Now I feel like I was taken in by the movie The Imitation Game, about Alan Turing. The Pole, Marian Rejewski, was the real hero.
Originally Posted by Tiny
both were important contributors but Turning more so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Cryptanalysis
Cryptanalysis
During the Second World War, Turing was a leading participant in the breaking of German ciphers at
Bletchley Park. The historian and wartime codebreaker
Asa Briggs has said, "You needed exceptional talent, you needed genius at Bletchley and Turing's was that genius."
[57] From September 1938, Turing had been working part-time with the
GC&CS, the British codebreaking organisation. He concentrated on
cryptanalysis of the Enigma with
Dilly Knox, a senior GC&CS codebreaker.
[58] Soon after the July 1939
Warsaw meeting at which the
Polish Cipher Bureau had provided the British and French with the details of the wiring of
Enigma rotors and their method of decrypting
Enigma code messages, Turing and Knox started to work on a less fragile approach to the problem.
[59] The Polish method relied on an insecure
indicator procedure that the Germans were likely to change, which they did in May 1940. Turing's approach was more general, using
crib-based decryption for which he produced the functional specification of the
bombe (an improvement of the Polish
Bomba).
[60]
This article is about the Polish decryption device. For the later British decryption device at
Bletchley Park, see
Bombe.
The
bomba, or
bomba kryptologiczna (
Polish for "
bomb" or "
cryptologic bomb") was a special-purpose machine designed about October 1938 by
Polish Cipher Bureau cryptologist Marian Rejewski to break
German Enigma-machine ciphers.
the Allies did not always act on decrypted intel. if they had, it would have tipped the Germans off that their codes were compromised. So the Allies at times allowed German ops to happen organically, as they would have without the intel regardless of the effect on Allied troops.