03 August 2010
 
None Dare Call It….


 
“JAP FLEET SMASHED BY U.S.
2 CARRIERS SUNK AT MIDWAY
NAVY HAD WORD OF JAP PLAN TO STRIKE AT SEA
KNEW DUTCH HARBOR WAS A FEINT”
- Chicago Tribune Headline, Sunday 7 June 1942 disclosing ULTRA information.
 
I got stuck on something that might be treason this morning, not the Wikipedia leak thing, but one that happened in the months after the victory at Midway in 1942.
 
My disquiet seethed with the morning coffee. I should stay away from ancient evil, but I need to get to it to describe the burgeoning intelligence effort that took Mac from underlining message and arranging IBM punch cards to making rubber topographic maps of remote islands that no one ever heard about.
 
I spent the first hour waking re-reading parts of CAPT Eddie Layton's book, "And I Was There" in preparation for today's outing, which was intended to talk about 1943. But there are some unburied dead from the period after June, 1942.
 
I chuckled as I read about Joe Rochefort’s Deputy in the Combat Information Unit, Tom Dyer. Layton said that he had the best collection of pin-ups in the Pacific under the glass on his desk. I made a note to ask Mac about how lurid they were.
 
Of course, what was on the top of Dyer’s desk obscured them most of the time. He said later that Rochefort and the other analysts, including himself, kept most of the five-digit code groups in their heads, and the desks were covered with hundreds of partial decrypts. They worked port-and starboard watches most days, and around the clock before the Midway break that identified Admiral Yamamoto’s target.
 
A newly arrived Yeoman once cleaned off the desk when Dyer was sleeping, and there was holy hell to pay, since like the code groups that floated in endless strings through his brain, he knew where every page that lay above the pin-ups was. The effort paid off. With Jasper Holmes trick, the target was identified, and with superhuman effort, a Lieutenant named Joe Finnegan managed to construct a table that cracked the super-encryption on the date of the attack.
 
Admiral Nimitz crossed the Rubicon at a major inter-service conference on the 27th of May; he believed Eddie Layton’s prediction that the Japanese carrier would launch the attack “on the morning of 04 June, from the northwest on a bearing of 325 degrees.”
 
Eddie was spot-on, though there was uncertainty up to the last moment. The Japanese had made a pre-invasion change of additives, and HYPO was in the dark on the eve of battle.
 
I won’t attempt an account of the struggle itself, since better people have done that. In The Dungeon, Mac was placed on a desk under a bunny tube that would deliver messages by pneumatic pressure. Those quaint delivery systems were still in the fleet when I arrived decades later and the rattle of the arrival of the hollow projectile was always exciting. But only a few intercepts arrived as the titanic struggle raged.
 
What interests me as a Spook is what happened afterward.

(CAPT Joe Rocheford. Official US Navy Picture).
 
Washington had been predicting that the attack could happen in the middle of June, and fall upon either Alaska, or perhaps to the south. Had anyone in the Pacific paid attention to their better-resourced predictions, the Japanese would have been using the Fleet Post Office code they had assigned to Midway Island.
 
It is said that victory has many fathers, and defeat only one.
 
The Redman Brothers, Joe and John, in the Office of Naval Communications and OP-20G (Radio Intelligence Section), respectively, had immediate access to the senior brass of the Navy and took credit for providing the intelligence that enabled the victory.
 
Anyone who has been forward and afloat knows that the Shore Establishment always wins, and the chance of victory is enhanced the closer your desk is to the flagpole at the Pentagon, or in Mac’s time, at Main Navy.
 
Once victory was certain, historian Stephen Budiansky quotes Joe Rochefort told everyone at Station Hypo that he "didn't want to see them for three or four days." He expected everyone would just go home and catch some sleep. Instead, a house party on Diamond Head was convened. Budiansky quotes Rochefort as saying it was a "straight out-and-out drunken brawl" that lasted the entire three days. Then everyone shook off their hangovers and went right back to twenty- and twenty-two-hour shifts to tackle the new code book and additives that the enemy had introduced into JN-25 before the battle.
 
I need to ask Mac about that. Or retiring Associate Justice of the Supreme Court John Paul Stevens, a lawyer in civilian life who worked with him at HYPO.
 
I am more likely to see Mac at Willow.
 
But the real battle was just beginning thousands of miles east of Midway. The assertion that Washington’s Station NEGAT had been right was breathtaking enough, but there was an implied task contained in taking the credit for other people’s success. They had to discredit Joe Rochefort and Eddie Layton.
 
The coup engineered by the Redmans to oust Joe Rochefort is quite extraordinary.
 
The Chicago Tribune Affair reveals the banality of institutional evil. A war correspondent named Stanley Johnson provided the article on which the re-write man in the Windy City based the headline slugs up above.
 
Johnson was a classic exemplar of the knock-about, wise-cracking newshound. Born in Australian, he wore a big black mustache and had served in the Australian Army in World War I. He roamed Europe and Asia  for years after the war, and wound up as a stringer for the Tribune's London bureau. He came to the U.S. after the fall of France and married a former showgirl he had met in Paris years before.
 
He became a U.S. citizen, and his free-wheeling ways brought him to the attention of the virulent FDR-hating publisher of the Tribune, Robert Rutherford "Colonel" McCormick. The Colonel had several axes to grind with Washington, and publishing Johnson's florid dispatch was just part of his maverick campaign against it. He dispatched Johnson to cover the war in the Pacific, and Johnson wound up embarked in USS Lexington for the action. The Ship’s PAO may have failed to have him sign a secrecy agreement. In any event, Johnson was either shown or had inadvertent access to classified information, and did not view himself as bound to protect it.
 
Shudders ran through the Navy Department at the prospect that the Japanese would recognize the success at penetrating the JN-25 code would be apparent, based on the precise information about the Japanese order of battle contained in the sensational- and otherwise incorrect- article.
 
Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox leaned on the Colonel to shut down the publicity on sources and methods, and the Colonel reluctantly agreed to spike the story. It is possible that the disclosure, picked up by a couple other major dailies, might have passed without issue.
 
The Redman brothers seized on the substance of Johnson’s article, which they correctly deduced came from the classified 31 May Fleet Intelligence Bulletin to Commanding Officers identifying the disposition and identity of the Japanese forces defeated at Midway.
 
Eddie Layton goes on to describe the following leaks to legendary radio newshawk Walter Winchell, who made two broadcasts decrying the compromise while explicitly talking about it. The Redmans pushed for an indictment in Federal Court against McCormick and Johnson, managing to keep the matter going, and a matter of public record. The story broke out again on the 8th of August
 
Years later, Jasper Holmes wrote about the impact of the headlines and the following publicity engineered by the Redmans in hs book Double-Edged Secrets, "Any informed reader could only conclude that Japanese codes has been broken."
 
Eddie Layton's 1985 book lays out a case of staggering mendacity that followed triumph. The Redmans wrote mutually re-enforcing memos up the chain accusing Joe Rochefort of insubordination, and recommending HYPO be brought to heel, and be placed under an officer more to their liking.
 
The younger Redman, John, managed to get himself assigned to the CINCPOA staff as communications officer, and used a private coded circuit to keep Washington apprised of his progress on isolating the renegade code-breakers.
 
With all the news of compromised codes flying about, it should not have come of much surprise that the Japanese changed their version of the JN-25 code a week after the news of the Tribune indictments, and the work of the previous six months was rendered useless. It would take four months of round-the-clock work to recover the ground that was lost.
 
Fleet Admiral Bill Halsey always said it was the campaign in the Solomons that was the turning point of the war, not the battle of Midway. I suspect he felt that way because he was not there, being confined to his hospital bed during the fight.
 
But his point it taken. The see-saw battle to keep Henderson Field on Guadalcanal in American hands gave birth to the ironic unofficial motto of the Marines that the "Navy will always abandon you in a pinch." The Tokyo Express roared in each evening by sea to re-supply the Japanese forces, and before it was done, two dozen men-of-war littered the floor of Ironbottom Sound. When the battle was over, in February of 1943, the Imperial Fleet never advanced again.
 
I will ask Mac his professional opinion on whether the single-minded campaign by the Redmans to wage war on Joe Rochefort might have disclosed the success of Station HYPO against the codes to the watchful Japanese.
 
Joe Redman put on the rank of Rear Admiral, and John made Captain. I understand ambition, but this might be something else. If what they did caused the Japanese to re-think their security, they might be guilty of something more than careerist aspirations.
 
You see, the Marines landed on Guadalcanal on the 7th of August, and when the JN-25 codebook changed the next week, the Americans were suddenly flying blind. How many people died as a result?

(Marines in the Field, Guadalcanal, 1942. Official US Navy picture).
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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