the real story how Enigma was broken. He fully acknowledged the groundbreaking work of Polish mathematicians produced as early as 1930s which subsequently led to the joint efforts of the French, British and Polish secret services (X, Y and Z) during the Second World War. - Zábava
So pleased to see the Poles getting credit for laying the foundation.
They always have in everything I'd watched on subject on British TV anyways
Long time known truth.
And the building of Colossus by Tommy Flowers a Post Office engineer was also an invaluable part of
cracking the Enigma . Dermot Turing's uncle Alan, said that it was almost impossible to achieve what Tommy Flowers and his team built . The worlds first electronic computer.
Not forgetting Bill Tutte, who did the maths that formed the basis for that computer.
Colossus and Tutte’s work were for the Lorenz cipher machine, not Enigma.
And not forgetting Mabel the tea lady who had a big part in beating the Germans. Who cares after all these years.
Space bar stuck Baz?
The true revelation here is not who really broke the cipher device that brought about the digital age. It is the collective effort of competing and/or collaborative human beings. New ideas and improvements are made on the foundations of previous work regardless of origin. We all start with nothing and yet conditioned by society to seek recognition for something as individuals. If only we stopped hurting and killing each other in the process.
All the reading about this and I'm convinced the Polish were not given enough credit.
You are absolutely correct. The Polish contribution was essential to the outcome of WW2.
Of course! Poland was swallowed by USSR and not part of the West after WW2. So the Americans took credit because they had the money...
And not just on this subject. I think it could easily be said that the Poles really took it in the yarbles during WWII from all sides. Sure they were our allies and their invasion really got the ball rolling, but they were treated pretty shabbily. Especially taking their contributions into account.
They built analog computers called "bombas" with which to do calculations, and this was pre WW2. They are indeed the unsung heroes of Enigma code breaking.
@jonnsmusich: "... So the Americans took credit because they had the money..."
Seems your parents didn't have the money for your proper schooling. Alan Turing and Bletchley Park are British, not American.
And Gordon Welchman is not given nearly enough credit for his work. He’s the man who made analysis of what we now call metadata a key intelligence field. Even when the Enigma coded messages couldn’t be broken in time to read the message, Welchman reasoned that just knowing German message traffic was unusually heavy (or light) gave British Intelligence a hint of where there was going to be action.
I have his book. Not forgotten
@@SW-qr8qejust looked him up. I’m seeking the book out. Thanks
And who was the truly great of this bunch who invented signals intelligence and moved to America. Much of that contribution is still secret.
Why the insistence of annoying & loud background music?
It is annoying, and probably makes it hard for non native English speakers to understand.
So many videos are ruined by this awful background music. I had to give up.
It's not only revolting, it's patronizing, as if we need that noise to tell us this is fascinating stuff.
Some artsy self-entitled editor put the music on the background because of his/her quite large Ego.
@@robertmclean3951 Not to mention the countless videos with "special effects" like shaking, zooming, flashing you name it.
Colossus had nothing to do with enigma, or Turing it was built to decrypt the traffic generated by the lorenz machine, a machine that was infinitely more complex than enigma, and it was the main means of communication used by the german high command.
Fascinating subject, spoiled by the needlessly loud and unnecessary background music.
Absolutely fascinating,
I recommend "The Battle of Wits" by Stephen Budiansky. Excellently written history of code breaking during WWII.
True so far is it goes. But the Poles knew they could not keep up with improvements to the Enigma machines and their choice to pass on the knowledge was very impressive.
Another thing to remember is that Turing was a true genius and his country betrayed him utterly after the war.
It's one thing to know how it worked, it's another to decode messages received in the 24 hour period before the settings were changed.
He betrayed himself
@@davidrennie8197 No. You deny his self. Get your shunning priorities in a bunch.
@@lewiscoacher7781 Is English your first language or was that some new WokeSpeak?:) He went out of his way to get arrested after paying a man for sex. He possibly died via stupid accident instead of suicide
@@davidrennie8197
He got arrested due to antiquated laws that demonised ALL Gay People. And he didn't pay for sex, you have lied there. In reality, Turing met a 19-year-old named Arnold Murray in Manchester. Their relationship involved sexual encounters. However, Murray stole money from Turing, and suspicion fell on him during a burglary at Turing’s house. Turing reported the burglary but gave the police a wrong description, which ultimately led to his undoing. He was arrested and later admitted to “acts of gross indecency” during his trial. As a result, he underwent chemical castration, a treatment involving anaphrodisiac drugs to reduce libido and sexual activity.
Also, Prof Jack Copeland argues the evidence should be taken at face value - that an accidental death is certainly consistent with all the currently known circumstances.
The problem, he complains, is that the investigation was conducted so poorly that even murder cannot be ruled out. An "open verdict", recognising this degree of ignorance, would be his preferred position.
None of this excuses the treatment of Turing during his final years, says Prof Copeland. I suggest you learn the truth and stop lying and showing you are homophobic.
Yep. Prof R.V. Jones explains it well in his book "Most Secret War."
I’ve worked with the Polish authorities, they are an exceptional ally and we should be thankful to them for their help (today and then). The Germans were so close to developing ordinance and fast flight that could have defeated the allied U.K. forces. The Polish are a great people and the U.K. civil servants should remember that instead of being their usual elite selves.
What is sad is according to the history books I’ve read, the Polish military was very poorly treated by the British and often scapegoated for British failures. Super sad to me - and I’m a damn yank 😊
Which version? The really early ones were broken by the Poles without question. But they knew that would not continue once things got more complicated. The thing that hits me most, though, is that the UK shafted Turing, the single person most responsible for keeping Enigma alive throughout WW2. Churchill and senior governmental figures knew exactly what they owed, but threw him to the wolves because he was homosexual. Not a thing that should be forgiven or forgotten.
I watched "The Imitation Game" about Enigma and Turing. Not a word about the Polish contributions. Now his chemical castration. Many inaccuracies and none were necessary to make a great movie.
The British "broke" the way the Enigma machine changed codes with each message, but about a dozen rural Postmasters from tiny New England towns ACTULLY "broke" the code. They were accustomed to sorting local mail by memory. They "solved" the code by playing the "Hangman Game". What letter is most common in German, then what Word is most common in German, then what instructions are sent to U-Boats most often. In about a month, the Postmasters could "read" (though NONE of them spoke or could read German) Enigma messages with 90-95% accuracy. With some "fine tuning" by MIT, WITHOUT a working Enigma machine, the US Navy was 'reading" messages to and from U-Boats BETTER than the sub Enigma operators! When the US Navy captured a working Enigma machine from U-122 (rammed by a US destroyer escort), we didn't bother using it. OUR "version" of the cipher was more "correct" than the machine's. -Source Adm. Samuel Elliot Morrison's "The Two Ocean War"-1947 Random House.
I wasn't aware of the Polish contribution.
Alan Turing acknowledged it in the very minimalist terms allowed by security
"And for all their bravery and all their sacrifice, the "allies" would betray Poland and sell her to the soviets for 30 pieces of silver. Never have so many been betrayed by so few for so little. May God forgive us." -- Col Michael Radcliff
This narrative is entirely fake, both sides of the war were working to precisely the same plan (kill as many humans as possible). Why do we always fall for their lies eh?
Britain declared war because of Germany's invasion of Poland. It had zero chance of winning a war against Russia when the war was over and Russia occupied Poland. Britain did support the polish government in exile till around 1987 when democracy returned to Poland. The government in exile was then disbanded and official polish seals were returned.
Incorrect ill informed whinnying
Poland was just the ruse that Churchill used to declare war on Germany,
On the orders of his paymasters, certain ‘bankers’ from the City of London.
Hitler had signed a Peace Treaty with Russia but then; Invaded Russia, Operation Barbarossa.
Russia was THE key enemy of the Nazis and instrumental in winning WW2.
Churchill invited Stalin to remain in the countrise occupied in the push to Berlin. Stalin agreed, in part because Russia had been invaded so many times before as well as the USA rebuilding western Europe while Russia rebuilt the East.
FDR didn't like Truman , he preferred his previous VP; Wallace and so do I. Churchill and Truman got their Cold War, JFK was negotiating to end it but that credit was given to someone preferred by the wealth class; Reagan. It was Gorbachev who deserved the credit however .
Shocking!
Tommy Flowers
Turing sidekick was born in Canty s field cork
Enigma was invented in 1918 and sold in the 20s for commercial encryption. Its surprising that it was virtually unknown to allied nations.
I always understood that the Poles managed to intercept an Enigma machine that had been sent in error by train to the German Embassy in Warsaw. This allowed them to find out the internal structure and rotor wiring of the early model Enigma. They did not "reverse engineer" it.
This is in no way to diminish the Polish work on Enigma and illustrated how good the Polish security services were to find the "lost" Enigma machine, exploit it and return it to the Germans without them finding out!
There's still a bit of work to reverse engineer the Enigma device, once a working sample is acquired.
This narrative is entirely fake, both sides of the war were working to precisely the same plan (kill as many humans as possible). Why do we always fall for their lies eh?
As I recall from reading "The Ultra Secret", published in 1975, the Polish group started with commercial versions of the machine produced by Scherbius & RItter, Gmbh. Those versions had two cylinders, the German government/military adopted a three cylinder version by the outbreak of WWII, which evolved into a four, then five cylinder version by the end of the war.
This is not true. You may want to read a record of actually happened. It is not a secret anymore.
Yes there is an account of how this took place by a Polish gentleman on CZcams somewhere. He explained that this package was due to be delivered to the German Embassy, but it arrived too late on a Friday as the Polish Post Office had already closed for the weekend.. The German diplomats made strenuous representations to the Polish authorities about it, but the Polish refused their requests by saying that it wouldn't be delivered until after the weekend, which gave them the time to open it and examine the machine. I'm not sure that the fact that it arrived by train was an error as such as theoretically at least it was a diplomatic package that normally shouldn't have been opened by anyone other than a German member of staff at their Embassy.
The Polish dudes did some nice works, but I did not know that they made a copy of the machine..... brilliant.
The Swedish guy Bjorklund a mathematician did some calculation on the Enigma because the transfer of info went thru Sweden in the war after Norway was occupied and the swedes got the possibilities to spy on it.
He later on got the office after Einstein at the USA university, so we can say he was some dude who knew math.....
*dud = failure. Dude = male person.
@@1258-Eckhart Get to the point......... the point that matters.
Hats off to the Poles
The British had enigma machines in 1939.
Here in Glasgow I’ve surprised a few Poles on my knowledge of the betrayal of Poland by the British and Churchill.
Wtf are you saying, what betrayal??
@@davidtuer5825 ask a Pole.
@@alexbowman7582 NO, you're the one i responded to. You spoke of a betrayal. YOU explain.
@@davidtuer5825 we left them under Russian Stalin communism. We had a treaty with them and broke it allowing Russia to occupy Poland. It’s more than likely Churchill permitted the NKVD to murder Polish leader in exile Sikorski and his entourage in Gibraltar disguised as a plane crash to prevent Sikorski making public a dossier he had received in Egypt from a German spy on the massacres of 21,000 Polish officers by the Russians.
Which betrayal?
The Polish breakthrough was key to breaking Enigma throughout the war. It would have happened later or never without the prior work of the Polish Cypher Bureau and Marian Rejewski's breakthrough.
In his 2019 book David Kenyon describes the bigger picture of Bletchley Park's work. It was the first modern intelligence organisation, an organised effort to collect all intelligence (traffic, signals and human), analyze it and then co-ordinate with the various customers in the military and the government to deliver what was relevant to that customer. Enigma was only a part of that intelligence.
I read somewhere that the British military attaché in Switzerland managed to purchase civilian version of the Enigma machine at an arms fair before the war and sent it to the War Office in London. They promptly sent it off to a government warehouse, where it remained untouched throughout the war.
Success has many fathers while failure is an orphan.
The final battle of good and evil is happening right now.
What about the German Intelligence officer who sold much information on, ‘Enigma’ to the Poles ? He gave them the boost they needed at a critical time and not that he wanted to help, but for hard cash.
Never heard about that. Can you tell more ?
Now it's a puzzle for getting who cracked the enigma machine actually in the WWII but I am convinced that British engineering and preparedness was fascinating forever to get overcome the challenge in the past
They built on what the Poles had done. With the UK Post Office engineers they went on to build the first computers for running through all the combinations necessary to get the day's settings. And then shipped that technology to the Americans because they had the power to manufacture lots of machines. So: From Poland to America via England.
So history is somewhat misleading and another great story for other people to dine out on ,yet still we do not learn!
The Poles deserved better allies.
Britain went to war because of Poland. How much better do you want ?
@@andym9571 Went to war, but then sacrificed them to the Russians. Remember it was both Germans and Russian who invaded Poland. It was Russia who kept Poland.
We did sacrifice our best young men, our economy, empire and post-war economic success to assist Poland. Having completely destroyed our country and ended up bankrupt, I'm not sure what more we could have done for a war we could easily have dodged by signing a pact with Hitler and simply sitting it out on our island.
@@chairmakerPete Churchill knew eventually Hitler was going to come across the Channel. It is better to fight him with allies still standing than after they have all fallen. That is why Great Britain was allied with France and Poland.
The Soviets were a bloody mess at the end of the war without the Wests assistance millions more Soviets would have died. Churchill and Roosevelt should have insisted on the liberation of all Eastern European nations completely free to choose their own paths. The Soviets were in no position to push back. The US had the atomic bombs there was no reason not to push to free Eastern Europe except apathy.
@@matthewhuszarik4173 Unfortunately Britain could do nothing about Poland's fate after WW2. Churchill tried but it was to be decided by the Soviets
I have not been able to find a resource to support this, but I understand that the individuals.....about 30 Poles who were involved in the Intelligence of breaking codes were arrested, tortured and finally executed by ther Germans. The report is that not one of the Poles broke faith and provided any information regarding their code-breaking efforts to the Germans. FWIW.
A very interesting few words, what is all that bloody awful noise rumbling on as he talks, added on by a complete numpty no doubt.
The Polish worked on it for about a year,and yes, it was they who handed the machine to the British.
The work on Enigma in Poland started in September 1932 and the code was broken in December 1932. The work continued for the next seven years.
Poland did of course.
Dublin? Have the Irish any interest in WW2 or are they the only people who still listen to Polish grandiosity?
It's amusing the no one in the only 68 Comments so far has noticed the name of the Speaker/Author.
He is the nephew of Alan Turing.
Ahh, I wondered what their relationship was, the elder Turing being somewhat light of foot.
Poland has always rescued Europe from the days the Polish knights came to break the siege of Vienna by the Islamic hordes under the Sultan.
And they fought bravely against Stalin while the allies pandered to that communist dictator responsible for 30 million deaths. And Poland will be on the front line to fight the Putin invasion of Europe too.
Poland had enigma. Poland didn't know they were going to be attack by germany and russia in 1939.
Poland knew. You can not gather a million army from 3 sides of Poland and Polish people can not see it? Germany changed the code of Enigma a few months before the attack
It was already very clear by 1938, from all the rhetoric about the Danzig Corridor, and the Polish army was rapidly arming. But a few clots high in the military establishment put a spanner in the works and the Polish engine wasn’t ready in September 39.
Call me cynical but Enigma could have been ‘cracked’ by an unknown person of colour who chose to gift the glory to a struggling white scientist. (History as re-written 2024)
Just wait until Netflix do the movie 😆🤣😂
I am surprised russian were not involved
You must be joking. The Poles have never liked or trusted any Russian Govt, the Soviets or the Tsars. The Russian Bear was only interested in itself,.
Poland had only regained its independence after the 1917 revolution and WWI. There was no way they would invite the Russians. Stalin was in power by 1930 and the Poles knew exactly what he was up to.
Completely aware of the Polish contribution to breaking Enigma ; most good documentaries highlight the fact . However , it’s never too much to remind us all of their ground work which enabled others to advance. “ if I have seen further it’s because I stood on the shoulders of giants “/
Yeah, just like the Brits condemend Turing for being of "unsavory" sexual preference, never mind his achievements, unlike a trully drunkward sailor wannabe, who single handed won the Battle of Brittain whilst being stupidly drunk...
Sounds anti white woke to me