Pyry Forest Meeting - 75th Anniversary

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 24 July 2014

⏱️ 4 minutes

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Summary

July 2014

On 26 and 27 July 1939 one of the most important events in the history of intelligence took place in the woods outside Warsaw. Just three weeks before the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) moved to its War Station at Bletchley Park, its Head, Alastair Denniston, and its Chief Cryptanalyst, Dilly Knox, travelled to Warsaw to meet their Polish and French equivalents to share all they knew about Enigma.

At a commemorative ceremony in Warsaw held earlier this month, BBC Security Correspondent, Gordon Corera spoke to the GCHQ Departmental Historian, on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme.

Many thanks to the BBC for letting us share this interview.

Gordon’s original article can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28167071

Picture: GC&CS Commander Alastair Denniston’s passport shows he travelled through Nazi Germany to the meeting in Poland and is on display in his office in the Mansion at Bletchley Park. ©Bletchley Park Trust

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #enigma

Transcript

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0:00.0	75 years ago, two British spies stepped off a train here at the central station in Warsaw.
0:15.3	They were from the Government Code and Cipher School, what would become Bletchley Park,
0:19.4	and they travelled across Europe, including
0:21.3	Germany, on the eve of the Second World War. Their mission was to try and unlock the secrets
0:27.2	of the German Enigma Machine, which Britain was struggling to crack. Tony Comer is a historian
0:33.0	from the modern codebreakers of GCHQ. The mission was absolutely crucial. They were here because
0:38.8	the only way to be successful against the German military's use of enigma machines to
0:46.1	encrypt their communications was going to be by sharing all of the information that the Poles,
0:50.7	the French and the British actually had. And the Poles were in the lead on this, were they? Why Poland?
0:55.9	Poland, crucially, had treated Enigma as a mathematical problem.
1:00.1	This had given them a series of insights that had taken them a lot further than the British or the French,
1:06.3	much further, in fact, than I think the British or French even began to imagine.
1:10.4	So this was a pretty important mission for those British codebreakers?
1:13.6	I think it's the single most important meeting that happened before the Second World War.
1:22.6	After they arrived in Warsaw, the two British codebreakers, Dilley Knox and Alastair Deniston,
1:28.4	went to a forest outside of Warsaw to meet Polish and French counterparts.
1:33.0	Polish mathematicians had made two breakthroughs,
1:35.3	using maths to attack an early version of the Enigma Code,
1:38.4	and applying that maths through machines.
1:41.6	Without the passing on of this knowledge,
1:43.6	Alan Turing may not have been able
1:45.3	to go on to break the more advanced wartime codes at Bletchley Park.
	...

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