20 January 2017

Editor’s Note: There is something going on downtown this morning- some transfer of power or something- and I have other places I want to be. in fact, I rose at that place a few years ago feeling the same sort of dislocation I am feeling this morning. No major incidents of violence last night, though tear gas was used by the DC cops to confront demonstrators determined to disrupt one of the celebratory galas. It was in front of the elegant digs of the National Press Club, for what it is worth, and the city is literally in a grid lock-down. I intend to avoid all that, chill and get on down the road. More from the Farm.

– Vic

Up Periscope!

(Dawn at Refuge Farm. Rays of the rising sun mimic those of the Imperial Japanese Naval Battle Flag. Photo Socotra)

Ever have that sense of dislocation, like not knowing where you are? Makes you queasy, like the aftermath of a great and rapid tectonic shift that surfs a 7-11 Store off it’s concrete slab and up over its parking lot and into the middle of an intersection.

Like my pal Mike says, the top of Mount Everest is composed of sedimentary rock, and as high as it is now, was once at the bottom of a primordial sea, way below periscope depth. He and his daughter stopped by Refuge Farm briefly yesterday, transposing their Mountain House in Colorado with placid Culpeper County. Having them here was as disorienting as waking up in the wrong county.

The dislocation got me big time this morning. I realized a few moments into consciousness that I was not in my bed, but in another one, also mine, but someplace else. It was as if I had come to periscope depth abruptly from the vasty deep, took a quick scan around and discovered a Japanese destroyer bearing down one me.

I crept downstairs in the darkness and decided to stay awake to greet the dawn. I am agitated about people I love, parents and others, and turned on the computer to scan the messages for portents and omens.

I discovered nothing about one situation and more than I needed on another. I have to help my brother and sister convince our Mom to give up her home and move into something smaller and more manageable where we can get Dad the help he needs.

There is no instruction manual on this; how the hell is this supposed to work? I reached back to my conversations with Mac for guidance on ow he handled the slow painful decline of his beloved wife Billie. His wisdom helped sustain me.

I sighed. I had this big scheme for this morning. I brought my notes from the long conversation at Willow with Mac down to the farm, and was going to tell you about the guy who saved his life so long ago. Jasper Holmes was the guy, who if the world was sane, would be remembered as a writer of popular fiction, not the author of the single greatest intelligence coup in the biggest war that was ever fought.

(LT Jasper Homes)

But of course the world is not sane, and Jasper wound up with a legacy that includes tricking the inscrutable East into the biggest screw-up in the military history of the 20th Century, which is going a fair piece. And saving the life of one of my best friends, Mac Showers.

Mac knew him well, and Jasper wrote his own book about their time together. “Double Edged Secrets” was the title, and it will tell you almost everything you need to know, if you know how to read it, like Eddie Layton’s memoir that Roger Pineau and John Costello had to finish. Admiral Layton was sick at the end, and held his tongue until the ULTRA secret was finally declassified.

Jasper savaged some of the alleged heroes of the big war, but the most guilty of them were already dead taking their medals and reputations with them. That is why my friendship with Mac means so much. When we talk, they are all still alive, heroes and villains alike.

We are sworn to silence about the middle parts of our lives, and I doubt if I will last as long as Mac to be able to speak openly about the coolest parts.

That was the subject of that long discussion the other day. Six months after Pearl Harbor, Jasper Holmes got a scheme to full in some of the blanks in all the files that Mac was cross-indexing with YN1 Bill Dunbar.

Mac has told the story of the Midway Miracle maybe a thousand times, but it never ceases to amaze me. But you need to understand a little about LT Holmes, so bear with me.

Jasper was not a career intelligence officer, but like Mac, pure chance propelled him into the most vital area of intelligence, Radio Intelligence and cryptography.

He was a line officer, originally, and a bold one. In the 1930s, he was assigned to an S-Boat, one of the original main-line USN submarines. Mac told me about them. Not much of an improvement over the German unterzee boats of World War One.

(Model of an S-Class diesel submarine like Jasper’s)

Mac says the S-Class were dank and chilly craft, which exasperated a bad case of osteoarthritis, and LT Holmes found himself medically retired and on the beach in lovely Hawaii. There are worse things in life, and Jasper used his unexpected change of career to reinvent himself. He wrote, beautifully, as it turned out, and out of deference to his day job at the University of Hawaii, wrote under a pen name he dreamed up.

“Alec Hudson” was what he chose, and as you might imagine, a naval officer with a bogus identity is something that resonates closely here at Refuge Farm. He wrote compelling accounts of life in the Submarine Force. He was published in the Saturday Evening Post, among other less prestigious places, and he was read avidly by those later caught up in the terror and excitement of the war.

His best known works of fiction are compilations of his shorter works “Up Periscope!” and “Battle Stations.”

A casual reading will betray the fact that they directly inspired the young Gene Roddenbery. The charismatic Scotsman of Star Trek (“I dinna can change the laws of Fizziks, Captain!”) and Jasper’s Captain Jaimeson and Roddenberry’s Captain Kirk are unmistakeable.

Jasper was recalled to active duty in mid-1941 with the anticipation of the outbreak of hostilities in the Pacific. His original duties were shore-based at the headquarters of the 14th Naval District. He essentially assigned himself with the tracking of merchant vessels in the Pacific. In peacetime, it is simple enough to use ship’s weather reports to provide locational data, and this association brought him closer and closer to the Spooks.

The Big Surprise on December 7th was naturally a shock. Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lt. General Short were fingered for the blame, and relieved for cause. Scapegoats and stalking horses had to be found. There were careers at stake here, for goodness sake.Chief Naval Personnel Chester Nimitz was tagged to command the battered Pacfic Fleet over dozens of officers more senior.

Washington would not admit that it was bitter rivalries between Army and Navy, and within the Navy itself that exacerbated the blind spot that permitted the Japanese to land a knock-out blow on the Pacific Fleet.

Jasper was propelled into the maelstrom of the response in the Combat Intelligence Unit- Station HYPO. While not initially allowed access to the sensitive COMINT mission, he swiftly became integral to it and was one of the handful of people indoctrinated into the ULTRA program.

Because he had no direct cryptographic or Japanese language experience, CDR Joe Rochefort decided Jasper’s experience as a submarine officer would best be harnessed in assessing various sources of intelligence to determine the strength, composition and movements of various Japanese military units- a sort of prototypical All Source approach to analysis. LT Holmes became chief of the Information Section of the CIU- later known as the Estimates Branch.

That is where Ensign Mac met the man who was going to save his life. He had copies of the books that Jasper wrote, both inscribed to him, but they are long gone in the constant shuffle of belongings in a Navy life.

Edward “Ned” Beach, was a Naval Academy midshipman who went on to command submarines and have a distinguished writing career (“Run Silent, Run Deep!) of his own. He recognized “Alec Hudson” as the pen name of a naval officer, and made a point of finding out who he was. He wrote about Jasper many years later, saying:

…[he] had become an intelligence officer at Pearl Harbor and, after the attack on the Day of Infamy, had taken on himself the particular and personal dedication to see the destruction of every ship that had participated in it. During the war, from time to time, commanders of submarines would receive by messenger, without explanation, a bottle of fine whiskey. Little by little the word got around that one of the Japanese ships sunk on a recent patrol had carried special significance for someone. In this way Jasper Holmes never left out submarines. It was through him that we would receive orders to be somewhere at a certain time – and on occasion there was a bottle of booze at the end of the trail.”

That is what Jasper was up to, and with Mac and his two Petty Officers, he was going to do it with complete success.

Oh, yeah, I could tell you (again) about the story about how Jasper foxed the Japanese at Midway, and got several of the bastards almost at first hand, but you could always just look it up.

Copyright 2017 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com