I am doing some deep research for an upcoming WWII novel, and I really came across a gem of a resource. It is entitled “X Y& Z”, after the codenames of the alliance of the French, British and Polish Intelligence Services that broke the German Enigma Code. It is what I would call a historical prequel to the the movie, “The Imitation Game” which seemed to suggest Alan Turing, the computer science trailblazer and the great mathematician, nearly single-handedly broke the German Code.

What the movie failed to tell its audience was that the Poles had broke the German Military Enigma Code as early as 1932. After the Germans had added two addition Enigma rotors to the machine’s rotation of 3 internally wired discs, the Poles knew what was coming and shared their secret with the French and English in a top secret bunker in the woods outside Warsaw. This meeting took place only six weeks before the Germans invaded Poland on September first.

Both the French and English were “gobsmacked” (to use the Brit’s phrase) to learn that the Poles had not only mathematically “reverse engineered” the Enigma device (including the internal wiring of its rotors) years earlier, but also had built a mechanical device to work through its possible 17 thousand plus daily settings. That machine was the Bomba, Polish for bomb, because of the ticking noise it made while working through the permutations. Sound familiar? All their efforts were openly shared with the French and British, effectively, as the author describes, handing off the Baton to the “boffins of Bletchley Park”.

The three Polish mathematicians who broke the code – Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki, and Henryk Zygalski would escape Poland during the war, relocate outside of Paris, before having to move again to the south of France. Eventually, their continued codebreaking was honed in on by the Nazis’s, forcing them to escape to Spain, to Gibraltar and eventually on to London. Except for Rozycki who drowned in a mysterious accident in the Mediterrean Sea.

The Polish cryptologists Rejewski and Zygalski never did make it to Bletchley Park. But thanks to their story finally being realized, Bletchley did unveil a monument to the Polish efforts which I took a photo in front of earlier this year during my visit.

And perhaps the best part of this story is that the author of “X Y & Z” is none other than Sir Dermot Turing, who just happens to be the nephew of Alan Turing. An excellent read, I recommend it fully.