“Why the French Military Cryptanalysis Failed to Break Enigma”, 2023-10-19 ():
In July 1939, when the French military discovered the possibility of breaking Enigma thanks to revelations from the Polish Cipher Service, it came as a complete surprise. Although the French secret services had known about the German machine for almost 10 years, the military cryptologists based in Paris had quickly concluded that it was impossible to break it. Only the forced exile of Polish mathematicians in France after the 1939 campaign enabled the French to decipher Enigma from January 1940 until the June defeat.
While the story of the Polish and British cryptological successes is now well known through academic and mainstream literature, the French failure has received virtually no attention until now.
Using unpublished archives held at the Defence Historical Service in Vincennes, this study analyzes the reasons for this fiasco and paints a picture of French military cryptanalysis in the 1930s, quite different from the past success of French codebreakers in the First World War.
[Keywords: Enigma, French cryptanalysis, World War II]
[Institutional sclerosis: bureaucratic incompetence as French cryptology was taken over by incompetent careerists who cheerily claimed everything was going fine (despite their manifest inability to crack the chief enemy’s increasingly-common cipher) while prioritizing mere appearance like military spit & shine, and the rest of the French military was too ignorant or lazy to call the bluff, as the consequences of disaster were so delayed & uncertain. The ‘nothing ever happens’ view was correct… until it was irrevocably, fatally, wrong—and Hitler had conquered France.]