In the Battle of Britain, Polish pilots had the highest kill rates.
Polish troops fought in North Africa, Italy and Normandy, and took part in the Battle for Berlin. The resentment adds to the wider feeling in the country that their contribution to the Allies’ victory has been under-appreciated. The film Enigma (made in 2001), starring Kate Winslet and set at Bletchley, has also upset the Poles - it not only downplays their contribution but also, the only Pole in the film is a traitor. 'They were silent about the Polish contribution to saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of troops fighting on all fronts.' Not only did the Western Allies marginalise the achievements of Polish cryptographers but the Soviets did the same. Jan Rulewski, a senator from the governing Civic Platform party, said: 'This resolution restores justice. Overlooked: Kate Winslet starred in the 2001 British-produced film, Enigma, which makes little mention of the Poles' contributionĪt its peak, the team was cracking 6,000 encrypted German Enigma messages every day - building on the principles set out by Rejewski, Rozycki and Zygalski. However the team of cryptologists, linguists, scientists and data analysts at Bletchley, in Buckinghamshire, led by Londoner Turing, were able to break it. If the receiving machine had been programmed with the same settings - one of 158 million million million combinations - the message would be deciphered. Using a complicated system of rotors, the machine would encode messages before sending them via Morse code to another machine. The Germans, who had been using the technology since the late 1920s, believed the codes were impossible to crack.
The resolution reads: 'In both popular literature and official information, the public was told that the breaking of the Enigma codes was due to the work of the British Intelligence services to the complete omission of the work of Polish scientists.'
Above, Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, where the breakthrough is said to have shortened the war by two years Poland's parliament has launched a campaign so Polish cryptographers are credited for helping to crack the Nazis' Enigma code.
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