of the British Bombe, died before the secret had been disclosed. Jerzy Rozycki, one of the first three Polish mathematicians hired to work against the Enigma in 1932, drowned when the ship he was on sank in a storm, possibly after hitting a mine, in 1942. The loss of their experiences is great. But through the memories of those who survive, the story of the Bombe and the people involved with it is now told.

Some historians claim that World War II could have gone on for as much as two more years, with an untold loss of life, had it not been for the Allies' ability to read Enigma messages. Those messages could not have been read without the Bombes and the men and women who built and operated them.

Jennifer E. Wilcox

January 2001

Notes

1. A. Ray Miller, The Cryptographic Mathematics of Enigma (Ft. George G. Meade, MD: Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency).

2. 6812th Signal Security Detachment (PROV), dated 15 June 1945;(NARA Record Group 457, File #2943, 7.) Hereafter referred to as 6812th.

3. Each rotor on an Enigma can be set in any one of twenty-six positions (1-26 or A-Z). On a three-rotor machine the number of possible settings is 263 or 17,576.

4. Bomba is Polish for bomb. Wladyslaw Kozaczuk's book Enigma (University7 Press of America, 1984, 63) cites a letter from Col. Tadeusz Lisicki, chief of a Polish signal unit, which claims that Jerzy Rozycki named the machine after an ice cream dessert the mathematicians were eating at the time. The bomba dessert was a round ball of ice cream covered in chocolate and resembled an old-fashioned bomb. However, in an article Rejewski himself says, 'For lack of a better name we called them bombs.' ('How Polish Mathematicians Deciphered the Enigma, 'Annals