For over half a century, there have been books and articles speculating as to whether Nazi Germany could have won the war. One movie actually showed preparations for a 1960 meeting between JFK and an aging Adolf Hitler. One reason for Hitler's defeat is widely believed to be his premature attack on the Soviet Union, forcing Germany into a war on two fronts.

Today it is impossible to say exactly how much longer World War II might have lasted, were it not for the Polish war effort. Poles fought on all the fronts of the war's European theater, and their 400,000-strong underground army kept thousands of Nazi troops tied down in occupied Poland, thereby saving countless allied lives elsewhere in Europe. Although crushed, the 1944 Warsaw Uprising was a victory of the Polish spirit. Unfortunately, both that upsurge and most other Polish contributions to the Allied victory have been largely ignored, overlooked and at times hijacked by other countries.

One glaring example is Enigma, the secret Nazi code that a group of Polish mathematicians succeeded in cracking. Over the years, a number of books on this subject have been published, but most of them downplayed the Polish input and or gave credit to someone else. A fictionalized British feature film entitled "Enigma" even went so far as to portray the main Polish character as--believe it or not--a Nazi sympathizer! Now there is a book on the market that will finally set the record straight.

That book is the explicitly titled "ENIGMA -- How the Poles Broke the Nazi Code" by Wladyslaw Kozaczuk and Jerzy Straszak. It tells the fascinating story of how three young Polish mathematicians--Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski--first deciphered what the Germans regarded as an unbreakable code in 1933, the year Hitler came to power. They then built copies of the portable-typewriter-like encoding machine and succeeded in decrypting successive German upgrades attempting to make Enigma even more enigmatic. Before Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia carved up Poland in 1939, Polish military code-breakers had made copies of the Enigma machine available to the French and continued their decoding efforts near Paris.

After the fall of France, the code-breaking operation made its way through devious, harrowing channels to Britain. But true to form, the English, who like to take credit for everything, displayed little gratitude and even changed the name of the project from Enigma to Ultra. As David Kahn wrote in his book "Seizing the Enigma": "The Poles reaped the customary reward of the innovators whose efforts have benefited others: exclusion. The British kept Rejewski and others away from any work on Enigma. (...) British cryptanalysts wanted to keep all the credit for themselves."

Be all that is it may, the Polish-decrypted Enigma code was what gave the Allies a clear insight into German military orders battle plans, the full extent of which the Nazis never realized. Intercepted Enigma messages were decisive in winning the Battle of Britain and ensured Allied victories and decreased casualties in North Africa and the Italian campaign as well as the Battle of the Atlantic. The Allies also were forewarned about Hitler's "wonder weapon" -- the V1 and V2 guided missiles -- with which he thought he could ultimately win the war. And conversely, instances of ignoring of Enigma messages brought about disastrous results such as the tragedy at the 1944 Battle of Arnhem, from which few Allied troops emerged alive.

"ENIGMA" is a tremendous read and will make a great gift to anyone interested in World War II. It reads like a spy novel and war story except that it provides the reader with the satisfaction of knowing this is not simply concocted literary fiction. In addition to accurately portraying all aspects of this unglue code-breaking story and providing photos of the Enigma machine and its decrypters, the authors have also zeroed in on longstanding attempts to distort, minimize or ignore the Polish contribution to this major wartime breakthrough.

Information on ENIGMA - How the Poles Broke the Nazi Code" (Hippocrene Books, NY 2004, ISBN 0-7818-0941-X) is available at: The Polish American Cultural Center Museum Gift Shop, 308 Walnut Street, in historic Philadelphia, PA 19106 - (215)-922-1700.

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