[poconopundit]

Nice job, RetainMike -- and it inspired some fascinating comments following your lead.

Hey rlmorel, I picked up that 1985 book at UGA Library after seeing the Midway 2019 film.

The book's name is And I Was There by Edwin Layton, who was the intelligence officer advising Nimitz.

I found the first 100 pages plus the chapter on Midway well-worth reading.  Clearly the book provided much background material for the film.

The book explains the business of breaking codes, cryptography.  It mostly covered the US side, but also gave some perspective on Japanese coding methods.  Some interesting tidbits:

• Layton and Rochefort became friends when they were both sent to Japan before the war to learn Japanese.  At that time, Rochefort was already a top cryptographer, a fact he kept hidden from Layton, who was a general line officer.
  
  
• Layton's Japanese was good enough to actually have had some one-on-one discussions with Admiral Yamamoto (as the movie showed).
  
  
• U.S. military cryptography was a political mess.  Much time in the book is spent discussing this.  Basically, key intelligence was kept from the folks at the Pacific command as Washington saying "we'll tell you what you need to know" -- even as Langford, one of the USA's top cryptography leaders was on the Pearl staff.
  
  
• A woman "Miss Aggie" was one of the foremost code breakers and she trained many other people in her techniques.
  
  
• There were periods when the Japanese totally switched their coding system and the Americans would require months to learn that new system.  Fortunately we were successfully reading their code in the months leading up to the Battle of Midway.  But just before the actual Battle, the Japanese made a switch and we were ignorant for some time afterward.

One other comment I'll make.  Somebody remarked that it would "take generations" for a hated enemy like the Japanese to be trusted again.

That's not my experience.  My Dad was a gunner's mate aboard an LST at the Battle of Okinawa -- a battle where we lost 5,000 American sailors, due in part to kamikaze attacks.

But I later was stationed in Sasebo, Japan and was always treated with respect as an American sailor.  My wife is from that city and when we came back to live in the States my Dad, out of habit, would use the "Jap" word from time to time, but he grew to love my wife and there was a meeting of the minds and mutual respect.

We were married at my hometown on Cape Cod, but we also later held a second wedding reception for the Japanese side of the family at the U.S. Naval Base in Sasebo where I wore my uniform. 

Near the end of the ceremony my wife and I received the traditional well-wishing send-off, a big both-arms-raised Banzai (which means "May you live a 1,000 years"). 

And one of most energetic of those Banzais was given by an older Japanese man who had only one arm.

[rlmorel]

Good post.

I am going to check that book out if I can find it. As you said, at that time, cryptography was a fetid backwater of the military, I would guess nobody went into it if they had any choice in the matter.

In the movie, I was mistaking the dinner the American officers had with the Japanese (the film said 1937) for a later meeting with the officers of the USS Astoria in 1939 that had bought the ashes of Japan’s Ambassador (Hirosi Saito) back to Japan as a sign of respect. I expect the similarity between the two dinners was that the Japanese naval officers were generally openly hostile and dismissive of their American counterparts at both of them.

Love your story-I lived in Japan (Yokosuka) for a few years as a dependent, and I liked the Japanese. I was old enough (8-11) to know the things they had done in WWII, but it didn’t resonate with me enough to shake my amicable feelings.

However, we spent a few years in the Philippines (Subic Bay) after that, and the attitude there towards the Japanese was quite hostile. When I was in the Scouts, we did an annual hike along the route of the Bataan Death March, and while I was only able to ride in the support truck due to a medical issue, I saw all those white markers. That compelled me to read several books detailing both the Bataan Death March and the overall experience of our POW’s held by Japan, and my attitude did change somewhat after that. What they did to our men and the populations of people they occupied was appalling, and it left a mark on me for many years. I wonder if I had been a bit young to read that book in its entirety, and the descriptions in it of the conduct of the Japanese was difficult to reconcile with the firsthand encounters I had of them.

It reminded me of the cognitive dissonance that Judge Daniel Haywood (one of the three tribunal judges at the Nuremberg Trials played by Spencer Tracy in “Judgement at Nuremberg”) felt when he went into the court rooms, and saw the horrible shocking film footage from the Nazi death camps, then went out to a beer hall for dinner and saw these jovial Germans laughing and drinking. He couldn’t reconcile them with what he saw.

It was much the same for me.

I once knew a man who was assigned to be the US Army Provost Marshal for the Hiroshima district when the war ended, but after they dropped the bomb there, they thought he would be more useful in Korea. His job there was to get the Japanese military personnel out of Korea as quickly as possible before they were massacred by the Koreans who had lived under their abuse. When I visited him once and the topic shifted to Japan, his attitude changed, he clammed up, and then left the room. I asked a lifelong friend of his if he was okay, and he said that even to that day (back in the Nineties) he had a burning dislike of the Japanese as a result of what he saw firsthand in Korea back in 1945.

Love your story about your wife and marriage...I do respect the Japanese in many ways, and am glad we are an ally and not a foe. I hope it doesn’t come to it that we need to fight with them against China, but I feel more pessimistic about that as time goes on.

[FreedomPoster]

Off topic on Midway, but regarding codes, this is a really interesting book with much source material reproduced inside.

Magic: The Untold Story of U.S. Intelligence and the Evacuation of Japanese Residents from the West Coast During WW II

[Retain Mike]

I didn't have that experience with the Japanese either. There is a light year of difference between the Japs and the Japanese of later generations and even those of that generation who rebuilt Japan.

I remember how thankful we were to return to Yokosuka and have the Japanese yard workers swarm over our ship. Many of those who helped build the Imperial Japanese Navy that attacked Pearl Harbor were in charge of the shops that did exquisite work repairing our ship before we headed to Vietnam again. The piers, cranes, drydocks, and shops were never bombed, because the U.S. Navy had determined to homeport the 7th Fleet there.

[Retain Mike]

“And I Was There” was a references I forgot to list. Another great book to read is “The Codebreakers” by David Kahn. I decided I had to have it after visiting the NSA museum in DC. A copy was on exhibit by itself. I paid $40 for my copy and then found another at St. Vincent DePaul for $3 to give to my son.

[Nailbiter]

re: your comment about reading Japanese code.

found book “code girls” by Liza Mundy to be interesting.

Similar to Bletchley code breakers.

Will look for Layton book to add for knowledge, thanks for the post

[Grampa Dave]

Thanks for sharing your personal story.