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164-660: The precursor of the agency that would become the Cipher Bureau was created in May 1919, during the Polish-Soviet War (1919–1921), and played a vital role in securing Poland's survival and victory in that war. In mid-1931, the Cipher Bureau was formed by the merger of pre-existing agencies. In December 1932, the Bureau began breaking Germany 's Enigma ciphers . Over the next seven years, Polish cryptologists overcame

328-776: A Polish-reconstructed Enigma, along with details of their equipment, including Zygalski sheets and Rejewski's cryptologic bomb . In return, the British pledged to prepare two full sets of Zygalski sheets for all 60 possible wheel orders. The French contingent consisted of Major Gustave Bertrand , the French radio-intelligence and cryptology chief, and Capt. Henri Braquenié of the French Air Force staff. The British sent Commander Alastair Denniston , head of Britain's Government Code and Cypher School , Dilly Knox , chief British cryptanalyst and Commander Humphrey Sandwith, head of

492-568: A captured Russian officer aptly remarked — ‘He is a man with a very large moustache, but a very small brain.’" Because of his exceptional Civil War record and public popularity, he continued to enjoy Stalin's patronage and suffered no real punishment for the disaster in Kiev. After the war, Budyonny was appointed deputy Minister of Agriculture of the USSR , responsible, among other things, for horse breeding. When he retired, he retained his membership of

656-422: A conversation with Prime Minister David Lloyd George , commented sarcastically: "The war of giants has ended, the wars of the pygmies begin." The Polish–Soviet War was the longest lasting of the international engagements. The territory of what had become Poland had been a major battleground during World War I and the new country lacked political stability. It had won the hard-fought Polish–Ukrainian War against

820-610: A definitive ruling in regard to Poland's eastern border but on 8 December 1919, the Allied Supreme War Council issued a provisional boundary (its later version would be known as the Curzon Line ). It was an attempt to define the areas that had an "indisputably Polish ethnic majority". The permanent border was contingent on the Western powers' future negotiations with White Russia , presumed to prevail in

984-703: A farm labourer, shop errand boy, blacksmith 's apprentice, and driver of a steam-driven threshing machine , until the autumn of 1903, when he was drafted into the Imperial Russian Army . He became a cavalryman reinforcing the 46th Cossack Regiment during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. After the war, he was transferred to the Primorsk Dragoon Regiment. In 1907, he was sent to the Academy for Cavalry Officers in

1148-549: A few instrumental vinyl records were issued in the USSR featuring a duo with his friend, cossack bayanist Grigory Zaytsev, titled as "Duo of bayanists" (Дуэт баянистов). The Military Academy of the Signal Corps in St. Petersburg carries the name of honour S. M. Budyonny. Budyonny's first wife was an illiterate Cossack whose forename and patronymic were Nadezhda Ivanovna. They were married in 1903, immediately before he joined

1312-473: A five-volume memoir, in which he described the stormy years of civil war as well as the everyday life of the First Cavalry Army. He was frequently commemorated for his bravery in many popular Soviet military songs, including The Red Cavalry song (Konarmieyskaya) and The Budyonny March . Budenovka , a part of Soviet military uniform, is named after Semyon Budyonny. He was also frequently named in

1476-810: A group of mathematicians from the University of Warsaw and the University of Lwów (most notably the founders of the Polish School of Mathematics  – Stanisław Leśniewski , Stefan Mazurkiewicz and Wacław Sierpiński ), who succeeded in breaking the Soviet Russian ciphers as well. During the Polish–Soviet War, the Polish decryption of Red Army radio messages made it possible to use Polish military forces efficiently against Soviet Russian forces and to win many individual battles, most importantly

1640-602: A local Polish offensive action of 13–16 February, led by General Antoni Listowski, near Byaroza , Belarus. The event has been presented as the beginning of the war of liberation by the Polish side, or of Polish aggression by the Russian side. By late February, the Soviet westward offensive had come to a halt. As the low-level warfare continued, the Polish units crossed the Neman River, took Pinsk on 5 March and reached

1804-472: A mechanized war. Soon after the war, Marshal Konev told the Yugoslav communist, Milovan Đilas : "Budyonny never knew much, and he never studied anything. He showed himself to be completely incompetent and permitted awful mistakes to be made." German Field Marshal Rundstedt , commander of Army Group South in the battles of Kiev and Uman, said after the war: "Of Budyonny, who commanded the armies facing me,

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1968-546: A modified civilian Enigma machine ; in 1928 the German Army followed suit. The complexity of the system was much increased in 1930 by the introduction of a plugboard ( Steckerbrett ), albeit with only six connecting leads in use. In December 1932, Marian Rejewski made what historian David Kahn describes as one of the greatest advances in cryptologic history, by applying pure mathematics  – the theory of permutations and groups  – to breaking

2132-516: A number that varied between five and eight. This made the Biuro's grill method much less easy, as it relied on 'unsteckered' letter pairs. The German navy was more security-conscious than the army and air force, and in May 1937 it introduced a new, much more secure, indicator procedure that remained unbroken for several years. The next setback occurred in November 1937, when the scrambler's reflector

2296-680: A proclamation from the Central Executive Committee announcing the formation of the Chechen Autonomous Region. The same year, he was also appointed assistant commander of the Red Army 's cavalry. During 1924–37, he was Inspector of Cavalry of the Red Army. He spent a great amount of time and effort in the organization and management of equestrian facilities and developing new breeds of horses. Budyonny

2460-599: A second echelon force by 1940–41, but Budyonny was never criticised for being on the wrong side of the argument, being a faithful ally of Stalin and Voroshilov. Budyonny graduated from the M. V. Frunze Military Academy in 1932. In 1934, he was made a candidate member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . In 1935 Budyonny was made one of the first five Marshals of

2624-593: A series of short stories about the experience, which achieved worldwide acclaim as one of the greatest contributions to Soviet literature – but which offended Budyonny, who made a "rare and furious foray into print" in March 1924, demanding that the Red Cavalry's reputation should be protected against "slander" by a "literary degenerate". This provoked a response from Maxim Gorky , then the most famous living Russian writer, defending Babel, but in 1928, Budyonny returned to

2788-475: A significant player in Eastern European geopolitics in the interwar period. The war is known by several names. "Polish–Soviet War" is the most common but other names include "Russo–Polish War" (or "Polish–Russian War") and "Polish–Bolshevik War". This last term (or just "Bolshevik War" ( Polish : Wojna bolszewicka )) is most common in Polish sources. In some Polish sources it is also referred to as

2952-559: A takeover of the western part of the province. The Polish–Ukrainian warfare there was discontinued from late May, and in early September an armistice was signed. On 21 November 1919, after contentious deliberations, the Allied Supreme War Council mandated Polish control over eastern Galicia for 25 years, with guarantees of autonomy for the Ukrainian population. The Conference of Ambassadors , which replaced

3116-606: A workhorse, a black cow and a pig weighing 250 kilograms (550 lb). In July–September 1941, Budyonny was Commander-in-Chief (главком, glavkom ) of the Soviet armed forces of the Southwestern Direction ( Southwestern and Southern Fronts) facing the German invasion of Ukraine . This invasion began as part of Germany's Operation Barbarossa which was launched on June 22. He also served as an original member of

3280-621: A year and a half for a full-scale war to develop. The Western powers considered any significant territorial expansion of Poland, at the expense of Russia or Germany, to be highly disruptive to the post-World War I order. Among other factors, the Western Allies did not want to give Germany and Russia a reason to conspire together. The rise of the unrecognized Bolshevik regime complicated this rationale. The Treaty of Versailles , signed on 28 June 1919, regulated Poland's western border. The Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920) had not made

3444-533: The Ober Ost regions abandoned by the Germans. Lenin viewed the newly independent Poland as a critical route for spreading communist revolutions into Europe . Meanwhile, Polish leaders, including Józef Piłsudski , aimed to restore Poland’s pre-1772 borders and secure the country's position in the region. Throughout 1919, Polish forces occupied much of present-day Lithuania and Belarus , emerging victorious in

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3608-608: The Allies an unprecedented advantage ( Ultra ) in their ultimately victorious prosecution of World War II . On 8 May 1919 Lt. Józef Serafin Stanslicki established a Polish Army "Cipher Section" ( Sekcja Szyfrów ), precursor to the "Cipher Bureau" ( Biuro Szyfrów ). The Cipher Section reported to the Polish General Staff and contributed substantially to Poland's defense by Józef Piłsudski 's forces during

3772-552: The Battle of Warsaw . On 5 January 1919, the Red Army took Vilnius, which led to the establishment of the Socialist Soviet Republic of Lithuania and Belorussia (Litbel) on 28 February. On 10 February, Soviet Russia's People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin wrote to Polish Prime Minister Ignacy Paderewski, proposing resolution of matters of disagreement and establishment of relations between

3936-551: The Christian IX of Denmark 18th Seversky Dragoon Regiment, Caucasian Cavalry Division on the Eastern Front . He became famous for his attack on a German supply column near Brzezina , and was awarded the St. George Cross , 4th Class. However, there was general ineptitude among the officers under whom he served (primarily Caucasian aristocrats who received commissions based on their social standing). In November 1916,

4100-536: The Commander in Chief , Marshal Józef Piłsudski . Interception and reading of the signals provided Polish intelligence with entire Russian operational orders. The Poles were able to follow the whole operation of Budionny 's Cavalry Army in the second half of August 1920 with incredible precision, just by monitoring his radiotelegraphic correspondence with Tukhachevsky , including the famous and historic conflict between

4264-650: The Curzon Line , securing Polish control over parts of modern-day Ukraine and Belarus . The war resulted in the official recognition of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic as Soviet states, undermining Piłsudski’s ambitions for a Intermarium federation led by Poland. Despite this, Poland's success at the Battle of Warsaw cemented its position as

4428-906: The Estonian War of Independence , the Latvian War of Independence , and the Lithuanian Wars of Independence were all fought in the Baltic Sea region. Russia was overwhelmed by domestic struggles. In early March 1919, the Communist International was established in Moscow . The Hungarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed in March and the Bavarian Soviet Republic in April. Winston Churchill , in

4592-685: The German armed forces' Enigma machine ciphers. Rejewski had worked out the precise interconnections of the Enigma rotors and reflector, after the Bureau had received, from French Military Intelligence Captain Gustave Bertrand , two German documents and two pages of Enigma daily keys (for September and October of that year). These had been obtained by a French military intelligence agent, a German codenamed Rex , from an agent who worked at Germany's Cipher Office in Berlin, Hans-Thilo Schmidt , whom

4756-477: The German–Soviet War , alleged that Budyonny killed his wife after she had confronted him over his infidelity. Budyonny told his daughter by a subsequent marriage that she shot herself, possibly unintentionally, when their marriage was failing. In 1925, he married a singer, Olga Stefanovna Mikhailova, who was around half his age, the daughter of a railway worker from Kursk . After their marriage, she entered

4920-789: The Kingdom of Poland and for the Grand Duchy of Lithuania . In the first half of the 14th century, the Principality of Kiev and the land between the Dnieper , Pripyat , and Daugava (Western Dvina) rivers became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In 1352, Poland and Lithuania divided the Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia between themselves. In 1569, in accordance with the terms of the Union of Lublin between Poland and Lithuania, some of

5084-493: The Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1921, thereby helping preserve Poland's independence, recently regained in the wake of World War I . The Cipher Section's purview included both ciphers and codes . In Polish the term "cipher" ( szyfr ) loosely refers to both these two principal categories of cryptography . (Compare the opposite practice in English , which loosely refers to both codes and ciphers as "codes".) During

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5248-520: The Polish–Soviet War (1919–1921), approximately a hundred Russian ciphers were broken by a sizable cadre of Polish cryptologists who included army Lieutenant Jan Kowalewski and three world-famous professors of mathematics – Stefan Mazurkiewicz , Wacław Sierpiński , and Stanisław Leśniewski . Russian army staffs were still following the same disastrously ill-disciplined signals-security procedures as had Tsarist army staffs during World War I , to

5412-707: The Polish–Ukrainian War . However, Soviet forces regained strength after their victories in the Russian Civil War , and Symon Petliura , leader of the Ukrainian People's Republic , was forced to ally with Piłsudski in 1920 to resist the advancing Bolsheviks. In April 1920, Piłsudski launched the Kiev offensive with the goal of securing favorable borders for Poland. On 7 May, Polish and allied Ukrainian forces captured Kiev , though Soviet armies in

5576-844: The Regency Council of the Kingdom of Poland, a body installed by the Central Powers . Subsequently, he was recognized by many Polish politicians as temporary chief of state and exercised in practice extensive powers. Under the Small Constitution of 20 February 1919, he became chief of state . As such, he reported to the Legislative Sejm . With the collapse of the Russian and German occupying authorities , virtually all of Poland's neighbours began fighting over borders and other issues. The Finnish Civil War ,

5740-696: The Romanian border. A Red Army assault between the Daugava and Berezina Rivers was repelled in October and the front had become relatively inactive with sporadic encounters only, as the line designated by Piłsudski to be the goal of the Polish operation in the north was reached. In autumn 1919, the Sejm voted to incorporate into Poland the conquered territories up to the Daugava and Berezina Rivers, including Minsk. The Polish successes in summer 1919 resulted from

5904-518: The Royal Navy 's intercept and direction-finding stations. When Rejewski had been working on reconstructing the German military Enigma machine in late 1932, he had ultimately solved a crucial element, the wiring of the letters of the alphabet into the entry drum, with the inspired guess that they might be wired in simple alphabetical order. Now, at the trilateral meeting – Rejewski

6068-749: The Russian Civil War . The Russian state lost territory due to the German offensive and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk , signed by the emergent Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic . Several nations of the region saw a chance for independence and seized their opportunity to gain it. The defeat of Germany on the Western Front and the withdrawal of the Imperial German Army in the Eastern Front had left Berlin in no position to retaliate against Soviet Russia, which swiftly repudiated

6232-417: The Socialist Soviet Republic of Lithuania and Belorussia (Litbel). It is however unlikely that the Soviet forced plannes further incursions westward. From late 1919, Lenin, encouraged by the Red Army's civil war victories over the White Russian forces and their Western allies, began to envision the future of world revolution with greater optimism. The Bolsheviks proclaimed the need for the dictatorship of

6396-421: The St. Petersburg Riding School. He graduated first in his class after a year, becoming an instructor with the rank of junior non-commissioned officer. He returned to his regiment as a riding instructor with a rank of senior non-commissioned officer. At the start of World War I , he joined a reserve dragoon cavalry battalion. During World War I, Budyonny was the 5th Squadron's non-commissioned troop officer in

6560-457: The Stavka of the Supreme High Command , the highest Soviet body of military command during the Great Patriotic War , from the start of the war until February 17, 1945. Operating under strict orders from Stalin (who attempted to micromanage the war in the early stages) not to retreat under any circumstances, Budyonny's forces were eventually surrounded during the Battle of Uman and the Battle of Kiev by Nazi forces. The disasters which followed

6724-451: The Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union . Budyonny died of brain hemorrhage on 26 October 1973, at the age of 90. He was buried with full military honours in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis , in one of the twelve individual tombs located between the Lenin Mausoleum and the Kremlin wall . Pallbearers at his funeral included the General Secretary of the CPSU Leonid Brezhnev and the USSR Minister for Defence, Marshal Grechko . Budyonny wrote

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6888-440: The West Ukrainian People's Republic by July 1919 but had already become embroiled in new conflicts with Germany (the 1919–1921 Silesian Uprisings ) and the January 1919 border conflict with Czechoslovakia . Meanwhile, Soviet Russia focused on thwarting the counterrevolution and the 1918–1925 intervention by the Allied powers . The first clashes between Polish and Soviet forces occurred in autumn and winter 1918/1919, but it took

7052-425: The Western Rifle Division in October 1918. In summer 1918, a short-lived Polish communist government, led by Stefan Heltman, was created in Moscow. Both the military and civilian structures were meant to facilitate the eventual introduction of communism into Poland in the form of a Polish Soviet Republic . Given the precarious situation resulting from the withdrawal of German forces from Belarus and Lithuania and

7216-457: The tank in the coming war in 1939, he remarked, "You won't convince me. As soon as war is declared, everyone will shout, 'Send for the Cavalry! ' " Budyonny was born into a poor peasant family on the Kozyurin farmstead near the town of Salsk in the Don Cossack region of the southern Russian Empire (now Rostov Oblast ). Although he grew up in a Cossack region, Budyonny's family were ethnic Russians from Voronezh province. He worked as

7380-440: The "War of 1920" ( Polish : Wojna 1920 roku ). The ending year of the conflict is variously given as either 1920 or 1921; this confusion stems from the fact that while the ceasefire came into force on 18 October 1920, the official treaty ending the war was signed on 18 March 1921. While the events of late 1918 and 1919 can be described as a border conflict and only in spring 1920 were both sides engaged in an all-out war ,

7544-406: The Allied war effort". British prime minister Winston Churchill's greatest wartime fear, even after Hitler had suspended Operation Sea Lion and invaded the Soviet Union , was that the German submarine wolfpacks would succeed in strangling sea-locked Britain. A major factor that averted Britain's defeat in the Battle of the Atlantic was her regained mastery of Naval Enigma decryption; and while

7708-448: The April operation in Ukraine , the battles with Tukhachevsky 's first and second offensives in Belarus , the battles with Budionny 's Cavalry Army, the Battle of Brody, to the Battles of Warsaw , Lwów and the Niemen . In mid-1931, at the Polish General Staff , a Cipher Bureau was formed by merging the Radio-Intelligence Office ( Referat Radiowywiadu ) and the Polish-Cryptography Office ( Referat Szyfrów Własnych ). The Bureau

7872-418: The Bolshevik victory; Budyonny became renowned for his bravery and was the subject of several popular patriotic songs. In 1922 he also became commander of all the troops in the north Caucasian military district. While serving as inspector of the Red Army's cavalry (1924–37) and commander of the Moscow military district (1937–40). As a political ally of Joseph Stalin, he became one of the original five Marshals of

8036-458: The British cryptanalyst Alan Turing spent several days at PC Bruno conferring with his Polish colleagues. He had brought the Poles a full set of Zygalski sheets that had been produced at Bletchley Park by John Jeffreys using Polish-supplied information. On 17 January 1940, the Poles made the first break into wartime Enigma traffic – that from 28 October 1939. During this period, until the collapse of France in June 1940, ultimately 83 percent of

8200-444: The Caucasian Cavalry Division was transferred to the Caucasus Front , to fight against the Ottoman Turks . He was involved in a heated confrontation with the squadron sergeant major regarding the officers' poor treatment of the soldiers and the continual lack of food. The sergeant major struck out at Budyonny, who retaliated by punching the ranking officer, knocking him down. The soldiers backed Budyonny during questioning, claiming that

8364-527: The Cipher Bureau's German section who had worked with Enigma, and most of the workers at the AVA Radio Company that had built Enigma doubles and cryptologic equipment for the German section, remained in Poland. Some were interrogated by the Gestapo , but no one gave away the secret of Polish mastery of Enigma decryption. At PC Bruno , outside Paris , on 20 October 1939 the Poles resumed work on German Enigma ciphers in close collaboration with Britain's Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park . In

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8528-462: The Cipher Bureau's German section, BS-4 , had been housed in the Polish General Staff building – the stately 18th-century " Saxon Palace " – in Warsaw. That year BS-4 moved into specially constructed new facilities in the Kabaty Woods near Pyry , south of Warsaw. There, working conditions were incomparably better than in the cramped quarters at the General Staff building. The move was dictated as well by requirements of security. Germany's Abwehr

8692-437: The Cipher Bureau's predecessor agency was still headed by Major Franciszek Pokorny (a relative of the outstanding World War I Austro-Hungarian Army cryptologist, Captain Herman Pokorny ), Ciężki, Franciszek Pokorny, and a civilian Bureau associate, Antoni Palluth , taught a secret cryptology course at Poznań University for selected mathematics students. Over ten years later, during World War II while in France , one of

8856-423: The Enigma keys that were found, were solved at Bletchley Park, the remaining 17 percent at PC Bruno. Rejewski commented: How could it be otherwise, when there were three of us [Polish cryptologists] and [there were] at least several hundred British cryptologists, since about 10,000 people worked in Bletchley ... Besides, recovery of keys also depended on the amount of intercepted cipher material, and that amount

9020-449: The French codenamed Asché . After Rejewski had worked out the military Enigma's logical structure, the Polish Cipher Bureau commissioned the AVA Radio Company , co-owned by Antoni Palluth , to build replicas (" doubles ") of the Enigma to Rejewski's specifications. His method of decrypting Enigma messages exploited two weaknesses of the German operating procedures. It used what Rejewski called "characteristics" that were independent of

9184-422: The German Office of the General Staff's Section II (Intelligence). There, from fall 1935 to mid-April 1939, it was worked up by Major Jan Leśniak , who in April 1939 would turn the German Office over to another officer and himself form a Situation Office intended for wartime service. He would head the Situation Office to and through the September 1939 Campaign . The system of pre-defining the indicator setting for

9348-446: The German front by mid-June. The offensive in the east was resumed at the end of June, following the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty, signed and ratified by Germany, preserved the status quo in western Poland. On the southern front in Volhynia, in May and in July the Polish forces confronted the Red Army, which was in process of pushing Petliura's Ukrainian units out of the contested territories. The rural Orthodox population there

9512-473: The Germans indeed marched into southern France. On the morning of 12 November they occupied Cadix. Over the two years since its establishment in October 1940, Cadix had decrypted thousands of Wehrmacht , SS and Gestapo messages, originating not only from French territory but from across Europe, which provided invaluable intelligence to Allied commands and resistance movements . Cadix had also decrypted thousands of Soviet messages. Having departed Cadix,

9676-422: The Germans introduced two new rotors on 15 December 1938, giving a choice of three out of five to assemble in the machines on a given day. This increased the number of possible rotor orders from 6 to 60. The Biuro could then only read the small minority of messages that used neither of the two new rotors. They did not have the resources to produce 54 more bomby or 54 sets of Zygalski sheets. Fortunately, however,

9840-475: The Moscow Conservatory, graduating in 1930, then joined the Bolshoi Theatre. According to the Croatian communist, Ante Ciliga , members of the Communist Youth ( Komsomol ) were so shocked to see him with his new bride at a public banquet, kissing her hands, that they threatened to create a scandal which the party authorities "had to use a very heavy hand to stifle". Budyonny divorced her before September 1937. Next, Budyonny married Olga's cousin, Maria Vasilevna,

10004-443: The North but by that time Tukhachevsky's forces had been driven back, forcing a general retreat. After Budyonny's army was defeated in the Battle of Komarów (one of the biggest cavalry battles in history), he was forced to withdraw onto Soviet-held territory. Budyonny took part in the reconquest of Crimea , the final phase of the Russian Civil War. Despite the defeat in Poland, Budyonny was one of Soviet Russia's military heroes by

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10168-597: The Paris Peace Conference. At the conference, Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ignacy Paderewski declared Poland's support for self-determination of the eastern nations, in line with Woodrow Wilson 's doctrine and in an effort to secure Western support for Poland's policies in regard to Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. The Polish offensive was discontinued around the line of German trenches and fortifications from World War I, because of high likelihood of Poland's war with Weimar Germany over territorial and other issues. Half of Poland's military strength had been concentrated on

10332-495: The Poles were evacuated to Algeria . On October 1, 1940, they resumed work at Cadix , near Uzès in unoccupied southern Vichy France , under the sponsorship of Gustave Bertrand. A little over two years later, on 8 November 1942, Bertrand learned from the BBC that the Allies had landed in French North Africa (" Operation Torch "). Knowing that in such an eventuality the Germans planned to occupy Vichy France , on 9 November he evacuated Cadix . Two days later, on 11 November,

10496-558: The Polish Army. The Polish Self-Defence forces were defeated by the Soviets at a number of locations. Minsk was taken by the Russian Western Army on 11 December 1918. The Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia was declared there on 31 December. After three days of heavy fighting with the Western Rifle Division, the Self-Defence units withdrew from Vilnius on 5 January 1919. Polish–Soviet skirmishes continued in January and February. The Polish armed forces were hurriedly formed to fight in several border wars. Two major formations manned

10660-419: The Polish borders in Galicia and Volhynia and crush a Ukrainian attempt at self-determination in the disputed territories east of the Curzon Line, which contained a significant Polish minority. On 7 February 1919, Piłsudski spoke on the subject of Poland's future frontiers: "At the moment Poland is essentially without borders and all that we can gain in this regard in the west depends on the Entente  – on

10824-439: The Polish claim to Lwów and eastern Galicia was indisputable; in April 1919, the Legislative Sejm unanimously declared that all of Galicia should be annexed by Poland. In April to June 1919, the Polish Blue Army of General Józef Haller arrived from France . It consisted of over 67,000 well-equipped and highly trained soldiers. The Blue Army helped drive the Ukrainian forces east past the Zbruch River and decisively contributed to

10988-482: The Polish personnel evaded the occupying Italian security police and German Gestapo and sought to escape France via Spain . Jerzy Różycki , Jan Graliński and Piotr Smoleński had died in the January 1942 sinking, in the Mediterranean Sea , of a French passenger ship, the Lamoricière , in which they had been returning to southern France from a tour of duty in Algeria . Polish-Soviet War The Polish–Soviet War (14 February 1919 – 18 March 1921)

11152-406: The Polish-French team solved an uncommonly hard three-letter code used by the Germans to communicate with fighter and bomber squadrons and for exchange of meteorological data between aircraft and land. The code had first appeared in December 1939, but the Polish cryptologists had been too preoccupied with Enigma to give the code much attention. With the German assault on the west impending, however,

11316-418: The Pyry meeting, Dillwyn Knox , in a letter dated 1 August 1939, thanked the Poles, in Polish, "for your cooperation and patience". He enclosed little paper batons and a scarf picturing a Derby horse race  – evidently emblematic of the cryptological race that Knox had hoped to win using the batons, and whose loss he was gallantly acknowledging. On 5 September 1939, as it became clear that Poland

11480-422: The Red Army. In late autumn 1918, the Polish 4th Rifle Division fought the Red Army in Russia. The division operated under the authority of the Polish Army in France and General Józef Haller . Politically, the division fought under the Polish National Committee (KNP), recognized by the Allies as a temporary government of Poland. In January 1919, per Piłsudski's decision, the 4th Rifle Division became part of

11644-456: The Russian Civil War. Piłsudski and his allies blamed Prime Minister Ignacy Paderewski for this outcome and caused his dismissal. Paderewski, embittered, withdrew from politics. The leader of Russia's new Bolshevik government, Vladimir Lenin , aimed to regain control of the territories abandoned by Russia in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 (the treaty was annulled by Russia on 13 November 1918) and to set up Soviet governments in

11808-569: The Russian Governor-General at Warsaw. In the aftermath of World War I , the map of Central and Eastern Europe changed drastically. The German Empire 's defeat rendered obsolete Berlin 's plans for the creation of Eastern European German-dominated states ( Mitteleuropa ), which included another rendition of the Kingdom of Poland . The Russian Empire collapsed, which resulted in the Russian Revolution and

11972-697: The Russian front in February 1919: the northern, led by General Wacław Iwaszkiewicz-Rudoszański , and the southern, under General Antoni Listowski . On 18 October 1918, the Ukrainian National Council was formed in Eastern Galicia , still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire ; it was led by Yevhen Petrushevych . The establishment of a Ukrainian state there was proclaimed in November 1918; it had become known as

12136-465: The Russians and almost every Polish division had the use of a land line . Polish cryptologists enjoyed generous support under the command of Col. Tadeusz Schaetzel , chief of the Polish General Staff's Section II (Intelligence) . They worked at Warsaw 's radio station WAR , one of two Polish long-range radio transmitters at the time. The Polish cryptologists' work led, among many other things, to

12300-546: The South and South-east, Russia could easily move into the status of second-grade power. Poland, as the largest and strongest of the new states, could easily establish a sphere of influence stretching from Finland to the Caucasus ". Piłsudski's concepts appeared more progressive and democratic in comparison with the rival National Democracy 's plans, although both pursued the idea of direct incorporation and Polonization of

12464-473: The Soviet Union . He was one of the two most senior army commanders that survived the Great Purge and in post at the time of German invasion of the USSR in 1941. After the Soviet forces under Budyonny's command were routed in the battles of Kiev and Uman , he was removed from frontline command. He received the blame for many of Stalin's military strategic errors in the early part of World War II, but he

12628-560: The Soviet Union . Three of these five were executed in the Great Purge of the late 1930s, leaving only Budyonny and Voroshilov. Early in the Great Purge, Budyonny was appointed commander of the Moscow Military District , possibly because Stalin was nervous that there would be a military coup after he had decided to move against two of the most popular Bolsheviks, Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov . When Bukharin

12792-433: The Soviet authorities admitted that all eight defendants were innocent. The 'evidence' consisted of confessions forced out of them under torture. Two weeks after their execution, Budyonny sent a memo to Voroshilov disclosing that Tukhachevsky initially withdrew his confession, yet Budyonny concluded that all eight were "patented spies ... since 1931, and a few of them even earlier were worming their way into our ranks ever since

12956-718: The St. George Cross, 1st class, for capturing a senior non-commissioned officer and six men. After the February Revolution overthrew the Tsarist regime in 1917, Budyonny was elected chairman of the squadron committee and a member of the regimental committee. When the Caucasian Cavalry Division was moved to Minsk , he was elected chairman of the regimental committee and deputy chairman of the divisional committee. Returning to Platovskaya , Budyonny

13120-691: The Supreme War Council, recognized the Polish claim to eastern Galicia in March 1923. Jan Kowalewski , a polyglot and amateur cryptographer , broke the codes and ciphers of the army of the West Ukrainian People's Republic and of General Anton Denikin 's White Russian forces. In August 1919, he became chief of the Polish General Staff 's cryptography section in Warsaw. By early September, he had gathered

13284-825: The Ukrainian lands passed to the Polish Crown . Between 1772 and 1795, many of the East Slavic territories became part of the Russian Empire in the course of the Partitions of Poland–Lithuania . In 1795 (the Third Partition of Poland ), Poland lost formal independence. After the Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815, much of the territory of the Duchy of Warsaw was transferred to Russian control and became

13448-673: The West Ukrainian People's Republic and it claimed Lwów as its capital. Because of Russia-related political considerations, the Ukrainian attempts failed to generate support of the Entente powers. Key buildings in Lwów were seized by the Ukrainians on 31 October 1918. On 1 November, Polish residents of the city counterattacked and the Polish–Ukrainian War began. Lwów was under Polish control from 22 November. To Polish politicians,

13612-608: The White General Anton Denikin , Trotsky described them contempuously as "Budyonny's corps — a horde, and Budyonny — their Ataman ring leader...He is today's Stenka Razin , and where he leads his gang, there will they go: for the Reds today, tomorrow for the Whites." However, in October 1919, Budyonny pulled off a spectacular victory when, in the greatest cavalry battle of the civil war, he attacked and defeated

13776-533: The White army corps commanded by Konstantin Mamontov . On 25 October, Trotsky sent a dispatch forecasting that the White army in the south would never recover from this defeat, and hailing Budyonny as "a true warrior of the workers and peasants". When Poland declared independence, there was no agreement between its government and the Soviet authorities over where the border would be. In April 1920, Budyonny's cavalry

13940-405: The White forces elsewhere, withdrew from its positions. The Polish "Lithuanian–Belarusian Front " was established on 15 May and placed under command of General Stanisław Szeptycki . In a statute passed on 15 May, Polish Sejm called for the inclusion of the eastern borderline nations in the Polish state as autonomous entities. It was intended to make a positive impression on the participants at

14104-560: The area were not decisively defeated. The offensive lacked local support, and many Ukrainians joined the Red Army rather than Petliura’s forces. In response, the Soviet Red Army launched a successful counteroffensive starting in June 1920. By August, Soviet troops had pushed Polish forces back to Warsaw . However, at the decisive Battle of Warsaw (1920) , Polish forces achieved an unexpected victory between 12 and 25 August 1920, turning

14268-615: The army. He did not see her for seven years. After the Bolshevik revolution, she travelled with the Red Cavalry, organising food and medical supplies. In 1920–23, the couple lived with the Voroshilovs in Yekaterinoslav . They moved to Moscow in 1923. In 1924, Nadezhda Ivanovna was killed by a gunshot. Her death led to numerous stories. Mikhail Soloviev, a Soviet army officer who settled in the west after being captured early in

14432-465: The attack in an open letter to Gorky accusing Babel of "crude, deliberate and arrogant slander", which Gorky said was an "undeserved insult". William Reswick, a correspondent for the American agency AP, described a celebration backstage at an opera house around the 10th anniversary of the revolution, at which: Budyonny, the celebrated cavalry, an amateur dancer and admirer of the ballet joined us. He

14596-664: The autonomous Congress Poland (officially the Kingdom of Poland). After young Poles refused conscription to the Imperial Russian Army during the January Uprising of 1863, Tsar Alexander II stripped Congress Poland of its separate constitution, attempted to force general use of the Russian language and took away vast tracts of land from Poles. Congress Poland was incorporated more directly into imperial Russia by being divided into ten provinces, each with an appointed Russian military governor and all under complete control of

14760-480: The beginning of the revolution" . Later, as the Great Purge continued, the NKVD came to interrogate and arrest Budyonny; Budyonny's response was to arm himself with his service Nagant M1895 revolver and call Stalin to demand he have the agents removed. Stalin complied and the event was not discussed again. By December 1937, Budyonny had been allocated a large dacha with orchards, raspberry and gooseberry bushes,

14924-470: The borders of France, once again changed their procedure for enciphering message keys, rendering the Zygalski sheets "completely useless" and temporarily defeating the joint British–Polish cryptologic attacks on Enigma. According to Gustave Bertrand , "It took superhuman day-and-night effort to overcome this new difficulty: on May 20, decryption resumed." Following the capitulation of France in June 1940,

15088-422: The box. The Bureau's leading Enigma cryptanalyst Marian Rejewski commented that the cipher machine may be surmised to have been a commercial -model Enigma since at that time the military model had not yet been devised. "Hence this trivial episode was of no practical importance, though it does fix the date at which the Cipher Bureau's interest in the Enigma machine began" – manifested, initially, in

15252-507: The breaking of the Luftwaffe code took on mounting urgency. The trail of the elusive code (whose system of letters changed every 24 hours) led back to Enigma. The first clue came from the British, who had noticed that the code's letters did not change randomly. If A changed to P , then elsewhere P was replaced by A . The British made no further headway, but the Poles realized that what

15416-528: The cavalry-oriented works of Isaac Babel. Babel had originally begun covering Budyonny as a writer for a Soviet newspaper during the Polish–Soviet War. Budyonny, who was a renowned horse breeder, also created a new horse breed that is still kept in large numbers in Russia: the Budyonny horse , which is famous for its high performance in sports and endurance. Semyon Budyonny was also an amateur bayan player;

15580-494: The customs officials, who notified the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau, which took a keen interest in new developments in radio technology. Since it happened to be a Saturday afternoon, the Bureau's experts had ample time to look into the matter. They carefully opened the box and found that it did not, in fact, contain radio equipment but a cipher machine. They examined the machine minutely, then put it back into

15744-584: The day for all Enigma operators on a given network, on which the method of characteristics depended, was changed on 15 September 1938. The one exception to this was the network used by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD)—the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party —who did not make the change until 1 July 1939. Operators now chose their own indicator setting. However, the insecure procedure of sending

15908-537: The decisive advantage of their German enemy. As a result, during the Polish-Soviet War the Polish military were regularly kept informed by Russian signals stations about the movements of Russian armies and their intentions and operational orders. The Soviet staffs, according to Polish Colonel Mieczysław Ścieżyński, had not the slightest hesitation about sending any and all messages of an operational nature by means of radiotelegraphy; there were periods during

16072-561: The discovery of a large gap on the Red Army 's left flank, which enabled Poland's Marshal Józef Piłsudski to drive a war-winning wedge into that gap during the August 1920 Battle of Warsaw . The discovery of the Cipher Bureau's archives, decades after the Polish-Soviet War , has borne out Ścieżyński's assertion that ... radio intelligence ... furnished [the Polish Commander-in-Chief, Józef Piłsudski ], in

16236-409: The disputed eastern lands. However Piłsudski used his "federation" idea instrumentally. As he wrote to his close associate Leon Wasilewski in April 1919, (for now) "I want to be neither an imperialist nor a federalist. ... Taking into account that, in this God's world, an empty talk of the brotherhood of people and nations as well as the American little doctrines seem to be winning, I gladly side with

16400-464: The east, the Polish forces took Lida on 17 April, Novogrudok on 18 April, Baranavichy on 19 April and Grodno on 28 April. Piłsudski's group entered Vilnius on 19 April and captured the city after two days of fighting. The Polish action drove the Litbel government from its proclaimed capital. Upon the taking of Vilnius, in pursuit of his federation objectives, Piłsudski issued a "Proclamation to

16564-565: The east. They had been incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1772–1795 and had remained its parts, as the Northwest Territory , until World War I . After the war they were contested by the Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian , and Latvian interests. In newly independent Poland, politics were strongly influenced by Józef Piłsudski . On 11 November 1918, Piłsudski was made head of Polish armed forces by

16728-578: The effort, in the form of a few densely written-over sheets of paper and the commercial-model Enigma machine. On 15 January 1929 Major Gwido Langer , after a tour of duty as chief of staff of the 1st Legion Infantry Division , became chief of the Radio-Intelligence Office, and subsequently of the Cipher Bureau. The Bureau's deputy chief, and the chief of its German section ( BS-4 ), was Captain Maksymilian Ciężki . In 1929, while

16892-577: The emerging countries in the western parts of the former Russian Empire. The more ambitious goal was to also reach Germany, where he expected a socialist revolution to break out. By the end of summer 1919, the Soviets had taken over most of eastern and central Ukraine (formerly parts of the Russian Empire) and driven the Directorate of Ukraine from Kiev . In February 1919, they set up

17056-553: The enciphered message key twice remained in use, and it was quickly exploited. Henryk Zygalski devised a manual method that used 26 perforated sheets , and Marian Rejewski commissioned the AVA company to produce the bomba kryptologiczna (cryptologic bomb). Both the Zygalski-sheet method and each bomba worked for only a single scrambler rotor order, so six sets of Zygalski sheets and six bomby were produced. However,

17220-469: The encirclement cost the Soviet Union 1.5 million men killed or taken prisoner. This was the largest encirclement in military history. On 13 September 1941, Stalin sacked Budyonny as a scapegoat , replacing him with Semyon Timoshenko . He was never allowed to command troops in combat again. First he was put in charge of the Reserve Front (September–October 1941), then made Commander-in-Chief of

17384-574: The end of the Civil War. With Semyon Timoshenko and Kliment Voroshilov he was one of the Cavalry Army clique leaders, and a supporter of Stalin . In 1920, Soviet songwriter Dmitry Pokrass wrote the song "Budyonny's March", which was one of the first songs to become widely popular throughout the Soviet Union. The writer Isaac Babel rode with Budyonny's cavalry in Poland, and published

17548-510: The entirely legal acquisition of a single commercial-model Enigma. On 15 July 1928, the first German machine-enciphered messages were broadcast by German military radio stations. Polish monitoring stations began intercepting them, and cryptologists in the Polish Cipher Bureau's German section were instructed to try to read them. The effort was fruitless, however, and was eventually abandoned. There remained very slight evidence of

17712-446: The essence had previously been known. Ścieżyński surmises that the Soviets must likewise have intercepted Polish operational signals; but he doubts that this would have availed them much, since Polish cryptography "stood abreast of modern cryptography" and since only a small number of Polish higher headquarters were equipped with radio stations , of which there was a great shortage; and finally, Polish headquarters were more cautious than

17876-711: The expected arrival of the Red Army there, Polish Self-Defence had been organized in autumn 1918 around major concentrations of Polish population, such as Minsk , Vilnius and Grodno . They were based on the Polish Military Organisation and were recognized as part of the Polish Armed Forces by the decree of Polish Chief of State Piłsudski, issued on 7 December 1918. The German Soldatenrat of Ober Ost declared on 15 November that its authority in Vilnius would be transferred to

18040-482: The extent to which it may wish to squeeze Germany. In the east, it's a different matter; there are doors here that open and close and it depends on who forces them open and how far". Polish military forces had thus set out to expand far in the eastern direction. As Piłsudski imagined, "Closed within the boundaries of the 16th century, cut off from the Black Sea and Baltic Sea, deprived of land and mineral wealth of

18204-547: The fact that the SD network was still using the old method of the same indicator setting for all messages, allowed Rejewski to re-use his previous method of working out the wiring within these rotors. This information was essential for the production of a full set Zygalski sheets which allowed resumption of large-scale decryption in January 1940. On 1 January 1939, the Germans made military Enigma even more difficult to break by increasing

18368-444: The fact that the Soviets prioritized the war with the White forces, which was more crucial for them. The successes created an illusion of Polish military prowess and Soviet weakness. As Piłsudski put it, "I am not worried about the strength of Russia; if I wanted to, I could go now, say to Moscow, and no one would be able to resist my power ...". The offensive was restrained in late summer by Piłsudski, because he did not want to improve

18532-525: The federalists". According to Chwalba, the differences between Piłsudski's vision of Poland and that of his rival National Democratic leader Roman Dmowski were more rhetorical than real. Piłsudski had made many obfuscating statements, but never specifically stated his views regarding Poland's eastern borders or political arrangements he intended for the region. From late 1917, Polish revolutionary military units were formed in Russia. They were combined into

18696-595: The first time and the town of Babruysk was captured. By 2 September, Polish units reached the Daugava River. Barysaw was taken on 10 September and parts of Polotsk on 21 September. By mid-September, the Poles secured the region along the Daugava from the Dysna River to Daugavpils . The frontline had also extended south, cutting through Polesia and Volhynia; along the Zbruch River it reached

18860-556: The future Polish state by structuring it as the Polish-led, multinational federation." Piłsudski had wanted to break up the Russian Empire and set up the Intermarium federation of various different states: Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and other Central and East European countries that emerged from the crumbling empires after World War I. In Piłsudski's vision, Poland would replace a truncated and vastly reduced Russia as

19024-435: The great power of Eastern Europe. His plan excluded negotiations prior to military victory. He had hoped that the new Poland-led union would become a counterweight to any potential imperialist intentions of Russia or Germany. Piłsudski believed that there could be no independent Poland without a Ukraine free of Russian control, thus his main interest was in splitting Ukraine from Russia. He used military force to expand

19188-456: The ground if we had not learned from the Poles, in the nick of time, the details both of the German military ... Enigma machine, and of the operating procedures that were in use." Allied Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower , at war's end, described intelligence from Bletchley Park as having been "of priceless value to me. It has simplified my task as a commander enormously." Eisenhower expressed his thanks for this "decisive contribution to

19352-529: The growing structural and operating complexities of the plugboard -equipped Enigma. The Bureau also broke Soviet cryptography. 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

19516-473: The historian Andrzej Chwalba , however, the scenario was different in late 1919 and winter–spring 1920. The Soviets, facing decreasing revolutionary fervor in Europe and having to deal with Russia's own problems, attempted to make peace with its neighbors, including Poland. According to Aviel Roshwald , (Piłsudski) "hoped to incorporate most of the territories of the defunct Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth into

19680-487: The inhabitants of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania" on 22 April. It was sharply criticized by his rival National Democrats, who demanded direct incorporation of the former Grand Duchy lands by Poland and signaled their opposition to Piłsudski's territorial and political concepts. Piłsudski had thus proceeded to restore the historic territories of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth by military means, leaving

19844-555: The interest of security, the Allied cryptological services, before sending their messages over a teleprinter line, encrypted them using Enigma doubles . Henri Braquenié often closed messages with a " Heil Hitler !" . As late as December 1939, when Lt. Col. Gwido Langer , accompanied by Captain Braquenié , visited London and Bletchley Park, the British asked that the Polish cryptologists be turned over to them. Langer, however, took

20008-532: The latter benefited crucially from British seizure of German Enigma-equipped naval vessels, the breaking of German naval signals ultimately relied on techniques that had been pioneered by the Polish Cipher Bureau. Had Britain capitulated to Hitler, the United States would have been deprived of an essential forward base for its subsequent involvement in the European and North African theaters. A week after

20172-572: The locating and traffic analysis of spy and fifth column transmitters operating in Poland. In late 1927 or early 1928, there arrived at the Warsaw Customs Office from Germany a package that, according to the accompanying declaration, was supposed to contain radio equipment. The German firm's representative strenuously demanded that the package be returned to Germany even before going through customs, as it had been shipped with other equipment by mistake. His insistent demands alerted

20336-416: The necessary political determinations for later. On 25 April, Lenin ordered the Western Front commander to reclaim Vilnius as soon as possible. The Red Army formations that attacked the Polish forces were defeated by Edward Rydz-Śmigły 's units between 30 April and 7 May. While the Poles extended their holdings further, the Red Army, unable to accomplish its objectives and facing intensified combat with

20500-559: The number of plugboard connections from between five and eight, to between seven and ten. When World War II broke out on 1 September 1939, Leśniak and his colleagues had been working intensively for two or three years to establish the German order of battle and had succeeded in working out nearly 95 percent of it. The German attack on Poland came as no surprise to the Polish General Staff . The results that had been obtained by Polish intelligence , according to Leśniak, "absolutely exceeded what would normally have been possible". Until 1937

20664-535: The numbers of Enigma messages solved, to Enigma intercepts. The ratio came to 75 percent. "Nor", Marian Rejewski has commented, "were those 75 percent ... the limit of our possibilities. With slightly augmented personnel, we might have attained about 90 percent ... read. But a certain amount of cipher material ... due to faulty transmission or ... reception, or to various other causes, always remains unread". Information obtained from Enigma decryption seems to have been directed from B.S.-4 principally to

20828-604: The outcome of the war. The West Ukrainian People's Republic was defeated by mid-July and eastern Galicia had come under Polish administration. The destruction of the West Ukrainian Republic confirmed the belief held by many Ukrainians that Poland was the main enemy of their nation. From January 1919 fighting also took place in Volhynia, where the Poles faced the forces of the Ukrainian People's Republic led by Symon Petliura . The Polish offensive resulted in

20992-657: The outskirts of Lida ; on 4 March, Piłsudski ordered further movement to the east stopped. The Soviet leadership had become preoccupied with the issue of providing military assistance to the Hungarian Soviet Republic and with the Siberian offensive of the White Army , led by Alexander Kolchak . By July 1919 Polish armies eliminated the West Ukrainian People's Republic. Secretly preparing an assault on Soviet-held Vilnius, in early April Piłsudski

21156-421: The plugboard connections. This involved compiling a card catalog of certain features of the set of indicator settings. The Germans increased the difficulty of decrypting Enigma messages by decreasing the interval between changes in the order of the rotors from quarterly, initially, to monthly in February 1936, then daily in October of that year, when they also increased the number of plugboard leads from six to

21320-559: The position that the Polish team must remain where the Polish Armed Forces were being formed – on French soil. The mathematicians might actually have reached Britain much earlier – and much more comfortably – than they eventually did; but in September 1939, when they went to the British embassy in Bucharest , Romania, they were brushed off by a preoccupied British diplomat. In January 1940,

21484-514: The proletariat and agitated for a worldwide communist community. They intended to link the revolution in Russia with a communist Revolutions and interventions in Hungary (1918–1920) they had hoped for and to assist other communist movements in Europe. To be able to provide direct physical support to revolutionaries in the West, the Red Army would have to cross the territory of Romania. According to

21648-474: The sergeant major was kicked by a horse. Budyonny was stripped of his St. George Cross, though he could have faced a court martial and death. Budyonny would go on to be awarded the St. George Cross, 4th class, a second time, during the Battle of Van . He received the St. George Cross, 3rd class, fighting the Turks near Mendelij, on the way to Baghdad . He then received the St. George Cross, 2nd class, for operating behind Turkish lines for 22 days. He received

21812-479: The strategic situation of the advancing Whites. Budionny Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonny (Russian: Семён Миха́йлович Будённый , romanized : Semyon Mikháylovich Budyonnyy , IPA: [sʲɪˈmʲɵn mʲɪˈxajləvʲɪdʑ bʊˈdʲɵnːɨj] ; 25 April [ O.S. 13 April] 1883 – 26 October 1973) was a Soviet cavalryman, military commander during the Russian Civil War , Polish-Soviet War and World War II , and politician, who

21976-447: The students, Marian Rejewski , would discover that the entire course had been taught from French General Marcel Givièrge's book, Cours de cryptographie (Course of Cryptography), published in 1925. In September 1932, Maksymilian Ciężki hired three young graduates of the Poznań course to be Bureau staff members: Marian Rejewski , Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski . In 1926, the German Navy adopted, as its top cryptographic device,

22140-427: The tide of the war. This battle, often referred to as the "Miracle on the Vistula," is considered one of the most significant military triumphs in Polish history. The war ended with a ceasefire on 18 October 1920, and peace negotiations led to the Peace of Riga , signed on 18 March 1921. The treaty divided disputed territories between Poland and Soviet Russia. Poland’s eastern border was established about 200 km east of

22304-489: The treaty and proceeded to recover many of the former territories of the Russian Empire. However, preoccupied with the civil war, it did not have the resources to react swiftly to the national rebellions. In November 1918, Poland became a sovereign state . Among the several border wars fought by the Second Polish Republic was the successful Greater Poland uprising (1918–1919) against Weimar Germany . The historic Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth included vast territories in

22468-427: The troops in the North Caucasus Direction (April–May, 1942), Commander of the North Caucasus Front (May–August, 1942) - but was removed from this post as the Germans approached, and appointed Cavalry Inspector of the Red Army (from 1943), as well as various honorific posts. Despite his bravery as a cavalry commander, the view of his fellow officers was that Budyonny was demonstrably incompetent at commanding an army in

22632-441: The two Russian commanders. The intercepts even included an order from Trotsky to the revolutionary council of war of the Western Front, confirming Tukhachevsky's operational orders, thus giving them the authority of the supreme chief of the Soviet armed forces. An entire operational order from Tukhachevsky to Budionny was intercepted on 19 August and read on 20 August, stating the tasks of all of Tukhachevsky's armies, of which only

22796-453: The two states. It was one of the series of notes exchanged by the two governments in 1918 and 1919. In February, Polish troops marched east to face the Soviets; the new Polish Sejm declared the need to liberate "the northeast provinces of Poland with their capital in Wilno [Vilnius]". After the German World War I troops had been evacuated from the region, the Battle of Bereza Kartuska , a Polish–Soviet skirmish, took place. It occurred during

22960-451: The war when, for purposes of operational communications and for purposes of command by higher staffs, no other means of communication whatever were used, messages being transmitted either entirely "in clear" ( plaintext ) or encrypted by means of such an incredibly uncomplicated system that for our trained specialists reading the messages was child's play. The same held for the chitchat of personnel at radiotelegraphic stations, where discipline

23124-401: The warfare that took place in late April 1920 was an escalation of the fighting that had begun a year and a half earlier. The war's main territories of contention lie in what is now Ukraine and Belarus . Until the mid-13th century, they formed part of the medieval state of Kievan Rus' . After a period of internal wars and the 1240 Mongol invasion , the lands became objects of expansion for

23288-420: The years 1919–1920 ... the most complete and... current intelligence on all aspects of the functioning of the Red Army , especially of units operating on the anti-Polish front, that it was radio intelligence that to a large degree determined the course of all ... military operations conducted by Poland in 1920 – from the January fighting at Ovruch , through the March operation against Mozyr and Kiev ,

23452-408: Was "a very aristocratic family of troops, commanded by princes, barons, and counts." Despite Trotsky's objections, the 1st Socialist Cavalry Regiment was formed in Tsaritsyn in October 1918, commanded by Boris Dumenko , with Budyonny as deputy commander. Budyonny joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1919. During the summer of 1919, while the Red Cavalry were in action against

23616-448: Was a close political ally of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin . Born to a poor peasant family from the Don Cossack region in southern Russia, Budyonny was drafted into the Imperial Russian Army in 1903. He served with distinction in a dragoon regiment during the First World War , earning all four classes of the Order of St. George . When the Russian Civil War broke out Budyonny founded the Red Cavalry , which played an important role in

23780-404: Was able to shift some of the forces used in Ukraine to the northern front. The idea was to create a fait accompli and to prevent the Western powers from granting the territories claimed by Poland to White Russia (the Whites were expected to prevail in the Russian Civil War). A new Polish offensive started on 16 April. Five thousand soldiers, led by Piłsudski, headed for Vilnius. Advancing to

23944-423: Was always looking for potential traitors among the military and civilian workers at the General Staff building. Strolling agents, even if lacking access to the Staff building, could observe personnel entering and leaving, and photograph them with concealed miniature cameras. Annual Abwehr intelligence assignments for German agents in Warsaw placed a priority on securing informants at the Polish General Staff. It

24108-530: Was assigned to driving the Polish army out of Ukraine. On 5 June, he took part in recapturing Kiev , and over the next few days successfully drove the Poles westward. At the start of the war with Poland, he was assigned to the southern front, which Stalin commanded. On 15 August, he asked the commander-in-chief of Soviet forces in Poland, Mikhail Tukhachevsky , for authority to swing north and assist in capturing Warsaw. With Stalin's agreement, he attempted to capture Lviv first. Unsuccessful, he eventually diverted to

24272-416: Was changed to one with different interconnections (known as Umkehrwalze-B ). Rejewski worked out the wiring in the new reflector, but the catalogue of characteristics had to be compiled anew, again using Rejewski's " cyclometer ", which had been built to his specifications by the AVA Radio Company. In January 1938, Colonel Stefan Mayer directed that statistics be compiled for a two-week period, comparing

24436-473: Was charged with both cryptography – the generation, and supervision of the use, of ciphers and codes – and cryptology – the study of ciphers and codes, particularly for the purpose of breaking them. Between 1932 and 1936, the Cipher Bureau took on additional responsibilities, including radio communications between military intelligence posts in Poland and abroad, as well as radio counterintelligence – mobile direction-finding and intercept stations for

24600-517: Was considered a courageous and colourful cavalry officer, but displayed disdain for the tools of modern warfare, particularly tanks, which he, along with Grigory Kulik , saw as "incapable of ever replacing cavalry". This brought him into direct conflict with Tukhachevsky, who was in charge of weapons developed, and foresaw the imminence of mechanized warfare. Even after Tukhachevsky's arrest, the Red Army never stopped developing large scale mechanized corps, and each front had numerous such corps attached as

24764-415: Was disastrously lax. In the crucial month of August 1920 alone, Polish cryptologists decrypted 410 signals: etc. The intercepts were as a rule decrypted the same day, or at latest the next day, and were immediately sent to the Polish General Staff 's Section II (Intelligence) and operational section. The more important signals were read in their entirety by the Chief of the General Staff, and even by

24928-577: Was elected deputy chairman of the Stanitsa Soviet of Workers', Peasants', Cossacks' and Soldiers' Deputies on 12 January 1918. On 18 February, he was elected to be a member of the Salsk District Presidium and head of the District Land Department. On the night of 23 February, Budyonny organized a force of 24 men to retake Platovskaya from the white guards , but was soon joined by a large number of new recruits. By morning, they had freed 400 inhabitants and killed 350 White Russian soldiers. His force now consisted of 520 men, from whom, on 27 February, he formed what

25092-481: Was far greater on the British side than on the French side. Finally, in France (by contrast with the work in Poland) we ourselves not only sought for the daily keys, but after finding the key also read the messages. ... One can only be surprised that the Poles had as many as 17 percent of the keys to their credit. The inter-Allied cryptologic collaboration prevented duplication of effort and facilitated discoveries. Before fighting had started in Norway in April 1940,

25256-454: Was fought primarily between the Second Polish Republic and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic , following World War I and the Russian Revolution , over territories previously controlled by the Russian Empire and the Habsburg monarchy . After the collapse of the Central Powers and the Armistice of 11 November 1918 , Vladimir Lenin 's Soviet Russia annulled the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and moved forces westward to reclaim

25420-428: Was hostile to the Polish authorities and actively supported the Bolsheviks. Also in Podolia and near the eastern reaches of Galicia, the Polish armies kept slowly advancing to the east until December. They crossed the Zbruch River and displaced Soviet forces from a number of localities. The Polish forces took Minsk on 8 August. The Berezina River was reached on 18 August. On 28 August, tanks were deployed for

25584-442: Was in high spirits. After helping himself to some vodka, he offered to outdance any professional in the Kamarinskaya . Ballerina Abramova took up the challenge. Thereupon Budyonny called over a harmonic player and went into a spin, cutting a Cossack caper with the ease and grace of a youngster. From 1921 to 1923, Budyonny was deputy commander of the North Caucasian Military District . In 1923, Budyonny arrived in Chechnya with

25748-474: Was in the Kabaty Woods, at Pyry, on 25 and 26 July 1939, with war looming, that, on instructions from the Polish General Staff, the Cipher Bureau's chiefs, Lt. Col. Gwido Langer and Major Maksymilian Ciężki , the three civilian mathematician-cryptologists, and Col. Stefan Mayer , chief of intelligence , revealed Poland's achievements to cryptanalytical representatives of France and Britain, explaining how they had broken Enigma. They undertook to give each country

25912-407: Was later recognised as the first 120-strong squadron of red cavalry. Eventually he was elected battalion commander. Budyonny met Stalin and Voroshilov in July 1918. Both supported the idea of creating a cavalry corps to fight on the Bolshevik side in the Russian Civil War ; but when Leon Trotsky , the People's Commissar for War, visited south Russia soon afterward, he told Budyonny that cavalry

26076-460: Was later to recount – "the first question that ... Dillwyn Knox asked was: 'What are the connections in the entry drum? ' " Knox was mortified to learn how simple the answer was. The Poles' gift, to their western Allies, of Enigma decryption, five weeks before the outbreak of World War II, came not a moment too soon. Former Bletchley Park mathematician-cryptologist Gordon Welchman later wrote: "Ultra would never have gotten off

26240-416: Was manifesting was Enigma's exclusivity principle that they had discovered in 1932. The Germans' carelessness meant that now the Poles, having after midnight solved Enigma's daily setting, could with no further effort also read the Luftwaffe signals. The Germans, just before opening their 10 May 1940 offensive in the west that would trample Belgium , Luxembourg and the Netherlands in order to reach

26404-399: Was one of the judges at the trial of Tukhachevsky and seven other Red Army commanders, whose execution was the start of a massive purge of the Red Army officer corps. At the trial, he provided testimony that Tukhachevsky's efforts to create an independent tank corps was so inferior to horse cavalry and so illogical that it amounted to deliberate " wrecking ". Half a century after the trial,

26568-410: Was retained in the Soviet high command. In 1953 he resumed his post of inspector of the cavalry. Budyonny was a staunch proponent of horse cavalry . During the Great Purge, he testified against Mikhail Tukhachevsky 's efforts to create an independent tank corps , claiming that it was so inferior to cavalry and illogical that it amounted to " wrecking " (sabotage). After being told of the importance of

26732-413: Was trying to defend himself, during a plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, on 26 February 1937, Budyonny barracked him, calling him a Jesuit . On 24 May 1937, Budyonny was copied into a resolution proposing to arrest Marshal Tukhachevsky, and the high ranking party official Janis Rudzutaks . He wrote on it: "It's necessary to finish off this scum." On 11 June, he

26896-493: Was unlikely to halt the ongoing German invasion, BS-4 received orders to destroy part of its files and evacuate essential personnel. During the German Invasion of Poland in September 1939, key Cipher Bureau personnel were evacuated southeast and – after the Soviets invaded eastern Poland on 17 September – into Romania, on the way destroying their cryptological equipment and documentation. Eventually, crossing Yugoslavia and still-neutral Italy, they reached France. Some personnel of

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