Did you know Poland cracked the Enigma code and not the British?

At the end of World War I, German engineer Arthur Scherbius invented the Enigma machine, a cipher machine capable of encrypting messages. It was used for commercial purposes until it was adopted by the militaries of several countries, especially Nazi Germany. Years before World War II, Polish leaders realized its military potential, and knowing that Germany was using them (and fearing German aggression) they began to try to decipher the machine. In 1932, three Polish mathematicians, Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski succeeded in breaking the code. With the help of some intelligence data from the French as well as mathematics, Marian reverse-engineered the machine. They then built machines that helped read the encrypted messages. One was called the “cryptologic bomb.”

Shortly before World War II, the Germans began to add more rotors to the machine, making it even more complex, until the Poles ran out of resources for breaking the new versions of Enigma. British and French delegations met with the mathematicians before the outbreak of the war and were told of the Polish breakthroughs. They were said to be absolutely furious that the Poles had cracked it first, and were especially mad about the fact that Poland figured it all out using mathematicians, while they were still using linguists… something that would guarantee failure. The delegations took the information back to their respective countries, along with replicas of the Polish cryptologic bombs. Alan Turing of Great Britain broke the code with his team and after the war, the Polish contribution was purposefully left out of history books (except in Poland). In 2014, on the 75th anniversary of the meeting between Poland, France and Great Britain, the spy chiefs of the countries involved acknowledged the vital Polish contribution, but Great Britain is still being given all the credit in history classes outside of Poland.