was analysed and reported. Although a leading British cryptographer, Dilly Knox (a veteran of World War I and the cryptanalytical activities of the Royal Navy's Room 40), worked on decipherment he had only the messages he generated himself to practice with. After Germany supplied modified commercial machines to the Nationalist side in the Spanish Civil War, and with the Italian Navy (who were also aiding the Nationalists) using a version of the commercial Enigma that did not have a plugboard, Britain could intercept the radio broadcast messages. In April 1937 Knox made his first decryption of an Enigma encryption using a technique that he called buttoning up to discover the rotor wirings and another that he called rodding to solve messages. This relied heavily on cribs and on a crossword-solver's expertise in Italian, as it yielded a limited number of spaced-out letters at a time. Britain had no ability to read the messages broadcast by Germany, which used the military Enigma machine. Polish breakthroughs In the 1920s the German military began using a 3-rotor Enigma, whose security was increased in 1930 by the addition of a plugboard. The Polish Cipher Bureau sought to break it due to the threat that Poland faced from Germany, but its early attempts did not succeed. Near the beginning of 1929, the Polish Cipher Bureau realized that mathematicians may make good codebreakers; the bureau invited math students at Poznań University to take a class on cryptology. After the class, the Bureau recruited some students to work part-time at a Bureau branch set up in Poznań for the students. The branch operated for some time. On 1 September 1932, 27-year-old Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski and two fellow Poznań University mathematics graduates, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki, joined the Bureau full-time and moved to Warsaw. Their first task was to reconstruct a four-letter German naval cipher. Near the end of 1932 Rejewski was asked to work a couple of hours a day on breaking the Enigma. Rejewski's characteristics method Marian Rejewski quickly spotted the Germans' major procedural weaknesses of specifying a single indicator setting (Grundstellung) for all messages on a network for a day, and repeating the operator's chosen message key in the enciphered 6-letter indicator. Those procedural mistakes allowed Rejewski to decipher the message keys without knowing any of the machine's wirings. In the above example of DQYQQT being the enciphered indicator, it is known that