(Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz. Photo USN)

I am at the farm, where the colors are ripening on the trees and the chores beckon. The fire in the cast-iron stove in the evening brings the feeling of the harvest season close. I won’t bore you with list of things that need to be done here, and will just get on with this project, one that meant a great deal to our pal Mac Showers, and even more to the men who lived the story.

Yesterday we saw what Joe Rochefort thought about his abrupt removal by the careerist barracudas back at Station NEGAT, the Washington Radio Intelligence node in the global signals intelligence community. Starting at Main Navy on B Street (now Constitution) the COMINT effort migrated to the Nebraska Avenue campus of the former Mount Vernon Seminary school for young ladies.

I commend to your attention Elliott Carlson’s fine (and relentlessly footnoted) account of the life and times of an American hero, before and after the battle at Midway. The title of the book says it all: “Joe Rochefort’s War: The Odyssey of the Codebreaker Who Outwitted Yamamoto at Midway.”

In sum, the punishment for being right at Pearl Harbor was the exile Joe chose for himself. He commanded a floating dry dock on the West Coast for most of the rest of the war. But the injustice rankled, and not just with him. Others tried to help. chief among them Jasper Holmes, who approached retired Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz to have Joe’s reputation restored. This note- “PERSONAL and PRIVATE-” went to the Admiral in 1959:

Admiral Nimitz tried to help, but got nowhere. By then, the men who had dispatched Joe to the outer darkness had been plank-owners at the then-secret National Security Agency and built a global SIGINT empire. While they were in power, no official acknowledgment of their failures could be tolerated.

But that left the last- and youngest- of the Station HYPO codebreakers on the case. It was going to take him awhile, but he was going to get justice for Joe.

Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303