As British as the operation that captured the first enigma machine - but of course when the film came out they rewrote it to be an American team (U571)
They rewrote Master and Commander to make the enemy French, when that particular book had them chasing an American ship. Apparently Hollywood couldn’t have Americans as the enemy 🤷♂️
Let's be real, the US domestic news is domesticated. They've lost the instincts of their wild ancestors and feral cousins. The American newshound has ended up as a chihuahua.
PBS rebroadcasts BBC and NHK and airs Amanpour n Co. and Democracy Now nationally, which are all vast improvements over the major players. Of course this administration defunded public broadcasting and it’s already going off air in Arkansas, with Mississippi and Alabama likely to follow soon… so ya, not great. It’s a mess. Would say “send help,” but it’s a made bed to lie in situation. Sometimes ya gotta hit rock bottom to really get your head on straight.
Mother lived through WW2 in Germany and was 20 when the war ended. War times were tough but she said the closest they ever came to starvation was when the Americans took over the food depots.
Don't believe for a second that all American soldiers were nice guys either.
And yet they kept in the detail that the keel was laid in Boston. It always made me wonder why the French were sailing an American made ship in that film.
Didn't you know that, like the car, the train, and everything else, the Americans made the first ships? America wasn't discovered sooner, because Americans had to build boats first
So potentially the ship could have been built in Boston, captured by the Royal Navy and captured again by the French. I loved the books and really enjoyed the film, but that part jarred. Warley could have seen the ship's keel almost anywhere, didn't have to be Boston.
“Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people, they’ll come back twenty years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.”
this is not surprising at all tbh. the American government "collaborates" with Hollywood, so as to control what they say and how. they provide them with resources and information in exchange for influence over their messaging. the Department of Defense has an article discussing this. this Wikipedia article has more information about how it functions for propagandic purposes.
funnily enough, on the subject of American producers editing important stories of British origin, the CIA bought the rights to create the first (and most famous) film adaptation of Orwell's Animal Farm). in doing so, they changed the ending so that the characters representing communists were overthrown and "defeated".
I’ve argued with film people before about this. It is extremely negligent when they significantly alter movies based on history because people are dumb and they will go with what they see in movies. Saying “based on” isn’t a get out of jail free card for that
You already have many replies, but to me the movie Argo is the best (and most frustrating) example. In real life, the Canadian ambassador in Iran, and many others, risked their lives. But in the movie, the Canadians mostly waited for the CIA and Ben Affleck to come and save the day.
That's certainly true, but I would argue the bigger issue is that you have an entire country full of people so fragile they can't even face reality without it needing to be altered to appeal to their sensibilities.
It is scary that they change stuff like that. I have also watched movies and thought "why would they change something like this" and just accepted that reality was as the movie depicted since there isn't any apparent reason to lie about it but I have learnt that I can't trust anything anymore.
They did the same with Chernobyl series, while the events are loosely as depicted, they really went out of their way to make the USSR as incompetent and evil as possible.
I'm not claiming to know a lot on the subject, but my impression from the show was the clean-up part was heroic. So many men knowingly going, "OK, you're asking me to do X. It will mean I face an agonising death, decades before my time. But it's what needs to happen. So OK".
Games as well. In Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019) for exemple, they said the "Highway of Death" was a Russian crime committed during the Gulf War when it was actually the US and their allies who did it.
Argo is another Egregious example. The team was mostly a Canadian operation. But it was changed to America in the movie because wooo USA number one fuck our allies they're just waiting around for liberation anyway.
Once you start noticing, you can never unsee it. I remember watching the first Independence Day movie when they figure out a way to defeat the aliens and broadcast it across the globe. All the other countries act like they couldn't have done anything themselves and had to wait for the hero Americans to save them.
Since around the 70s, the Pentagon has leaned heavily on Hollywood. The US military will financially support movies that make the US Military look good.
There's a documentary, Theaters of War, about the scale of America's relationship with Hollywood. It is horrifying and you can't begin to imagine it. If you live in the western world you have no frame of reference that is distinct from American propaganda. It is everywhere.
Patriotic US movies based on real events take some interesting liberties. The movie Argo (I’m pretty sure I’m thinking of the right movie) chooses to add a moment where they ask the NZ embassy for help and get turned down - something that never happened.
Why make something up to call us out as unfaithful allies? Did the screenwriter have a grudge of some kind?
Kinda missing the major problem with Argos rewriting of history. It was a Canadian plan. There are no Canadians in the movie. The real event is known as the Canadian caper.
They did. And Canadian parliament held an emergency session to issue Canadian passports to each of the Americans hiding in Iran in order to be able to get them out of that country.
It was a big move on Canada's part, issuing official "fake" passports to foreigners. The movie all but erased Canada's role in helping the US.
How generous lmao - I’d actually forgotten that they downplayed Canada’s actions in the movie. If it wasn’t for the sheer “but why” of them taking a moment to pick on NZ I probably would’ve forgotten about the movie entirely.
As far as im aware, in real life New Zealand sheltered two of the Americans in a safe room and the others escaped hidden under blankets in the back of a vehicle driven by NZ staff. Considering the risks they took, I understand people being a bit peeved with the movie showing what it did.
I think it went as far as our parliment taking some sort of action against Ben Affleck in the end?
Americans won't pay to watch movies that conflict with the myth of American superiority, so producers don't make them. And Americans won't watch them because they've constantly been fed that myth. Telling them that the US had help from Canada or NZ (or that Enigma was broken by the British and Poles, or whatever) implies that America needed that help, which can't be true because it's America that rescues everybody else
That movie burned NZ and UK, but it especially burned Canada. The entire plan was Canadian, but the movie rewrites every heroic aspect of the story to be a CIA action where the allies are side characters.
Long time ago I read somewhere a quote by an actual US navy guy who served aboard submarines: when we want to have a laugh, we watch U571. If we want to watch an actual submarine movie, we watch Das Boot.
Polish intelligence first broke the encryption, and gave their work to the British once the writing was on the wall for Poland.
The UK then developed ways to break the code faster and faster as it originally took too long to be useful.
The British also captured a naval enigma machine from a uboat which was a slightly different design, allowing that code to be attacked. There were other cyphers in use as well which also ended up being defeated by the UK.
The version the Polish cracked also got upgraded, so when the new version took over it took far, far longer to crack with the Polish methods than it had when they initially devised a solution.
But without the work of the Poles, the UK wouldn't have had a starting point. I think it's shocking how little recognition the Polish contribution gets, tbh.
They forget that the original nuclear programme was a joint UK-Canada venture. When the USA was finally dragged into the war and the Manhattan Project was created the programme became a joint UK-Canada-USA project. On completion, the USA cut Canada and UK out of the results so to reap the revenue and benefits
The machine built to decrypt the code at Bletchley Park was called the "Bombe" - literally a Polish name. It's obvious that the people involved at the time were acknowledging the work they inherited, but this has definitely been diluted over time.
Not quite. The Polish machine was called "bomba". "Bombe" is a French spelling, I'm not sure why the British used it (possibly because they got the information through a French connection).
To be thorough, Captain Bertrand of the French Second Bureau had obtained the Enigma documentation. This documentation had been passed on to the Polish and British services. The Poles would create an electromechanical machine capable of breaking the code (the "bombs"). It was to Bertrand that the Poles would transmit their progress, along with a Polish machine (the bombs). Bertrand transferred the documents and a machine to the British services in 1939 (carried in the suitcase of Sacha Guitry, a French actor). The bombs would be superseded by improvements made to Enigma but would serve as a basis for Turing.
The Enigma code was primarily broken by Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski in the early 1930s, and this knowledge was shared with the British.
Turing and his team at Bletchley Park finished the job, especially as the Germans levelled up during the war and started changing the cipher daily, so there was suddenly more complexity to contend with.
In the recent Nuremberg film it's the Americans that steal the show as well. And the American audience will watch and perceive it like it's a history lesson..
Alan Turing and Bletchley Park were routinely breaking more complex wartime Enigma codes by mid-1940, well before the U.S. even bloody entered the war at the end of 1941.
Yes, this film (U-571) is a scandal. But you understand, they simplify the story so people can understand, and it's impossible for the heroes not to be American... Meanwhile, Hollywood is rewriting history with these films, impacting not only Americans but also viewers worldwide.
This is true. I watched a Stalingrad documentary and it was so ingenious how the 101st airborne struck the armies holding the Germans flank, allowing Patton to cut off the German and drive straight to Berlin!
U571 wasn't the first machine captured by the allies, I think the Polish had already cracked it in 1932.
The problem was that when the codes changed the work had to start again,
U571 may have got an enigma machine but the code books that they captured at the same time were the real prize, as they enabled the cracking to be done much faster so they could act on the information before it was too late. And yes that was the Royal Navy that got those.
It was a bit more complicated than that even. The Poles had reconstructed the earlier Enigma machine and after the invasion of Poland all their work was shared between the French and the British. The first Nazi Enigma machines were captured in a joint British/Norwegian Resistance raid on occupied Norway.
U571 is a travesty of rewriting history though. The actual capture of U110 was so significant yes because the British got an intact naval Enigma with is extra rota but much more important were the books of daily cipher keys. With those the code breakers could read everything the German Navy broadcast whereas before the German Navy, unlike the crazily leaky Luftwaffe, had been scrupulously tight in their handling of Enigma.
The people who first built the "Bombe" codebreaking machine to break the Lorenz codes were Polish. Then, the war started, the Enigma codes were brought in and Alan Turing eventually built a computer to break the updated cypher system.
If any other nations tried to steal credit from the Americans (not that anyone wants to) in the same way they do, they would be up in arms and throwing a tantrum about it.
Important to note the first and most enigma machines were captured by the Poles (who then provided them to the British), their efforts early in the war were absolutely key in breaking the enigma code.
Thats actually common. A lot of countries share some intel with some countries, but not others, despite how closely allied they seem. Its all about need to know.
Do you have the clearance? Yes.
Do you need to know this info? Um, not really.
Then no look for you!
That said, yes, history seems to be skipping a track and until the laser gets past that part of the CD, we're kinda stuck.
Remember the Manchester bombing at the Arianna grande concert? We were initially sharing intelligence with the US about it, until some chodes from the NYPD started going on live TV just blabbing it all.
I believe it was Turing who automated the decyphering after the Polish heroes managed to crack the workings of the machine and could decypher by hand. The decyphering had to be done every day as the decryption changed daily in most of the Nazi army branches. This took too much time by hand due to the large amount of possible combinations after the Germans added an additional layer of complexity from the initially commercially bought Enigma machine.
Edit: additon: Pixelcharlie corrected my by stating the Poles developed the Bomva machine and did not work by hand. Thanks!
Fun fact: The Germans made the job easier for the codebreakers by ending many of their messages with "Heil Hitler" and immediately giving away six letters. This is an anecdote I heard from a man who gives tours of Bletchley Park.
Same here, was an amazing experience at Bletchley Park. HH was just one of the things that helped. The automated weather stations for example also worked in their disadvantage: know the weather at that location and the transmission is far more easily broken.
My favourite room at Bletchley was the room that told about the time an enigma operator fell asleep (at least i think it was sleep) on the machine pressing down one letter and the code was able to be cracked that day because the enigma never encoded a letter as itself.
I thought I understood how the enigma code worked until I went to Bletchley and couldn't get my head around how complex it really was. Some clever guys there.
As far as I'm aware, they got their work to Britain while under occupation, that's why they were so crucial
Germans almost never risked the Enigma getting captured by the Brits, but in "their territory" they used it normally
So Poles managed to get their hands on some while under occupation, and delivered the info to Brits
Something similar happened with the V1 and V2 rockets I believe, when Polish resistance found a wreckage of a test flight, made schematics and told Brits that it exists and roughly how it works before any were fired at Britain, and in 1944 they even sent a whole (dissasembled obviously) V2 rocket for the Brits to study (Operacja Most III)
Edit: I was wrong, they captured it before the war
I believe that's untrue. They have originally broken enigma before the war (thus ocupation), and had recreation of the machine, that was shared with the french and brits, when it was clear, it's over.
"Five weeks before the outbreak of World War II, on 25 July 1939, in Warsaw, the Polish Cipher Bureau revealed its Enigma-decryption techniques and equipment to representatives of French and British military intelligence, which had been unable to make any headway against Enigma. This Polish intelligence-and-technology transfer would give the Allies an unprecedented advantage (Ultra)) in their ultimately victorious prosecution of World War II."
To be thorough, Captain Bertrand of the French Second Bureau had obtained the Enigma documentation. This documentation had been passed on to the Polish and British services. The Poles would create an electromechanical machine capable of breaking the code (the "bombs"). It was to Bertrand that the Poles would transmit their progress, along with a Polish machine (the bombs). Bertrand transferred the documents and a machine to the British services in 1939 (carried in the suitcase of Sacha Guitry, a French actor). The bombs would be superseded by improvements made to Enigma but would serve as a basis for Turing.
Polish mathematicians broke the code, but it took too long to decode messages to be of much use. Turing and co built off their work and invented a machine that could do it fast, so messages could be decoded while they were still useful.
Collaborative effort. But the yanks weren't involved.
Yeah, but we (the British) wouldn't have been able to achieve what we did without the Polish. They did the initial work on breaking it before being annexed by Germany and also got one of the machines to Britain as well. One of many reasons the "First To Fight" WW2 poster exists.
The later device and code books captured from a U-boat - by the British, not the Americans - was Shark, the stronger naval variant of the Enigma used by U-boats.
Books like "Top Secret Ultra" and "Station X" are good accounts of what went in to it all (the former written by Peter Calvocoressi, who actually worked at Bletchley on decryption and decodes).
Based on what I read, Turing's homosexuality was known to British army officials during the war and his work on Enigma, and at that point they already decided that they'd deal with him after the war was over. Somehow, I find it extremely insidious and cruel. He already was for them a disgusting being. I think it was no different from Nazis forcing Jewish scientists to work for them.
Another parallel with Oppenheimer is that the film ignored the British contribution, particularly from James Chadwick (who won a Nobel prize for discovering the neutron).
American Prometheus is next on my reading list, so I can come back and let you know when I’m another book the wiser! But deliberate or not, I was more thinking about people being useful during the war and then discarded as soon as their skills aren’t actually needed any more, despite their service and achievements.
He was persecuted for being gay, through the zealous application of laws that many people thought were archaic even in the 50s, although that was by a very different branch of government than his wartime work was for - it's not like his former employers turned on him.
There's really very little evidence he killed himself - no note, no conversations suggesting intent. Accident seems just as likely. The official verdict of suicide after a very shoddy inquest seems as much driven by the homophobia of the time as his treatment by the authorities was - the idea that of course gay people would be so disgusted and ashamed of themselves that they would naturally commit suicide. Turing was openly and happily gay, not ashamed at all.
It was first cracked by the Polish cipher bureau, who shared the intel, as well as enigma hardware they had copied from civil machines, with France and the UK in 1939, shortly before the war started.
This has been a long standing issue tbh, especially war films where they have a pesky habit of historical revisionism in favour of America, diminishing the role of other nations etcs, or in some instances straight up fabricates events and tries to past them off as historical.
Most Americans have no clue there were five beach-head assaults on D-Day. They know about Utah and Omaha, but no clue about Juno, Gold or Sword. The Brits and Canadians.
About a year ago I started watching European ww2 movies. Being an avid history buff, Europe was practically a gold mine of war movies for me.
I own The battle of Britain on dvd, (which apparently most Americans never heard of. Not even the blitz. My dad was just as surprised.) And wish to God Dambusters was available on dvd in the U.S. Waterloo unfortunately isn't available in the U.S either but at least its on youtube, and I discovered the 2005 Japanese movie Yamato is on youtube.
Is this a commonly shared American myth? More than once I’ve had an American tell me they’re the ones who cracked enigma, one tried telling me Turing was American.
I think a lot of Americans think they did most of the work of anything during WW2. Tbf, if you don't pay attention in history class/have lacking history education and watch a lot of war movies (which became basically US propaganda) I can see how you'd become convinced USA did more than they actually did.
I went to HS in USA for a year, and from what I understood it's not that they say US did most of the work. It's just that they tend to focus on USAs involvement in the war, pearl Harbour, the island attacks, D-day etc.
American history is very interesting, but if you focus too much on it during world events it's easy to ignore/miss what other countries were involved with during the same time.
Tbf, I'm Swedish and didn't learn about the conflicts in Africa during WW2 until much later. Our history lessons during the war was mostly focused on the events in Europe, since we live in Europe you know.
To be fair, it's also a commonly shared British myth. Anyone who says 'Britain' did it and leaves out the Polish and French teams are just doing the same thing.
The confusing thing to me is why they didn't make the movie about U-505, which actually is an interesting story and has the benefit of being real. It's pretty cool to look at, you can go see it in Chicago and realise how strange it is to see a u-boat inside a building.
The polish broke it first, Alan Turing then made the first ‘computer’ to break it very fast so it could be used more since they often would not get it broken by midnight (the codes changed daily)
The Polish broke an earlier version of it, then the Germans upgraded it to a version that was incredibly impractical to crack manually considering the enigma settings changed each day and it usually took at least that long to figure them out.
Turing designed the machine that was finally able to crack that more complex version, every day, pretty damn quickly
And my government still fucked him over for the 'crime' of being gay
Poland mathmaticians broke it first in the 30's, Alan Turing improved on it to decrypt on a large scale basis with his machine. We Americans had little to do with it but did "help" later.
Also, Bletchley Park is a very cool place, and I highly recommend a visit.
The resistances in occupied countries get forgotten too easily in general and it always annoys me. They risked, and often sacrificed, their lives for the war effort. So much of what the UK and other allied countries were able to do to win the war was because of intelligence they got from these people living under the horrors of Nazi occupation.
Even just the invasion of Poland gets put in some sort of "Germany just rolled in" kind of light, it wasn't easy at all, and this was when the German war machine was fully charged and prepared. Combined with an early adaptation of a new style of warfare.
We also shouldn't assume a country that was occupied only contributed resistance, Polish Pilots flew for the RAF after Poland fell, 5% of RAF Fighter Command, but had 12% of the kills.
Their experience fighting the Luftwaffe during the invasion of Poland was invaluable to the RAF and the rest of the Allies.
Yes, like when the Brexit idiots complained about all the Polish people that chose to build lives in the UK and saying things like "we didn't fight the Battle of Britain only to be invaded by foreigners now" while neither being old enough to be anywhere near the war nor educated enough to know about the massive Polish contribution to the air defence of the UK.
Especially amusing as there's a famous picture of airmen in front of a plane they often include in their Facebook posts which shows the Polish 303 squadron.
The Brexiters are the spiritual brethren of this sub.
Breaking it wasn't the problem. Breaking it in time to use the information that day was. That's what Turing's machine did, broke it every day in minutes rather than hours.
Tbf, he did so after Polish Mathematicians had already broken it at least once (which iirc contributed greatly to the Bletchley Park project being able to consistently break Enigma?)
There is so much that most people get wrong about Enigma as well as Bletchley Park and Alan Turing.
It was Polish mathematicians who first cracked Enigma in 1932. After 7 years of decoding Enigma messages using a machine they invented called the bomba, the Poles eventually provided their work to the French and British. That was done because the Nazis had modified the Enigma in a way that Polish intelligence could no longer decrypt due to them not having the resources to scale up their program to a size necessary for decrypting any messages.
Eventually, British intelligence at Bletchley Park, using the work done by the Poles, was able to build up their own decryption program, with Alan Turing designing the bombes that would be used to decrypt Enigma messages.
On a side note, Turing was not directly involved in the development of the Colossus machine, which was used to decrypt the Lorenz cipher. That machine was instead built by Tommy Flowers.
Garbo (Juan Pujol Garcia) was also a very important piece of the puzzle as the spy network he helped setup was used to get hold of machines and material such as various messages and also allowed the Allies to deliver false information and misdirection to the Axis by working as a double agent.
The best part? he received commendations from both sides because the Nazis truly believed he was working for them.
It was a genius Polish lady edit Man, lol. as the first to crack it, and later itterations of the code were cracked by the UK at Bletchley Park and Alan Turing using a giant computer that he designed and built.
Strictly speaking, Polish mathematicians, especially Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, andHenryk Zygalski, who first reverse-engineered the German Enigma cipher machine in the 1930s, providing vital breakthroughs that enabled the Allies, particularly Bletchley Park, to read Enigma messages during WWII, significantly shortening the war.
It was very much a joint Polish / British effort.
In August 1939, following a tripartite meeting of Polish, French, and British cryptologists at Warsaw on 25–26 July 1939 – during which the Poles had explained all their Enigma-decryption methods and equipment – two Enigma replicas were passed to Poland's allies, one sent to Paris and one to London.
Lots of this sort of stuff constantly going on. The new one I’ve spotted coming up a lot recently is the Americans invented T.V. (The didn’t, that was a Scottish man named John Logie Baird). They’re trying to subtly change the definition of T.V to distort it.
It’s been happening for decades. The problem is the money to make these films is predominantly American and they want a return. Many years ago there was a film script advanced about the famous RAF Lancaster bomber and her crew, S for Sugar. (NB: this is pre nato alphabet before anyone gets upset) Eventually it was made about the USAF Memphis Belle and her crew, as the yanks would not invest in a film where they weren’t the heroes.
If you want to get really upset, look into the Americans patenting penicillin.
Wasnt Alan Turing a british scientist?
As British as the operation that captured the first enigma machine - but of course when the film came out they rewrote it to be an American team (U571)
Edit: the film in question is called "U571"
Jesus...
Movie really have a lot of PRO American propaganda in them....
More then I realised XD
They rewrote Master and Commander to make the enemy French, when that particular book had them chasing an American ship. Apparently Hollywood couldn’t have Americans as the enemy 🤷♂️
If any country needs more “are we the baddies” moments it’s the US
Edit cuz my “it’s 6 am” addled brain got the quote wrong
https://i.redd.it/o08hj6jw6z6g1.gif
This is EXACTLY what i was thinking of
Take my angry upvote. You beat me too it
That's what the news is for
Alas not the domestic news it seems :'(
Let's be real, the US domestic news is domesticated. They've lost the instincts of their wild ancestors and feral cousins. The American newshound has ended up as a chihuahua.
my rescue Chihuahua is a ball of hate that won't let you bullshit him. he would decimate trump if he could talk
he would hunt and kill that rat on his head.
Hopefully hump it first.
Ah yes, inbred
You can get CBC over the air if you’re close enough to the border, but yeah. Domestic US news is crap
PBS rebroadcasts BBC and NHK and airs Amanpour n Co. and Democracy Now nationally, which are all vast improvements over the major players. Of course this administration defunded public broadcasting and it’s already going off air in Arkansas, with Mississippi and Alabama likely to follow soon… so ya, not great. It’s a mess. Would say “send help,” but it’s a made bed to lie in situation. Sometimes ya gotta hit rock bottom to really get your head on straight.
CBC news is available on YouTube.
"news".
Infotainment.
Mother lived through WW2 in Germany and was 20 when the war ended. War times were tough but she said the closest they ever came to starvation was when the Americans took over the food depots.
Don't believe for a second that all American soldiers were nice guys either.
My Nonna was is Sicily where the US Navy was camped. I’ve probably heard similar things
You have to watch the likes of black hawk down to see how fucked up their propaganda machine is.
I mean literally the one thing that could improve this film is them hunting yanks
And yet they kept in the detail that the keel was laid in Boston. It always made me wonder why the French were sailing an American made ship in that film.
It's obvious: the French didn't know how to build boats. Only the Americans mastered that art.
Didn't you know that, like the car, the train, and everything else, the Americans made the first ships? America wasn't discovered sooner, because Americans had to build boats first
Not to be "well, ackshually" captured ships were often reused by the capturing force. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Vengeance_(1800) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nautilus_(1799)
So potentially the ship could have been built in Boston, captured by the Royal Navy and captured again by the French. I loved the books and really enjoyed the film, but that part jarred. Warley could have seen the ship's keel almost anywhere, didn't have to be Boston.
“Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people, they’ll come back twenty years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.”
this is not surprising at all tbh. the American government "collaborates" with Hollywood, so as to control what they say and how. they provide them with resources and information in exchange for influence over their messaging. the Department of Defense has an article discussing this. this Wikipedia article has more information about how it functions for propagandic purposes.
funnily enough, on the subject of American producers editing important stories of British origin, the CIA bought the rights to create the first (and most famous) film adaptation of Orwell's Animal Farm). in doing so, they changed the ending so that the characters representing communists were overthrown and "defeated".
As Doctor Who said
“We can’t let the Americans get their hands on time travel. You’ve seen their movies”
Absolutely just read that in Matt Smith's voice.
Same Doctor, but it's a quote from Kate Stewart in The Day of the Doctor, not the Doctor himself.
I’ve argued with film people before about this. It is extremely negligent when they significantly alter movies based on history because people are dumb and they will go with what they see in movies. Saying “based on” isn’t a get out of jail free card for that
It shouldn’t be but it is used that way, Fargo says it’s based on true events at the beginning but it’s entirely fictional.
I did get a bit suspicious when a fucking alien turned up.
That's not an alien that's just Steve Buscemi.
https://preview.redd.it/l21so3jgrz6g1.jpeg?width=306&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f1256c6739049bd59a5db9c385a02cf8f2bff4cc
You already have many replies, but to me the movie Argo is the best (and most frustrating) example. In real life, the Canadian ambassador in Iran, and many others, risked their lives. But in the movie, the Canadians mostly waited for the CIA and Ben Affleck to come and save the day.
Yup, that is definitely one of the movies that comes to mind. It gives the CIA too much credit and it’s a total propaganda piece
That's certainly true, but I would argue the bigger issue is that you have an entire country full of people so fragile they can't even face reality without it needing to be altered to appeal to their sensibilities.
That’s a bingo!
It is scary that they change stuff like that. I have also watched movies and thought "why would they change something like this" and just accepted that reality was as the movie depicted since there isn't any apparent reason to lie about it but I have learnt that I can't trust anything anymore.
They did the same with Chernobyl series, while the events are loosely as depicted, they really went out of their way to make the USSR as incompetent and evil as possible.
I'm not claiming to know a lot on the subject, but my impression from the show was the clean-up part was heroic. So many men knowingly going, "OK, you're asking me to do X. It will mean I face an agonising death, decades before my time. But it's what needs to happen. So OK".
Games as well. In Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019) for exemple, they said the "Highway of Death" was a Russian crime committed during the Gulf War when it was actually the US and their allies who did it.
I'm still pissed at Argo for making the Canadians barely an after thought
Who France credits with defeating the Nazis
Hollywood is one hell of a propaganda machine
Argo is another Egregious example. The team was mostly a Canadian operation. But it was changed to America in the movie because wooo USA number one fuck our allies they're just waiting around for liberation anyway.
Once you start noticing, you can never unsee it. I remember watching the first Independence Day movie when they figure out a way to defeat the aliens and broadcast it across the globe. All the other countries act like they couldn't have done anything themselves and had to wait for the hero Americans to save them.
Since around the 70s, the Pentagon has leaned heavily on Hollywood. The US military will financially support movies that make the US Military look good.
Hollywood has been pro-US (obviously) and pro-war propaganda since forever. That's half the reason they pump so much money into it.
There's a documentary, Theaters of War, about the scale of America's relationship with Hollywood. It is horrifying and you can't begin to imagine it. If you live in the western world you have no frame of reference that is distinct from American propaganda. It is everywhere.
https://youtu.be/JPYgce2xfVw
Patriotic US movies based on real events take some interesting liberties. The movie Argo (I’m pretty sure I’m thinking of the right movie) chooses to add a moment where they ask the NZ embassy for help and get turned down - something that never happened.
Why make something up to call us out as unfaithful allies? Did the screenwriter have a grudge of some kind?
Kinda missing the major problem with Argos rewriting of history. It was a Canadian plan. There are no Canadians in the movie. The real event is known as the Canadian caper.
It’s a double whammy - pick on NZ and erase the actions of the Canadians who did help. America, fuck yeah.
AFAIR the escapees in the movie hid in the house of the Canadian ambassador to Iran.
They did. And Canadian parliament held an emergency session to issue Canadian passports to each of the Americans hiding in Iran in order to be able to get them out of that country.
It was a big move on Canada's part, issuing official "fake" passports to foreigners. The movie all but erased Canada's role in helping the US.
It also really downplayed Canada’s role. At the end of the movie they decide to “let” Canada take the credit for the operation.
How generous lmao - I’d actually forgotten that they downplayed Canada’s actions in the movie. If it wasn’t for the sheer “but why” of them taking a moment to pick on NZ I probably would’ve forgotten about the movie entirely.
Yeap. It pissed a few people off alright lol.
As far as im aware, in real life New Zealand sheltered two of the Americans in a safe room and the others escaped hidden under blankets in the back of a vehicle driven by NZ staff. Considering the risks they took, I understand people being a bit peeved with the movie showing what it did.
I think it went as far as our parliment taking some sort of action against Ben Affleck in the end?
It almost feels like whoever wrote the script or produced the movie was mildly resentful that the US needed and accepted help.
Americans won't pay to watch movies that conflict with the myth of American superiority, so producers don't make them. And Americans won't watch them because they've constantly been fed that myth. Telling them that the US had help from Canada or NZ (or that Enigma was broken by the British and Poles, or whatever) implies that America needed that help, which can't be true because it's America that rescues everybody else
That movie burned NZ and UK, but it especially burned Canada. The entire plan was Canadian, but the movie rewrites every heroic aspect of the story to be a CIA action where the allies are side characters.
A lot of these films are co-financed by the military and they get some say about the content.
It's an actual propaganda tactic.
Long time ago I read somewhere a quote by an actual US navy guy who served aboard submarines: when we want to have a laugh, we watch U571. If we want to watch an actual submarine movie, we watch Das Boot.
Das Boot is absolutely incredible. I have both the movie and the TV mini-series version. Never seen the more recent one though.
Wasn't it the polish that captured the first machine
Polish intelligence first broke the encryption, and gave their work to the British once the writing was on the wall for Poland.
The UK then developed ways to break the code faster and faster as it originally took too long to be useful.
The British also captured a naval enigma machine from a uboat which was a slightly different design, allowing that code to be attacked. There were other cyphers in use as well which also ended up being defeated by the UK.
The version the Polish cracked also got upgraded, so when the new version took over it took far, far longer to crack with the Polish methods than it had when they initially devised a solution.
But without the work of the Poles, the UK wouldn't have had a starting point. I think it's shocking how little recognition the Polish contribution gets, tbh.
TIL that there's a monument at Bletchley Park that pays tribute to the Polish effort.
A bit like how America made nuclear weapons, by taking all the work done in Britain in exchange for promising to share the end result.
They finished it off from a massive starting point and then refused to share it back.
Untrustworthy partners from day 1.
They forget that the original nuclear programme was a joint UK-Canada venture. When the USA was finally dragged into the war and the Manhattan Project was created the programme became a joint UK-Canada-USA project. On completion, the USA cut Canada and UK out of the results so to reap the revenue and benefits
You can add a few more things like better radar, the cavity magnetron, jet engine...
See the Tizard mission for more
Add the Canadians in there too.
The machine built to decrypt the code at Bletchley Park was called the "Bombe" - literally a Polish name. It's obvious that the people involved at the time were acknowledging the work they inherited, but this has definitely been diluted over time.
Not quite. The Polish machine was called "bomba". "Bombe" is a French spelling, I'm not sure why the British used it (possibly because they got the information through a French connection).
Apologies, though the British machine's name was in direct reference to its Polish forebear regardless.
To be thorough, Captain Bertrand of the French Second Bureau had obtained the Enigma documentation. This documentation had been passed on to the Polish and British services. The Poles would create an electromechanical machine capable of breaking the code (the "bombs"). It was to Bertrand that the Poles would transmit their progress, along with a Polish machine (the bombs). Bertrand transferred the documents and a machine to the British services in 1939 (carried in the suitcase of Sacha Guitry, a French actor). The bombs would be superseded by improvements made to Enigma but would serve as a basis for Turing.
Avery good exemple of european cooperation
The Enigma code was primarily broken by Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski in the early 1930s, and this knowledge was shared with the British.
Turing and his team at Bletchley Park finished the job, especially as the Germans levelled up during the war and started changing the cipher daily, so there was suddenly more complexity to contend with.
In the recent Nuremberg film it's the Americans that steal the show as well. And the American audience will watch and perceive it like it's a history lesson..
Alan Turing and Bletchley Park were routinely breaking more complex wartime Enigma codes by mid-1940, well before the U.S. even bloody entered the war at the end of 1941.
Yes, this film (U-571) is a scandal. But you understand, they simplify the story so people can understand, and it's impossible for the heroes not to be American... Meanwhile, Hollywood is rewriting history with these films, impacting not only Americans but also viewers worldwide.
That just makes it sound like Americans in general are incredibly stupid and require help to both chew and swallow information
You forgot to add extremely thin skinned
Didn’t you know that it was only America that fought the Nazis?
This is true. I watched a Stalingrad documentary and it was so ingenious how the 101st airborne struck the armies holding the Germans flank, allowing Patton to cut off the German and drive straight to Berlin!
Truly a marvel of strategy.
U571 wasn't the first machine captured by the allies, I think the Polish had already cracked it in 1932.
The problem was that when the codes changed the work had to start again,
U571 may have got an enigma machine but the code books that they captured at the same time were the real prize, as they enabled the cracking to be done much faster so they could act on the information before it was too late. And yes that was the Royal Navy that got those.
It was a bit more complicated than that even. The Poles had reconstructed the earlier Enigma machine and after the invasion of Poland all their work was shared between the French and the British. The first Nazi Enigma machines were captured in a joint British/Norwegian Resistance raid on occupied Norway.
U571 is a travesty of rewriting history though. The actual capture of U110 was so significant yes because the British got an intact naval Enigma with is extra rota but much more important were the books of daily cipher keys. With those the code breakers could read everything the German Navy broadcast whereas before the German Navy, unlike the crazily leaky Luftwaffe, had been scrupulously tight in their handling of Enigma.
Nods in Canadian watching Argo
The people who first built the "Bombe" codebreaking machine to break the Lorenz codes were Polish. Then, the war started, the Enigma codes were brought in and Alan Turing eventually built a computer to break the updated cypher system.
If any other nations tried to steal credit from the Americans (not that anyone wants to) in the same way they do, they would be up in arms and throwing a tantrum about it.
U-571 was so bad it reached the British Parliament.
Important to note the first and most enigma machines were captured by the Poles (who then provided them to the British), their efforts early in the war were absolutely key in breaking the enigma code.
Yes, and if i remember hearing correctly, the British kept a lot of intel from the Americans because they were concerned it would get leaked.
So basically history is repeating itself today.
Thats actually common. A lot of countries share some intel with some countries, but not others, despite how closely allied they seem. Its all about need to know.
Do you have the clearance? Yes.
Do you need to know this info? Um, not really.
Then no look for you!
That said, yes, history seems to be skipping a track and until the laser gets past that part of the CD, we're kinda stuck.
Remember the Manchester bombing at the Arianna grande concert? We were initially sharing intelligence with the US about it, until some chodes from the NYPD started going on live TV just blabbing it all.
So British he’s on the money
The irony of putting him on the £50 note so he can continue to not be accepted in places.
I was going to make a comment about how poorly the Brits treated him, but this comment is better than anything I could’ve come up with.
Yeah it was absolutely shameful what the government did to him after all that. Actual hero.
Weren’t Rejewski, Rozycki and Zygalski Polish mathematicians?
Weren't they the ones who did most of the early heavy lifting of breaking enigma?
I know they're Polish and they got their work out before Poland fell to the Nazis.
I believe it was Turing who automated the decyphering after the Polish heroes managed to crack the workings of the machine and could decypher by hand. The decyphering had to be done every day as the decryption changed daily in most of the Nazi army branches. This took too much time by hand due to the large amount of possible combinations after the Germans added an additional layer of complexity from the initially commercially bought Enigma machine.
Edit: additon: Pixelcharlie corrected my by stating the Poles developed the Bomva machine and did not work by hand. Thanks!
Fun fact: The Germans made the job easier for the codebreakers by ending many of their messages with "Heil Hitler" and immediately giving away six letters. This is an anecdote I heard from a man who gives tours of Bletchley Park.
Same here, was an amazing experience at Bletchley Park. HH was just one of the things that helped. The automated weather stations for example also worked in their disadvantage: know the weather at that location and the transmission is far more easily broken.
My favourite room at Bletchley was the room that told about the time an enigma operator fell asleep (at least i think it was sleep) on the machine pressing down one letter and the code was able to be cracked that day because the enigma never encoded a letter as itself.
I thought I understood how the enigma code worked until I went to Bletchley and couldn't get my head around how complex it really was. Some clever guys there.
Also included in the film 'The Imitation Game'
Too bad the film really screwed over Turing as a person.
Not as much as our own government screwed him over...
I've not seen the film, but I have been to Bletchley Park and listened to a tour guide there give a list of all the things that film got wrong.
As far as I'm aware, they got their work to Britain while under occupation, that's why they were so crucial
Germans almost never risked the Enigma getting captured by the Brits, but in "their territory" they used it normally
So Poles managed to get their hands on some while under occupation, and delivered the info to Brits
Something similar happened with the V1 and V2 rockets I believe, when Polish resistance found a wreckage of a test flight, made schematics and told Brits that it exists and roughly how it works before any were fired at Britain, and in 1944 they even sent a whole (dissasembled obviously) V2 rocket for the Brits to study (Operacja Most III)
Edit: I was wrong, they captured it before the war
I believe that's untrue. They have originally broken enigma before the war (thus ocupation), and had recreation of the machine, that was shared with the french and brits, when it was clear, it's over.
"Five weeks before the outbreak of World War II, on 25 July 1939, in Warsaw, the Polish Cipher Bureau revealed its Enigma-decryption techniques and equipment to representatives of French and British military intelligence, which had been unable to make any headway against Enigma. This Polish intelligence-and-technology transfer would give the Allies an unprecedented advantage (Ultra)) in their ultimately victorious prosecution of World War II."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cipher_Bureau_(Poland))
To be thorough, Captain Bertrand of the French Second Bureau had obtained the Enigma documentation. This documentation had been passed on to the Polish and British services. The Poles would create an electromechanical machine capable of breaking the code (the "bombs"). It was to Bertrand that the Poles would transmit their progress, along with a Polish machine (the bombs). Bertrand transferred the documents and a machine to the British services in 1939 (carried in the suitcase of Sacha Guitry, a French actor). The bombs would be superseded by improvements made to Enigma but would serve as a basis for Turing.
He was
Polish mathematicians broke the code, but it took too long to decode messages to be of much use. Turing and co built off their work and invented a machine that could do it fast, so messages could be decoded while they were still useful.
Collaborative effort. But the yanks weren't involved.
Yeah, but we (the British) wouldn't have been able to achieve what we did without the Polish. They did the initial work on breaking it before being annexed by Germany and also got one of the machines to Britain as well. One of many reasons the "First To Fight" WW2 poster exists.
The later device and code books captured from a U-boat - by the British, not the Americans - was Shark, the stronger naval variant of the Enigma used by U-boats.
Books like "Top Secret Ultra" and "Station X" are good accounts of what went in to it all (the former written by Peter Calvocoressi, who actually worked at Bletchley on decryption and decodes).
And he got chemically castrate for being gay after the war if im not mistaken.
It was the polish as well. Without them, Turing probably wouldn't have managed it.
To be fair, GB was also not really grateful...
They basically caused his suicide, for Turing being homosexual...
Based on what I read, Turing's homosexuality was known to British army officials during the war and his work on Enigma, and at that point they already decided that they'd deal with him after the war was over. Somehow, I find it extremely insidious and cruel. He already was for them a disgusting being. I think it was no different from Nazis forcing Jewish scientists to work for them.
Interesting parallels with Oppenheimer there?
But however poorly they treated Turing, he and the Bletchley Park code breakers were British (and European).
Another parallel with Oppenheimer is that the film ignored the British contribution, particularly from James Chadwick (who won a Nobel prize for discovering the neutron).
I think, there was no plan during the war to screw over Oppenheimer, like there was with Turing, but I might be wrong.
American Prometheus is next on my reading list, so I can come back and let you know when I’m another book the wiser! But deliberate or not, I was more thinking about people being useful during the war and then discarded as soon as their skills aren’t actually needed any more, despite their service and achievements.
To also be fair, his role in the war was a massive secret, so gratefulness or not doesn't really apply as no-one knew
He was persecuted for being gay, through the zealous application of laws that many people thought were archaic even in the 50s, although that was by a very different branch of government than his wartime work was for - it's not like his former employers turned on him.
There's really very little evidence he killed himself - no note, no conversations suggesting intent. Accident seems just as likely. The official verdict of suicide after a very shoddy inquest seems as much driven by the homophobia of the time as his treatment by the authorities was - the idea that of course gay people would be so disgusted and ashamed of themselves that they would naturally commit suicide. Turing was openly and happily gay, not ashamed at all.
Alas, we'll never really know.
Well the forced chemical castration probably didn't help
And actually they build upon what the Polish started.
No, every single person of consequence was American. From Cleopatra to Alan Turing, it's America all the way down baby /s
It was first cracked by the Polish cipher bureau, who shared the intel, as well as enigma hardware they had copied from civil machines, with France and the UK in 1939, shortly before the war started.
Even movies are affected by American exceptionalism, I'm not surprised.
This has been a long standing issue tbh, especially war films where they have a pesky habit of historical revisionism in favour of America, diminishing the role of other nations etcs, or in some instances straight up fabricates events and tries to past them off as historical.
They movie subs will cry every time I bring this up
Just look at any western. The Americans are the good guys and the "Indians" are the bad guys.
Or russians... or whoever it is from former USSR
Not so many of those in westerns ;)
But Mexicans too.
I like in Dutch war movies, usually when Americans show up they make things worse for everyone involved
Most Americans have no clue there were five beach-head assaults on D-Day. They know about Utah and Omaha, but no clue about Juno, Gold or Sword. The Brits and Canadians.
Australians were there too. Air support, navy and Juno beach
About a year ago I started watching European ww2 movies. Being an avid history buff, Europe was practically a gold mine of war movies for me.
I own The battle of Britain on dvd, (which apparently most Americans never heard of. Not even the blitz. My dad was just as surprised.) And wish to God Dambusters was available on dvd in the U.S. Waterloo unfortunately isn't available in the U.S either but at least its on youtube, and I discovered the 2005 Japanese movie Yamato is on youtube.
Everyone glosses over the fact Stalin beat Hitler, for instance.
Stalin likes to glosse over what happened before great patriotic war
Stalin was not, and I’m sure this isn’t a surprise, a nice guy.
Like DDAY only about them, when they were less than 50% of the troops in the landings.
Especially movies. They've been a Trojan horse for spreading the myth of American perfection for a long time.
As a Canadian I was so pissed when I saw Argo. Dear God what a disaster. And Americans were praising the film too.
See also any WW1 or WW2 movie or series. We're the Canadians even there? Geneva checklist anyone?
Well, the character doesn’t say breaking Enigma code was an American achievement
Argo comes to mind straight away.
Shoutouts to UK and Poland.
Is this a commonly shared American myth? More than once I’ve had an American tell me they’re the ones who cracked enigma, one tried telling me Turing was American.
I think a lot of Americans think they did most of the work of anything during WW2. Tbf, if you don't pay attention in history class/have lacking history education and watch a lot of war movies (which became basically US propaganda) I can see how you'd become convinced USA did more than they actually did.
Tbf in school they are probably taught that they did most of the work. Their education system isn't very good.
I went to HS in USA for a year, and from what I understood it's not that they say US did most of the work. It's just that they tend to focus on USAs involvement in the war, pearl Harbour, the island attacks, D-day etc.
American history is very interesting, but if you focus too much on it during world events it's easy to ignore/miss what other countries were involved with during the same time.
Tbf, I'm Swedish and didn't learn about the conflicts in Africa during WW2 until much later. Our history lessons during the war was mostly focused on the events in Europe, since we live in Europe you know.
They also tend towards a narrative heavy education, whereas we in Europe/canada tend towards a more critical method of history teaching.
They just automatically assume that if something was done, it was done by an American.
I watched a video on YouTube of an American man being surprised to find out bands who had hits in the US weren't American.
Rolling Stones, Elton John, Bee Gees, AC/DC, Ozzy, Def Leopard, Billy Idol etc etc
🤷♀️
To be fair, it's also a commonly shared British myth. Anyone who says 'Britain' did it and leaves out the Polish and French teams are just doing the same thing.
The confusing thing to me is why they didn't make the movie about U-505, which actually is an interesting story and has the benefit of being real. It's pretty cool to look at, you can go see it in Chicago and realise how strange it is to see a u-boat inside a building.
This, it was the Polish who first cracked enigma and the Polish who created the first machine to run that algorithm, it wasn’t fast enough though.
The true British contribution was that we made a machine that could run the algorithm fast enough, that’s it.
The polish broke it first, Alan Turing then made the first ‘computer’ to break it very fast so it could be used more since they often would not get it broken by midnight (the codes changed daily)
The Polish broke an earlier version of it, then the Germans upgraded it to a version that was incredibly impractical to crack manually considering the enigma settings changed each day and it usually took at least that long to figure them out.
Turing designed the machine that was finally able to crack that more complex version, every day, pretty damn quickly
And my government still fucked him over for the 'crime' of being gay
Yep, what happened to him was an absolute abomination, he contributed so much to Britain and computing in general.
I’ve been studying his work in university for the last year and I’ve still only just scratched the surface
Benedict Cucumber broke it
He broke the Enigma code but he still couldn't pronounce the word "penguin".
Give him a break. He tried. About 30 or 40 different ways to say it. He may even have succeeded once or twice.
Pingwing
Ah, Benadryl Cabbagepatch, truly an icon of our age
Poland mathmaticians broke it first in the 30's, Alan Turing improved on it to decrypt on a large scale basis with his machine. We Americans had little to do with it but did "help" later.
Also, Bletchley Park is a very cool place, and I highly recommend a visit.
Yeah, I think there will be a lot of people here overlooking the Poles alright …
Poland and missing facts about how much they accomplished during WW2, name a more iconic duo.
The resistances in occupied countries get forgotten too easily in general and it always annoys me. They risked, and often sacrificed, their lives for the war effort. So much of what the UK and other allied countries were able to do to win the war was because of intelligence they got from these people living under the horrors of Nazi occupation.
Even just the invasion of Poland gets put in some sort of "Germany just rolled in" kind of light, it wasn't easy at all, and this was when the German war machine was fully charged and prepared. Combined with an early adaptation of a new style of warfare.
We also shouldn't assume a country that was occupied only contributed resistance, Polish Pilots flew for the RAF after Poland fell, 5% of RAF Fighter Command, but had 12% of the kills.
Their experience fighting the Luftwaffe during the invasion of Poland was invaluable to the RAF and the rest of the Allies.
Yes, like when the Brexit idiots complained about all the Polish people that chose to build lives in the UK and saying things like "we didn't fight the Battle of Britain only to be invaded by foreigners now" while neither being old enough to be anywhere near the war nor educated enough to know about the massive Polish contribution to the air defence of the UK.
Especially amusing as there's a famous picture of airmen in front of a plane they often include in their Facebook posts which shows the Polish 303 squadron.
The Brexiters are the spiritual brethren of this sub.
This absolutely boils my piss and I try to make this point every time it comes up.
Witold Pilecki comes to mind. Probably one of the bravest, most selfless men in WWII and yet the majority of people have Probably never heard of him
Also recommend visiting Bletchley park. It's an incredible piece of history!
Breaking it wasn't the problem. Breaking it in time to use the information that day was. That's what Turing's machine did, broke it every day in minutes rather than hours.
Source: U-571
Slop movie tbh
Alan Turing was already mistreated during his lifetime by the British because he was gay. Now he is being made invisible by the Yanks.
Yup, whenever I hear an American say they saved "us" by breaking the enigma, I just thank them for being gay. The gays saved us.
It was British, who couldn't do it if Polish resistance members didn't figure out some stuff lmfao
It was really a combined operation of the Poles and French, which also involved a German working for the Poles. Pretty interesting story overall.
As a gay man from Scotland, UK I actually, out-loud yelled ”you WHAT?!?!”
Wasn't it Turing who did that? You know, a British guy?
Yeah but you know MURICA if they can try to take the credit they do
They invented everything, the wheel, the camera, the computer etc
Not alone. Many other people were before and behind him, almost all of whom were also not American.
Tbf, he did so after Polish Mathematicians had already broken it at least once (which iirc contributed greatly to the Bletchley Park project being able to consistently break Enigma?)
There is so much that most people get wrong about Enigma as well as Bletchley Park and Alan Turing.
It was Polish mathematicians who first cracked Enigma in 1932. After 7 years of decoding Enigma messages using a machine they invented called the bomba, the Poles eventually provided their work to the French and British. That was done because the Nazis had modified the Enigma in a way that Polish intelligence could no longer decrypt due to them not having the resources to scale up their program to a size necessary for decrypting any messages.
Eventually, British intelligence at Bletchley Park, using the work done by the Poles, was able to build up their own decryption program, with Alan Turing designing the bombes that would be used to decrypt Enigma messages.
On a side note, Turing was not directly involved in the development of the Colossus machine, which was used to decrypt the Lorenz cipher. That machine was instead built by Tommy Flowers.
«We» dint break shit. Those involved were:
Polish cryptanalysts (early work on Enigma):
-Marian Rejewski: Polish -Jerzy Różycki: Polish -Henryk Zygalski: Polish
British cryptanalysts (wartime work at Bletchley Park):
-Alan Turing: British -Gordon Welchman: British -Joan Clarke: British -Dilly Knox: British
They can’t help themselves. Always stealing the credit
Garbo (Juan Pujol Garcia) was also a very important piece of the puzzle as the spy network he helped setup was used to get hold of machines and material such as various messages and also allowed the Allies to deliver false information and misdirection to the Axis by working as a double agent.
The best part? he received commendations from both sides because the Nazis truly believed he was working for them.
It was a genius Polish lady edit Man, lol. as the first to crack it, and later itterations of the code were cracked by the UK at Bletchley Park and Alan Turing using a giant computer that he designed and built.
Marian Rejewski was a man, but pretty spot on apart from that.
Strictly speaking, Polish mathematicians, especially Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski, who first reverse-engineered the German Enigma cipher machine in the 1930s, providing vital breakthroughs that enabled the Allies, particularly Bletchley Park, to read Enigma messages during WWII, significantly shortening the war.
It was very much a joint Polish / British effort.
In August 1939, following a tripartite meeting of Polish, French, and British cryptologists at Warsaw on 25–26 July 1939 – during which the Poles had explained all their Enigma-decryption methods and equipment – two Enigma replicas were passed to Poland's allies, one sent to Paris and one to London.
Well before the USA joined the Allies.
Lots of this sort of stuff constantly going on. The new one I’ve spotted coming up a lot recently is the Americans invented T.V. (The didn’t, that was a Scottish man named John Logie Baird). They’re trying to subtly change the definition of T.V to distort it.
It’s been happening for decades. The problem is the money to make these films is predominantly American and they want a return. Many years ago there was a film script advanced about the famous RAF Lancaster bomber and her crew, S for Sugar. (NB: this is pre nato alphabet before anyone gets upset) Eventually it was made about the USAF Memphis Belle and her crew, as the yanks would not invest in a film where they weren’t the heroes.
If you want to get really upset, look into the Americans patenting penicillin.