Extra - E49 - Bletchley's Foreign Relations with Tony Comer Part 2

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2016

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

March 2016

In November 2015, the GCHQ Departmental Historian made a rare public appearance as part of the Bletchley Park Presents lecture series. Tony gave a talk titled International Partnerships - Bletchley's Foreign Relations. In this second part of his talk he picks up the story with the fundamental work on Enigma carried out by Polish Codebreakers in the years running up to the start of World War Two and the start of the UK US relationship.

The simultaneous management of different levels of relationship with different countries added an often unsuspected level of complexity, and the need gradually to decouple from some relationships as the war in Europe came to an end, needed careful management.

This talk added rich detail to the Bletchley Park story.

Bletchley Park’s Polish Memorial Image: ©shaunarmstrong/mubsta.com

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #Enigma, #History, #WW2

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The From the home of the co-breakers and the birthplace of modern computing, this is the Bletchley Park podcast.
0:41.8	Welcome to another Bletchley Park podcast Extra.
0:47.9	The GCHQ departmental historian Tony Comer came to Bletchley Park in November last year to talk about international cooperation in code breaking, not least of which formed the foundations of the US-UK special relationship,
0:56.4	which endures and remains vital to both nations to this day.
1:05.1	The Poles had treated Enigma as a mathematical problem from the word go. They'd not had a cryptanalytic
1:15.3	tradition in the way that the French and the British had. So when they came across this new
1:20.6	form of encryption, they simply treated it as a mathematical problem. They recruited mathematicians
1:26.2	to work on Enigma, and the breakthroughs
1:29.5	that they made against Enigma were mathematical breakthroughs rather than traditional
1:34.2	cryptanalytic breakthroughs. They'd received information from the French that the French had got
1:40.2	from an agent in the German army, and the polls had had a lot of success until 1938,
1:48.3	when as part of the series of increases in complexity that the Germans put onto Enigma,
1:55.0	they got to the point where they could no longer break into the traffic.
1:59.9	This gave the French the opportunity to call
2:02.1	together a meeting of the British and Poles. The first one happened in January 1939 and was
2:08.0	completely unsuccessful because neither the British nor the Polish side were prepared to reveal
2:14.0	what they knew. It was in July 1939 after the British and French governments had
2:21.7	given the guarantee to Poland that they would declare war on Germany, if the Germans invaded Poland.
2:28.9	It was after that guarantee that the Poles called a meeting in the forest just outside Warsaw, at which
2:36.6	all of the information that they had was finally shared. Again, that part of the story is well
2:43.5	known, but it's not the end of the story. The polls shared the information they had and gave
	...

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