X, Y & Z Read online

  La collaboration avec le Service britannique n’a pas cessé pendant toute la guerre et de la façon la plus intime qui se puisse rêver. Gustave Bertrand, report of 1 December 1949

  [Collaboration with the British Service continued uninterrupted for the whole war, and in the closest manner imaginable.]

  First published 2018

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port

  Stroud, Gloucestershire, gl5 2qg

  www.thehistorypress.co.uk

  © Dermot Turing, 2018

  The right of Dermot Turing to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-0-75098-967-1

  Typesetting and origination by The History Press

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd

  eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

  CONTENTS

  List of Maps

  Foreword

  Dramatis Personae

  Timeline

  Introduction

  1 Nulle Part

  2 Enter the King

  3 Mighty Pens

  4 The Scarlet Pimpernels

  5 How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix

  6 Monstrous Pile

  7 The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side

  8 Into Three Parts

  9 A Mystery Inside an Enigma

  10 Hide and Seek

  11 The Last Play

  Epilogue

  Appendix

  Notes

  Abbreviations

  Select Bibliography 1945

  LIST OF MAPS

  Partition of Poland before World War One

  Poland 1922–39

  Partition of Poland 1939–41

  Gwido Langer’s escape route 1939

  France 1940–42

  Eastern border of France with Spain.

  Poland after

  Foreword

  By H.E. Prof Dr Arkady Rzegocki, Ambassador of the Republic of Poland to the United Kingdom

  On 23 March 2018 I was pleased to be the guest of honour at Bletchley Park, where H.R.H. the Duke of Kent ceremonially opened a new permanent exhibition called The Bombe Breakthrough, which explains how messages encrypted on the Enigma cipher machine were broken using novel machine techniques. The exhibition describes not only the work done at Bletchley Park itself, but also the foundations laid in Poland before the start of World War Two. The Polish Embassy contributed a full-scale replica of the Polish bomba machine, illustrating that the development of machines for code-breaking began in Poland.

  The fact that the Enigma code was broken is now well known in both Britain and Poland, but what people know is surprisingly different in the two countries. In Britain, the story is about the achievements of Bletchley Park, centred on the work of Alan Turing, and how the decryption of Enigma messages helped the Allies to victory and shortened World War Two by as much as two years. In Poland, however, the story is about the triumph of mathematicians, especially Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różyicki and Henryk Zygalski, who achieved the crucial breakthroughs from 1932 onwards, beating their allies to the goal of solving Enigma, and selflessly handing over their secret knowledge to Britain and France. It is the story of a relay race, with the baton changing hands at crucial moments. When America entered the war, the Enigma secrets were once again passed on. All the countries involved have much to be proud of, and the Enigma story deserves to be told from all the viewpoints. This book will help ensure that the achievements of the Polish code-breakers are better understood in Britain. But there is a wider significance than balancing the narrative. At the heart of the success against Enigma, and its contribution to the outcome of World War Two, was international cooperation in the field of intelligence. Poland, France and Britain (and, later, the United States) were partners in an intelligence-sharing network, contributing knowledge from various sources towards a common goal. The spirit underlying the Enigma relay race remains relevant, with intelligence cooperation continuing to be a matter of vital importance in the face of more modern threats to security. It is in that spirit the Polish Embassy has supported the exhibition about Enigma code-breaking at Bletchley Park.

  Meanwhile, the dramatic story of the Polish code-breakers and their colleagues, and what became of them, is set out here. I hope you enjoy this fascinating book written by Sir Dermot Turing, the nephew of Alan Turing. Sir Dermot has, for a number of years now, cooperated closely with the Polish Embassy, historians and academics to tell the true story behind these crucial events, that shaped our modern history. I am very grateful that this story has been told from both sides. It is key to a better understanding of our common history.

  Arkady Rzegocki

  The Embassy of the Republic of Poland

  47 Portland Place

  London W1B 1JH

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Polish

  The Other Exiles

  The Wider Picture

  The French

  The Service de Renseignements

  The British

  ‘World War Two’s greatest spy’

  Pronunciation

  Despite the grumbles of English speakers, Polish is largely phonetic, and strings of consonants are not so daunting once the principles are mastered. The emphasis is almost always placed on the penultimate syllable.

  c

  ts, as in hats, unless followed by i, when it is softened as in chip

  ch

  soft ch, as in Bach

  ć,

  cz hard ch, as in chop

  dz

  j or ge, as in judge

  ę

  en, as in penguin

  j

  y, as in yes

  ł

  w, as in how

  ń

  as ñ in the Spanish mañana, or ni in onion

  ó

  oo, as in hood

  ś, sz

  soft sh, as in shot; s followed by i is also softened

  w

  v, as in van

  rz, ż

  soft z, like the ‘s’ in pleasure; z followed by i is also softened

  TIMELINE

  INTRODUCTION

  The most significant problem for British military and naval intelligence at the beginning of World War Two, was to understand German communications that had been encrypted on the Enigma cipher machine. During the course of the Great War, code-breaking had given the British an edge, notably in the war at sea, but also on the diplomatic front, accelerating the arrival of the point at which the United States became involved in that conflict. Twenty years on, the use of mechanisation to conceal secret communications threatened to deprive the Allies of this most valuable source of information about the Nazis’ plans.

  Nowadays, we know that the British were not daunted by the problem. They had set up a secret establishment, somewhere between London and Birmingham, specifically dedicated to unravelling the modern encipherment techniques being deployed by Germany (and others). Early in the war, a solution to the Enigma machine was found. German Air Force signals could be read from mid 1940, and signals from their navy could be read from 1941. Thereafter, with some ups and downs, a steady stream of decrypted signals began to flow towards the British authorities. In time, the stream became a flood, enabling the Allies to ob
tain a full appreciation of German military and naval plans in many theatres and enhancing their commanders’ ability to take wise and well-informed battlefield decisions. The success of Bletchley Park is now rooted in the public imagination as an example of triumph in adversity, a showcase of brains excelling over brawn, the cradle of a world-changing technology. Bletchley Park has much to be proud of.

  Yet, somewhere in this story, something got lost. In truth, Britain’s code-breakers had made no progress against the military version of the Enigma machine before 1940. How were they able to bring about such a rapid and effective transformation of their fortune?

  The missing piece is the contribution of the Polish code-breakers, who had been working on the problem for over ten years before the war and who shared their knowledge in a crucial meeting near Warsaw just six weeks before the outbreak of hostilities. In the estimation of those who were there at the time, what the British learned at that meeting advanced their research programme by a year. And what a year it was. Imagine a counterfactual history in which the British had not been able to decipher Enigma messages during the Battle of Britain, the naval war in the Mediterranean, the early years of the Battle of the Atlantic, or the campaign in the Western Desert. Such a scenario is frightening, as it would be a history that depicts not just a longer, drawn-out war but potentially one with a quite different outcome. In this light, the Polish contribution to the reading of Enigma-coded communications deserves to be better understood.

  The July 1939 meeting near Warsaw is itself a major mystery: why did the Poles suddenly hand over all their priceless secrets? Again, there is a missing piece. That meeting was the culmination of a relationship built slowly over many years, not by the British, but by the French. Without the French, the Polish code-breakers would not have been as rapid with their breakthroughs and their efforts might even have been thwarted. Without the French, the British attack on Enigma at Bletchley Park could have been stillborn or significantly delayed. The contribution of the French, like that of the Poles, ought to be better known. The Enigma endeavour was, then, an international collaboration by three countries. For the greater security of the joint enterprise, the code-breakers labelled themselves X, Y and Z for the French, English and Polish centres respectively.

  To tell the story of X, Y and Z was the original mission of this book. But this book is not principally about code-breaking techniques or international politics. As I uncovered more of the story, the Polish code-breakers themselves, and their French counterparts, began to take charge of the narrative. This book is, therefore, about those people, and its purpose is to re-establish them in the record where they belong.

  Bringing the X-Y-Z story to life has had its own subplots. One, almost worthy of a book in its own right, is the tale of the source material. World War Two had some unexpected results: French records were captured by the Germans and, when Berlin was occupied by the USSR, ended up in Moscow. Much of this material was returned (with Soviet annotations) to France in 1994 and 2000. Many Polish records were dispersed with exiled citizens, ending up in London in various collections. Some remain in Moscow and some are actually where you might expect, in Warsaw. German records were captured by the Americans and the British, finding their way to the US and UK national archives. Some original parts of the record have disappeared, leaving the researcher to rely on shadows of original telegrams, surviving in the form of intercepted, decrypted and translated copies, which turn up in unexpected places. A bizarre example is the large collection of Polish telegrams, in German, in the Foreign Office TICOM archive in Berlin, comprising documents seized in Germany by the British ‘Target Intelligence Committee’ at the end of World War Two: these, the fruits of success of the German signals intelligence service, which monitored and decoded the Poles’ radio communications, were thrown into a lake in 1945, dredged out by the British, kept in the UK for decades, and returned to Berlin in the 1990s. The Polish-language originals have long disappeared.

  Most of the material relating to X, Y and Z has been declassified. Perhaps the most significant new collection is the archive of an individual who plays a critical part in this story and whose perilous career was spent in France, working for that country’s various intelligence systems. Gustave Bertrand’s archives were made available in mid 2016 after declassification by the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure in France. This collection comprises a long report by Bertrand, together with over 200 supporting files, almost all containing original documentation. Alas, the first ninety-nine supporting files (of a total of 304) are missing, but those which remain bring a wealth of colour and light to the events in the years before the disbandment of Bertrand’s Franco-Polish code-breaking operation in 1942.

  Looking at documents is part of the process of discovery; equally important is hearing from those involved. The families of the code-breakers have embraced my project with great enthusiasm, and I have been overwhelmed by the welcome, support and information given by the families of Maksymilian Ciężki, Antoni Palluth, Marian Rejewski, Wiktor Michałowski and Henryk Zygalski. Anna Zygalska-Cannon gave me privileged access to her archive of letters and Henryk’s amazing collection of photographs; she deserves my very special thanks. Especially important to me was the long interview given to me by Jerzy Palluth in January 2017. A man of great courage and intellect – an intellect well spiced with energy and wit – his own life story is every bit as fascinating as that of his code-breaker father. It was a blow to learn of Jerzy’s death only a few weeks after we spoke, not least because his parting words to me were ‘When you next come, I can tell you all about how we resisted the communists during the Cold War.’ I am privileged to have heard at least the first part of his story, and profoundly grateful.

  Many others have helped bring this book into being. Katie Beard, Anna Biała, Sébastien Chevereau, Barbara Ciężka, Tony Comer, Prof. Nicolas Courtois, Dorian Dallongeville, Anne Debal-Morche, Georgina Donaldson, John Gallehawk, Dr Marek Grajek, Dr Magdalena Jaroszewska, Prof. Jerzy Jaworski, Dr Zdzisław Kapera, Herbert Karbach, Dr Iwona Korga, Katarzyna Krause, Michal Kubasiewicz, Dariusz Łaska, Stephen Liscoe, Beata Majchrowska, Eva Maresch, Aleksander Markiewicz, Jerry McCarthy, Piotr Michałowski, Prof. David Munro, Lauren Newby, Steve Ovens, Jerzy Palluth, Laura Perehinec, Geoffrey Pidgeon, Halina Piechocka-Lipca, Alicja Rakowska, Katie Read, Ginny Reid, Guy Revell, Jeremy Reynolds, Jeremy Russell, Dr Arkady Rzegocki, Sir John Scarlett, Agnieszka Skolimowska, Eric van Slander, Michael Smith, Anna Stefanicka, Rene Stein, Prof. Michael Stephens, Dr Andrzej Suchcitz, Dr Janina Sylwestrzak, Dr Olga Topol, General Włodzimierz Usarek, Alicja Whiteside, Nicolas Wuest-Famôse and Anna Zygalska-Cannon will all know what contributions they have made and I pay them sincere tribute. My family has also borne with admirable restraint the consequences arising from the process of my writing another book. I have had unfailing help and support from the staffs of the National Archives at Kew; the archive of the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London; the Józef Piłsudski Institute in London (and its sister organisation in New York); the Service Historique de la Défense in Vincennes; the National Archives and Research Administration at College Park, MD; the Center for Cryptologic History at Fort Meade, MD; and the Politisches Archiv of the Auswärtiges Amt in Berlin. I also drew extensively on the commendable blog of Christos Triantafyllopoulos (Christos military and intelligence corner) which not only has valuable and well-researched commentary, but also useful links to source material.

  I cannot sufficiently explain how much I have depended on the inestimable assistance of Dr Janka Skrzypek, who has been at my side as research colleague and translator since the first days. For anyone to try to tell this story without drawing on the Polish-language resources would destroy it at the outset: Janka’s participation in the project has enabled me to draw on that essential material. She has provided me with translations of over a hundred documents, some very long, and researched and sifted through many thousands of others to help focus our efforts. She spent several days
on my behalf in the Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe (Polish Military Archive) in Rembertów as well as helping me in the Sikorski and Piłsudski Institutes in London. The work has been puzzling, time-consuming, and often tedious, though I hope with some flashes of interest and enjoyment at times. I am extremely grateful to Janka for all the help, guidance and support she has provided over the last two years: without her this book would not have been credible; indeed it would not have been possible.

  Finally, a note on style, place names, pronunciations and so forth. Place names have changed since the 1930s and the convention followed here (except where there is an English name, such as Warsaw) is to use the contemporary name with, where necessary, the current name shown in brackets the first time the place is mentioned (for example: Lwów (Lviv)). Pronunciation of Polish names can be troublesome for English speakers, but unless you are reading aloud the correct pronunciation probably doesn’t matter, while worrying about it can get in the way of the narrative. Some phonetic guidance is given in the Dramatis Personae. Spellings in quoted passages appear as they do in the original, except where the passage has been translated, in which case the spelling of names has been corrected. The intrusive word sic has thus been avoided except to clarify a couple of endnotes. Translations were done by me where the source text was in French or German and by Janka Skrzypek where it was in Polish. Errors of all descriptions are, however, mine. I hope there are few enough of them to make this story enjoyable and much better known.

  Dermot Turing

  St Albans, UK

  April 2018