Cadix - History

History

Two days after the June 22, 1940, Franco-German armistice, Major Gustave Bertrand had flown PC Bruno's essential personnel to Algeria. In September 1940 he secretly returned them to southern (Vichy) France (France's unoccupied "Free Zone"), to Uzès on the Mediterranean coast. At a new intelligence center codenamed "Cadix," housed at the Château des Fouzes near Uzès, they would work at breaking ciphers for over two years until November 9, 1942. Cadix's personnel comprised 15 Poles, nine Frenchmen and seven Spaniards (the latter worked on Italian and fascist Spanish ciphers).

In July 1941, Polish cryptologists Marian Rejewski and Henryk Zygalski were asked to test the security of the Polish Lacida (or LCD) rotor cipher machine. The device had evidently never been subjected to rigorous testing before being approved for production and wartime use. To the consternation of the Cipher Bureau's chiefs, the two mathematicians made short work of the Polish machine cipher.

Cadix had a branch office in Algeria, directed by Maksymilian Ciężki, which periodically exchanged staff with Uzès. In one of these exchanges, one of the Cipher Bureau's three mathematician-cryptologists, Jerzy Różycki, died when, on January 9, 1942, the passenger ship Lamoricière on which he was sailing to France mysteriously sank. Also lost were Piotr Smoleński and Jan Graliński of the prewar Cipher Bureau's Russian section, and a French officer accompanying the three Poles, Captain François Lane.

On November 9, 1942, a day after the Allied Operation Torch landings in North Africa, Major Bertrand evacuated Cadix—just two days before southern France was occupied by the Germans on November 11.

Cryptologists Rejewski and Zygalski eventually crossed the Pyrenees into Spain, where they were arrested and imprisoned. Released after Red Cross intercessions, they finally made it to Britain. In London they continued contributing, to war's end, to the effort against German (SS "hand") ciphers.

Cadix's Polish military chiefs, Gwido Langer and Maksymilian Ciężki were captured by the Germans as they tried to cross from France into Spain on the night of March 10-11, 1943. Captured with them were three other Poles, Antoni Palluth, Edward Fokczyński and Kazimierz Gaca. Langer and Ciężki became prisoners of war. The other three men were sent as slave labor to Germany, where Palluth and Fokczyński perished. All five men protected the secret of Allied Enigma decryption.