In the encryption battle we would have been completely lost without the Polish. They were well ahead of us in cracking the code, and thankfully they shared what they'd learnt on the eve of the Second World War.
Gordon Welchman:
"Hut 6 Ultra would never have gotten off the ground if we had not learned from the Poles, in the nick of time, the details both of the German military version of the commercial Enigma machine, and of the operating procedures that were in use."
Peter Calvocoressi:
"The one moot point is - how valuable? According to the best qualified judges it accelerated the breaking of Enigma by perhaps a year. The British did not adopt Polish techniques but they were enlightened by them."
The Polish Cryptologists are often overlooked but they were an absolutely vital part of the Enigma story, and they had a harder time of it than Bletchley Park, at one point hiding out in France and French Algeria and decoding on the quiet.
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