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Posted on 12/15/2004 10:41:21 PM PST by SAMWolf
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 are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
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The contention that broken Japanese codes could have alerted the United States won't go away. But is there a simpler explanation than a failure of intelligence? More than 60 years later, Americans still wonder how Japan's surprise attack on the Pacific Fleet could have succeeded. The joint congressional committee that investigated the attack in 1945 and 1946 put the question sharply: "Why with some of the finest intelligence available in our history, with the almost certain knowledge that war was at hand, with plans that contemplated the precise type of attack that was executed by Japan on the morning of December 7--Why was it possible for a Pearl Harbor to occur?"  Admiral Husband Kimmel - Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet, The best intelligence came from breaking Japanese codes. Solving the secret messages of a hostile power is like putting a mirror behind the cards a player is holding, like eavesdropping on the huddles of a football team. It is nearly always the best form of intelligence. It is faster and more trustworthy than spies, who have to write up and transmit their reports and who are always suspected of setting up or falling for a deception. It sees farther into the future than aerial reconnaissance, which detects only what is present. It is broader in scope than the interrogations of prisoners, who know little more than what they have experienced. And it is usually cheaper and less obtrusive, hence more secret, than all of these. But it has a serious double-barreled failing: It cannot provide information that a nation has not put onto the airwaves, and its apparent omniscience and its immediacy seduce its recipients into thinking they are getting all the other nation's secrets. This is one of the lessons of Pearl Harbor. American code-breakers performed prodigies, giving remarkable insight into Japanese thinking. But that insight was not total, and so even the extraordinary U.S. cryptanalysis could not warn policymakers of Japan's secret intentions. The nations of the world learned the value of code-breaking during World War I. Radio--used extensively in that conflict for the first time--gave them their opportunity. Messages were easily intercepted, so armies and navies sheathed them in codes and ciphers. But linguists and mathematicians on both sides learned to crack them, and the information thereby obtained provided victory after victory to generals, admirals and political leaders. Cryptanalysis substantially helped France to block the supreme German offensive in 1918, Germany to defeat Russia, Britain to bring the United States into the war, the United States to convict a German spy. When hostilities ended, the powers refounded these agencies to retain in peace the benefits won in war.  Lt. Gen. Walter C. Short - Commander of US Army defenses in Hawaii The United States was one of these nations, and its main target was Japan. Before World War I, Japan had defeated China and then Russia to become mistress of the western Pacific. Now it was building a fleet to match that of the United States and, under a League of Nations mandate, had occupied islands that enabled it to menace the ocean routes to the Philippines. It was generally felt that Japan constituted the greatest danger to the United States. The State and War departments jointly set up the Cipher Bureau in 1919 under the inspiring leadership of Herbert O. Yardley, a 30-year-old who had created and run a code-breaking unit for military intelligence in World War I. The Cipher Bureau scored the first great achievement of American code-breaking while working out of a narrow brownstone at 141 East 37th Street in Manhattan. Despite only a rudimentary knowledge of Japanese, Yardley and his associates cracked Japanese diplomatic codes. A bewhiskered missionary then turned the messages into English. Sent to the State Department, the translated messages informed American negotiators at the Washington naval disarmament conference of 1921-22 about Japan's fallback position on capital ships. Armed with this knowledge, the negotiators pushed Japan to promise to build such ships in a U.S.Japan tonnage ratio not of 10-to-7, as Japan had wanted, but to 10-to-6--the equivalent of three fewer battleships. Although the Navy was more concerned about Japan than was any other element of government, it had no code-breaking unit. Then, early in 1923, naval intelligence came upon a 1918 Japanese naval code book while rifling the steamer trunk of a Japanese naval officer visiting New York. This impelled the Navy to create a code-breaking agency--called, for security reasons, the Research Desk--within the Division of Naval Communications. Its first head was Laurance F. Safford, a lieutenant with a flair for mechanics and mathematics. He set up shop with four civilians in Room 1621 of the Main Navy Department, a temporary wooden building on Constitution Avenue near the Lincoln Memorial. One of the first things he did was to establish radio intercept stations in the Pacific, to furnish more material for code-breaking than was obtainable through haphazard monitoring by ships and the naval radio station in Shaghai.  Herbert O. Yardley In August Safford took one of his most important strides forward when he hired 32-year-old Agnes Meyer Driscoll as a cryptanalyst. A onetime mathematics teacher and former employee of the Code and Signal Section, under which the Research Desk came, she soon proved to be an outstanding code-breaker. Among her first assignments was to work on the photographed code from the rifled steamer trunk. The Research Desk had found that not only was the "plaintext," or the original message, encoded; its code groups themselves were enciphered. "Miss Aggie," as Driscoll was called, had to remove that encipherment. Incessantly turning the pages of the reproduced code book with the rubber tip of her eraser, she completed that job after two or three years of work. A husband-and-wife team of translators turned the Japanese into English. By then, in 1926, Safford had returned to sea. He was succeeded by Lieutenant Joseph J. Rochefort, one of the first American naval officers to have studied Japanese in Japan. He was a "mustang"--a former enlisted man who had earned a commission. This had made him tough and independent in a world dominated by Annapolis graduates; he neutralized his caustic speech with a conciliatory smile. Rochefort became one of the very few Americans with aptitude both in the Japanese language and in code-breaking. A subordinate, who most likely helped to crack Japanese subsidiary code, remembered: "Hours went by without any of us saying a word, just sitting in front of piles of indexed sheets on which a mumbo jumbo of figures or letters was displayed in chaotic disorder....[We] gave ourselves to cryptography with the same ascetic devotion with which young men enter a monastery."  The hardest part of breaking a code is the beginning. Rochefort explained it in colorful terms: "It first off involved what I call the staring process. You look at all of these messages that you have, you line them up in various ways, you write them one below the other, and you'd write them in various forms and you'd stare at them. Pretty soon you'd notice a pattern; you'd notice a definite pattern between these messages. This was the first clue....You notice a pattern that when you follow through, you say this means so-and-so; you'd run that through, and it doesn't work out. Then you'd proceed on some other effort and eventually, if you're lucky and the other fellow makes mistakes, which he invariably will, then you come up with a solution that will stand up under test, and this gives your first lead-in." Rochefort said he felt good while doing this work "because you have defied these people who have attempted to use a system they thought was secure, that is, it was unreadable. It was always somewhat of a pleasure to defeat them or challenge them." But the work took its toll. While engaged in the actual cryptanalysis, he said, he generally felt frustrated. The tension was so great that after work he had to lie down for two or three hours before he could eat anything; he developed ulcers anyway, and this, together with the fact that duty in communications intelligence hurt a man's career, drove him to get out of the work when his tour at the Research Desk ended in 1927.  Agnes Meyer Driscoll The translation of the photographed Code No. 1 originally had been put together in ten "volumes" with metal-strip Acco office binders. When Safford returned from sea duty to the Research Desk in June 1929, he had the material retyped in four copies on huge 12-by-18-inch forms and bound in two volumes in red buckram McBee binders, far more convenient to use. This gave the code its more common name, the Red Code. On December 1, 1930, the Japanese replaced it with a new code. But Driscoll by then had learned the ships, communications patterns, and frequently used phrases of the Japanese fleet, and she solved its transposition encipherment and then reconstructed the entire 85,000-group, two-part code. It was later called, from the color of its binding, the Blue Code. Her work was a remarkable feat of cryptanalysis, and for years it gave the U.S. Navy insight into Japanese forces and tactics.
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Two months later, Rowlett and his colleagues were excitedly combing through the secret files of Yardley's defunct organization. This most clandestine and most valuable form of intelligence thrilled them. They went on to study basic cryptography and the solution of machine ciphers, clearly the wave of the future. In 1932, their training completed at last, they attacked Japanese diplomatic cryptographic systems, working on messages provided by the Army's new intercept service.
They first cracked a simple code, the LA. That code did little more than replace the syllables of the plaintext with pairs of code letters listed in a code book. In fact, the system resembled simple cryptograms found in Sunday newspapers. First the Japanese words of the message were transliterated into romanized letters (so that Western telegraphic systems could be used in sending them). This was done by using the katakana (literally, "borrowed words"), a syllabary that expresses Japanese words phonetically. The words were then encoded by looking up each syllable.
As difficult as machine systems are, however, study of the cryptograms did yield clues. Vowels, for instance, had a relatively higher frequency than consonants. It appeared that the machine divided the romanized alphabet (used in the katakana transliteration) into two subsets, the six vowels and the twenty consonants. Working with one of the less garbled intercepts, and perhaps with some help from the Navy's solution of another Japanese cipher machine, Rowlett and Solomon Kullback, one of the other original junior cryptanalysts, struck gold one day: Among their tentative recoveries of plaintext were three letters followed by an unknown and then another letter: oyobi. They knew then that they had cracked the system, because oyobi is romanized Japanese for "and." They named this machine system Red (not related to the Red Code).
By 1937, for the first time in American history, solutions of foreign messages began going to the White House, probably to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Gentlemen were once again reading someone else's mail. It revealed, for instance, advance information about Italy's possible adherence to the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact. This was in March 1937, six months before American diplomats began reporting on it. Later it provided part of the text of the treaty.
These half-dozen cryptanalysts were providing the United States with its best secret intelligence on Japan as relations with that nation, which was persisting in its aggression against China, deteriorated. The cryptanalysts plunged into their work in Rooms 3416 and 3418 in the Munitions Building. Room 3418, about 25 feet square with a steel door secured by a combination lock and with barred windows, was known as the vault. As additional cryptanalysts were assigned to the Purple problem, the group moved into larger quarters, finally occupying about eight rooms.
Reconstructing a cipher system is like solving an immensely complicated scientific problem, with this difference: Nature does not deliberately conceal her secrets. The researchers concoct hypotheses and test them. If x stands for e, will the other cipher-to-plain equivalents that it entails make sense? Or will they merely yield gibberish, or lead to a self-contradiction? Can one recovered alphabet be linked with another? There is no clear way to the answer, as there is in the algebra problems posed in math classes. Particularly in the early stages of a difficult cryptanalysis, the work is one of the most excruciating, agonizing, tantalizing, compelling mental processes known to humans--and, when successful, one of the most satisfying.
Despite Rosen's remarkable advance, the totality of Purple still resisted the Americans. Friedman, who had been supervising the work rather loosely, was asked by his bosses--all extremely supportive, financially as well as psychologically--to participate personally. His genius helped considerably. The Navy also lent a hand temporarily, organizing its files the same way as the Army's to facilitate cooperation. After about four months, however, the Navy returned to its main effort, Japanese naval codes. The SIS pushed ahead. Within Rowlett's group, teamwork was extremely close; determination was pervasive. No one complained that a task was too menial. Rowlett was confident from the start that they would reconstruct the Purple mechanism the way he and others had reconstructed the Red Code. He never got depressed, even though months went by without a solution. As they sought a breakthrough, the cryptanalysts spent much of their time trying to match possible plaintext--guesses, often educated, as to the cipher-text, or encoded language and numbers. Early in the effort, for example, many identical Japanese telegrams were sent to multiple addresses; some of the telegrams were composed using the Red machine, some the Purple. The cryptanalysts could read Red, which then gave them the text of the same Purple messages. They knew, too, that many diplomatic dispatches began "I have the honor to inform Your Excellency that..." and they often tried that as the start of the plaintext. In a very few cases, the State Department gave them the text of notes to or from the Japanese ambassadors, which the code-breakers used as cribs.
Some people have conjectured that this fabulous decoded information made it clear to Roosevelt and his advisers that Pearl Harbor was going to attacked. They say the president, wanting to bring the United States into the war on the side of Great Britain, traitorously suppressed this information and sacrificed American ships and American lives to achieve his goal. Various theories have been put forth to support this notion. Safford himself, by then a captain, agreed. He based his argument upon the so-called winds code. Japan had notified its diplomatic posts in a J19-K10 circular telegram on November 19 that if diplomatic relations and international communications were likely to be cut off, it would warn these posts with a fake weather forecast in the middle of the Japanese shortwave news broadcast. If Japanese-American relations were in danger, the forecast would predict "east wind rain." American code-breakers solved this message on November 28. Immediately, a frantic effort was made to pick up this broadcast. Safford insisted that the "winds execute"--the forecast--was heard on December 4 and that the intercept was subsequently removed from the files as part of a coverup. Virtually no one has supported this contention. But even assuming that an execute message had been transmitted, it would at best confirm that relations were strained. In no way could it point to Pearl Harbor. Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton has argued that the lack of a Purple machine in Hawaii prevented Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short, the commanders there, from using Magic-provided information on international affairs to illuminate their situation. This would have enabled them to predict the attack, Layton has claimed. But this is speculation, supported only by hindsight. Moreover, the presence of a Purple machine in the Philippines did not prevent the American forces from being surprised. Author John Toland found several former radio operators who had been listening in San Francisco or at sea. They said that in the week before December 7, they had heard a cacophony of radio signals from northwest of Hawaii--presumably the strike force heading for Pearl Harbor. They said they reported this, to no effect. But this story founders because, according to the Japanese, the strike force maintained absolute radio silence throughout its voyage. And American naval intercept units, straining to pick up whatever they could on the Japanese naval circuits, heard nothing. U.S. radio-intelligence operators knew that several carriers had dropped out of the traffic picture. They thought that the ships were in home waters, covering a movement to the south--the Philippines or the oil- and rubber-rich Dutch East Indies. Carrier communications had likewise vanished in February and July 1941, and naval radio-intelligence operators hypothesized then that the carriers had been held near Japan--a hypothesis later determined to be factual. But what happened then was not what was happening in December.  Several writers have suggested that the solution of the many messages dealing with ship movements in and out of Pearl Harbor should have alerted the authorities to the impending attack. But similar messages were transmitted about the Philippines, the Panama Canal, San Francisco, San Diego and Seattle. In fact, from August 1 to December 6, 59 such intercepts dealt with the Philippines and only 20 with Hawaii. The writers have pointed to one intercept, instructing the consulate in Hawaii to divide the Pearl Harbor anchorage into smaller areas for more precise reporting of ship locations, as a clear indication of a forthcoming attack. That is hindsight. At the time, the authorities viewed it merely as evidence of the thoroughness of Japanese intelligence or of the need to abbreviate communications. James Rusbridger, in his book Betrayal at Pearl Harbor, claims that the British code-breaking unit at Singapore solved enough of JN25 to reveal the plan to attack Pearl Harbor and that this information was passed on to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who withheld it from Roosevelt to ensure American entry into the war, thereby enabling the attack to succeed. Citing the Official Secrets Act, British authorities have denied Rusbridger any access to the records of the unit, and the U.S. Navy reports that it cannot find any of these JN25b solutions, partial or complete, from before December 7. His thesis rests on the memory of an Australian code-breaker working in Singapore. That is a slender reed upon which to base so heavy a charge. Moreover, Rusbridger does not distinguish between the a and b editions of JN25--and does not make clear why Churchill would try to get the Americans to fight Japan instead of Germany. A retired communications intelligence analyst, Fred Parker, has dredged through the files of Japanese messages intercepted before Pearl Harbor but not solved until afterward. Though he has found no smoking gun, no message referring specifically to an attack on Pearl Harbor, he believes that the messages he has found point clearly to an impending attack there. He cites, for example, the presence of an oiler on what became the strike force's homeward route and the broadcast of the message "Climb Mount Niitaka 1208." The oiler obviously was put there, he says, to refuel the returning ships. The 1208 in the message meant December 8, the attack date on the Tokyo side of the international date line. Mount Niitaka (Hsin-kao in Taiwan) was the highest peak in what was then the Japanese empire. Parker contends that a solution of these messages would have suggested an attack on Pearl Harbor. Like the other theories, however, this is hindsight.  Some historians have contended that if only the Army and Navy intelligence officers, and perhaps State Department officials as well, had found the time to analyze all the intercepts as a group, they would have discerned a pattern that pointed to Pearl Harbor. This argument resembles one that Roberta Wohlstetter made in her book Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, in which she holds that the noise of the false evidence drowned out the indications of the true signals: "We failed to anticipate Pearl Harbor not for want of the relevant materials, but because of a plethora of irrelevant ones." This is wrong. There were no true signals, no clear indications of the attack. The fact is that code-breaking intelligence did not prevent and could not have prevented Pearl Harbor, because Japan never sent any message to anybody saying anything like "We shall attack Pearl Harbor." The ambassadors in Washington were never told of the plan. Nor were any other Japanese diplomats or consular officials. The ships of the strike force were never radioed any message mentioning Pearl Harbor. It was therefore impossible for the cryptanalysts to have discovered the plan. What, then, is the answer to the joint congressional committee's question? What about that "finest intelligence"? The simple answer is that, fine though it was, it was not fine enough. Perhaps if the United States had established intercept operators in the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo to obtain enough messages to make a solution of JN25b more likely, or had been able to buy a spy in the top circles of the Japanese government, or had been able somehow to fly aerial reconnaissance regularly above the island empire--then perhaps there might have been a chance that the Pearl Harbor attack would be detected in advance. None of these things could have been easily done. Even if they had, discovery of the plan would not have been certain. Japan had successfully closed all openings through which foreigners might gain information about its intentions. The real reason for the success of the Pearl Harbor attack lies in the island empire's hermetic security. Despite the American code-breakers, Japan kept her secret. For Americans, the Rising Sun rose in eclipse. |
To all our military men and women past and present, military family members, and to our allies who stand beside us
Thank You!
Good evidence exists on the interception of the "Winds" message by the US Navy, and the destruction of evidence after the Pearl Harbor attack.
No good evidence exists that intercepts indicated that Pearl Harbor was the target beforehand.
Very excellent evidence exists that intercept intelligence from early November showed the Japanese would make war on the United States in the first two weeks of December. The Friday before the Sunday, December 7, there was a decrypt that was officially read as a Japanese attack on elements of the US Navy within the next few days.
All from memory. The Eric Nave book is the best non-technical one.
Good morning, Snippy and everyone at the Foxhole.
Read: Exodus 20:1-20
Honor your father and your mother. —Exodus 20:12
Bible In One Year: Amos 4-6; Revelation 7
Through her books and lectures, Edith Schaeffer has become much appreciated for her insights into the value of life's ordinary days. When she and her husband Francis were first married, both sets of parents lived nearby. The newlyweds divided each Sunday afternoon and evening be-tween the Schaeffers and the Sevilles.
After a few years, Edith and Francis moved to Switzerland, where they could talk with their parents only once a year in a brief phone conversation.
Looking back half a century later, Edith wrote of being glad for the way they had used those Sunday afternoons. She noted that "proximity of loved ones is not an endless situation." She concluded that a package labeled "time to care for parents and exhibit love" doesn't just arrive someday. We must show love while we can.
The fifth of the Ten Commandments says: "Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you" (Exodus 20:12). The command to love and respect our parents applies equally to children living at home, newly independent young couples, and empty-nesters.
Seize each moment you have to love and honor your family. The opportunity won't last forever. —David McCasland
Good Morning
Christmas Sand
I had no Christmas spirit when I breathed a weary sigh, And looked across the table where the bills were piled too high.
The laundry wasn't finished and the car I had to fix, My stocks were down another point, the Dolphins lost by six.
And so with only minutes till my son got home from school I gave up on the drudgery and grabbed a wooden stool.
The burdens that I carried were about all I could take, And so I flipped the TV on, to catch a little break.
I came upon a desert scene in shades of tan and rust, No snowflakes hung upon the wind, just clouds of swirling dust.
And where the reindeer should have stood before a laden sleigh, Eight Hummers ran a column right behind an M1A.
A group of boys walked past the tank, not one was past his teens. Their eyes were hard as polished flint, their faces drawn and lean.
They walked the street in armor with their rifles shouldered tight, Their dearest wish for Christmas, just to have a silent night.
Other soldiers gathered, hunkered down against the wind, To share a scrap of mail and dreams of going home again.
There wasn't much at all to put their lonely hearts at ease, They had no Christmas turkey, just a pack of MREs.
They didn't have a garland or a stocking I could see, They didn't need an ornament-- they lacked a Christmas Tree.
They didn't have a present even though it was tradition, the only boxes I could see were labeled "ammunition."
I felt a little tug and found my son now by my side, He asked me what it was I feared, and why it was I cried.
I swept him up into my arms and held him oh so near and kissed him on the forehead as I whispered in his ear.
There's nothing wrong my little son, for safe we sleep tonight, Our heroes stand on foreign land to give us all the right,
To worry on the things in life that mean nothing at all, Instead of wondering if we will be the next to fall.
He looked at me as children do, and said it was alright, to thank the ones who help us and perhaps that we should write.
And so we pushed aside the bills and sat to draft a note, to thank the many far from home, and this is what we wrote:
God Bless You all and keep you safe, and speed your way back home. Remember that we love you so, and that you're not alone.
The gift you give you share with all, a present every day, You give the gift of liberty and that we can't repay.
1944 Battle of the Bulge begins
with apologies ro valin, hope the new windows go well :-)
Regards
alfa6 ;>}
Good Morning Radu.
Pearl Harbor mobilized the nation for quick victory as 9/11/01 has not - Draft, Rosie the Riveter war production, War Bonds to raise money. Just think three years after Pearl Harbor Italy was defeated, Japan was on the ropes and we were on the border of Germany. Four years after Pearl Harbor we were completely occupying and controlling the well-armed axis powers and starting them toward democracy. Japan awoke a 'sleeping giant' and the 'giant' answered back.
I read "At Dawn We Slept", pretty good book with lots of detail. Seems all the "clues" were there, putting them together and drawing the proper conclusions was the problem.
Morning Aeronaut.
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