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Menzies, Who Was Involved with the Enigma Project in England, From Menzies, who was involved with the Enigma project in England, from General Eisenhower, asking him to thank Sir Edward Travis and the people in Bletchley Park for all the work they had done in regards to the Enigma. There was no mention of the Polish anywhere in the short letter. 22 The British finally managed to break the Enigma code during the Battle of France. 23 Now, here, finally, are the reasons why the Polish should be the ones who receive the credit for breaking the Enigma code. The Polish actually broke the German Enigma codes before the war started. The Enigma codes for German High Command communications were broken “during the buildup to war”. 24 One participant of the Polish codebreakers retells how the Polish confirmed the Germans were using Enigma to send codes. At the end of 1927, or possibly at the beginning of 1928, a parcel containing radio equipment, according to the declaration, arrived from Germany at the customs house in Warsaw. Because the parcel had been sent erroneously in place of other equipment, a representative of a German firm very insistently demanded the return of the parcel to the German government before it was cleared through customs. His demands were so urgent that they awakened the suspicions of the customs officers, who informed the Cipher Bureau of the Second Department of the General Staff, an institution interested in every kind of innovation in the area of radio equipment. Since it happened to be Saturday afternoon, the employees delegated by the bureau had time to study the matter at leisure. The box was carefully opened, and it was determined that indeed it did not contain radio equipment; it contained a cipher machine. 25 Based on what they saw in the box, the Polish realized that the Germans had sent a commercial version of the Enigma machine through Polish customs. This whole thing started as a collaboration with the French intelligence community in 1928. The Polish then proceeded to break the German naval codes in 1932 and the next year broke the codes for the German High Command and Foreign Ministry. 26 The most impressive f eat is the fact that the P olish were able to decipher over 100,000 German messages by the year 1939. 27The f irst transmissions tha t were shared with the Allied forces were the messages about the remilitarization of Germany in 1936, the joining of Austria and Germany in 1938 and the message about G ermany taking the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, only after the action was approved by the Polish General Staff. The reason was the messages started to show that Hitler was planning on attacking Poland. As noted before, the As inllie B ritain and France did not receive their Enigma machines until July 1939. 28 After the machines were sent to the British and French, Poland was taken over by the Germans in September of 1939. So the Polish government fled to Romania and France and 22 Winterbotham, 2. 23 Gordon Welchman, The Hut Six Story: Breaking the Enigma Codes, 96. 24 Rodney P. Carlisle and Gail H. Nelson, Poland: ENIGMA codebreakers, Encyclopedia of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 2, (Armonk, NY: Sharpe Reference, 2005), 501. 25 Marian Rejewski, How Polish Mathematicians Deciphered the Enigma, (Annals of the History of Computing, 1981), 213. 26 Carlisle and Nelson, 501. 27 Carlisle and Nelson, 501. 28 Carlisle and Nelson, 501. 39.
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