Re: Well done
The Polish contribution is very well acknowledged at Bletchley.
What is not generally acknowledged is that Bletchley had to repeatedly break enigma again and again in its different versions, and spent months blind to naval enigma messages until the RN managed to capture a code book.
Then Bletchley Bille Tutte also reverse engineered the Lorenz cipher, a greater feat and with the work of Tommy Flowers at Dollis Hill in London they computerised the process of discovering reel settings. The code breaking was the key to it all but the real effort in collating hundreds of encrypted messages per day from a network of listening stations, and team of couriers into an industrial operation involving 24x7 shifts of many thousands of people to mine the messages and sift-pan them for gold. It’s too often portrayed as a couple of ramshackle huts with a few tank-topped boffins chewing pencils and scratching heads. A visit will open the eyes to the huge concrete blocks designed to look like a hospital. The processing of information that happened there was industrial scale. Sure the first commercial enigma cracks were important but it was a far bigger show than that.
Of course we all know but are ashamed to admit that what really happened was an American GI showed up there chewing gum, wearing aviator shades and hat cocked at a jaunty angle, looked at a couple of crypts, changed a couple of wires on a bombe and suddenly everything started working 100 times better. He then declared that this was what he was talking about and took the prettiest WREN away with him sweet talking promises of nylon stockings and ration busting quantities of canned beef and Hershey’s chocolate.