The Poles shared their secrets with French and British intelligence services before and during the Second World War - the letters X, Y and Z were shorthand for the French, British and Polish codebreaking teams, respectively. In his book X, Y & Z, Dermot Turing, the great mathematician’s nephew, tells the gripping story of a band of Polish mathematicians who figured out much about how German Enigma encoding machines operated, years before Alan Turing did. But as with all breakthroughs, many more people laid the foundations. Bletchley Park, UK - the secret centre where it all happened - rightly gained its place in history. This deluge of knowledge shortened the war.

From 1940 onwards, Turing and his team engineered hundreds of electronic machines, dubbed bombes, which decrypted the thousands of missives sent by enemy commanders each day to guide their soldiers. X, Y & Z: The Real Story of How Enigma Was Broken Dermot Turing The History Press (2018)Īlan Turing’s crucial unscrambling of German messages in the Second World War was a tour de force of codebreaking.

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