Codebreakers Victory (27 page)

He proceeded to set his sea trap. His two task forces met at "Point Lucky," 325 miles northeast of Midway, a position that was expected to place them on Yamamoto's left flank. The three carriers would lie in wait, undetected, while long-range search planes from Midway sought out the Japanese fleet. Then every type of air power the U.S. could marshal, both from Midway and the carriers, would fall on the Japanese ships.

In Washington, suspicions still lingered that Nimitz and Rochefort were being gulled by a Japanese force that was only a decoy. Consequently, they were greatly relieved when on June 3 a flying boat from Midway spotted the invasion fleet almost exactly where Rochefort had predicted it would be. The Spruance and Fletcher task forces, along with the defenders at Midway, knew for certain what they must do.

At this point Yamamoto's plan began to show its flaws. His battleships, with their powerful eighteen-inch guns, could have pulverized Midway's defenses, but they were three hundred miles away. The softening up was left to Pearl Harbor's hero, Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, commanding the invasion fleet that included the mission's four carriers. At dawn on June 4, Nagumo sent off nine squadrons of bombers escorted by four squadrons of Zero fighters. Their arrival at Midway was expected to be a surprise. Instead, the planes were met by heavy antiaircraft fire and a fierce swarm of game but outmoded and outclassed fighters.

Nagumo's Zeros shot down most of the U.S. planes. Overall, however, the initial resistance put up by Midway's defenders seemed to the Japanese leader of the raid too strong to permit a landing of troops. He radioed back to his commander that a second attack wave was needed.

That was not what Nagumo wanted to hear. His ordnance men were already arming aircraft with torpedoes and armor-piercing bombs, preparing to dispatch any Allied warships that might show up, especially the U.S. carriers that Yamamoto hoped to lure toward Midway. A second attack on the island meant canceling that order and equipping his planes with fragmentation bombs for a land bombardment. The necessity for the change, however, seemed to be confirmed by the arrival of a fleet of torpedo bombers from Midway. Even though antiaircraft fire and the Zero fighters massacred the obsolete U.S. planes, their attack verified that the defenders of Midway were far from neutralized. Nagumo sent off a second wave against the island.

While those planes were in the air, he received dumbfounding news: one of his reconnaissance planes had discovered American warships in the area. At first the spotter saw only cruisers and destroyers. Then he reported a carrier. He also warned that more torpedo planes were winging Nagumo's way. How should he counter this incredible new development? After dithering for a precious quarter of an hour, Nagumo ordered that the returning planes be armed with the original torpedoes and bombs to be used against surface ships.

At that moment of maximum confusion and vulnerability, when the Japanese carrier decks were cluttered with torpedoes, bombs, gasoline hoses and aircraft, came what Gordon Prange in his monumental
Miracle at Midway
called the Americans' "uncoordinated coordinated" attack.

Spruance and Fletcher had planned for flights of torpedo planes, dive-bombers and fighters to converge simultaneously over the Japanese fleet, while Flying Fortresses from Midway dropped their bombs from great heights. But Nagumo had changed course, and the American planes had trouble finding his ships. The fighters, running out of fuel, turned back, many of them having to ditch. The torpedo planes, first to discover the Japanese, courageously swept in at low levels. The complete flight was shot to pieces by the Zeros, with only one of the thirty crewmen surviving. They were lost without scoring a hit. The Flying Forts were equally ineffective, managing nothing better than near misses.

The sacrifice of the torpedo planes, though, was not in vain. While the Zeros were occupied with them down near sea level, thirty-seven American dive-bombers from
Enterprise
arrived far overhead. They had traced their way to Nagumo's fleet only because their commander, Clarence Wade Mc-Clusky, had cannily let himself be guided by a Japanese destroyer returning after a try at sinking a pesky U.S. submarine. When McClusky and his mates went into their screaming dives, the huge rising suns painted on the flight decks as aids to Japanese fliers gave the Americans perfect targets. McClusky's crew wrecked the
Akagi
and the
Kaga
. A
second flight of
 
dive-bombers, from
Yorktown,
arrived almost simultaneously and concentrated on
Soryu.

In less than five minutes the opportunity that had been slipping away from the Americans was turned into a flaming victory. Three of the four carriers were reduced to blazing hulks and later sank. As historian Keegan put it, "Between 10:25 and 10:30, the whole course of the war in the Pacific had been reversed." George Marshall called it "the closest squeak and the greatest victory."

The battle was not quite over. The
Yorktown,
only partially restored from her Coral Sea mauling, was further crippled by a flight of Japanese dive-bombers from the remaining carrier and was finished off by a submarine, which also sank a destroyer. Bombers from
Enterprise
exacted quick revenge. Her planes caught up with the retreating occupation force and sank the fourth carrier. Also, one cruiser was sunk and a second badly damaged.

Yamamoto still had a vast superiority in sea power, but with the only other two carriers of his fleet protecting the Aleutian landings, he knew he was defeated. He called off the Midway operation and sneaked back to home waters.

The one part of Yamamoto's overly complex plan that succeeded was his diversionary raid against the Aleutians. Ironically, his small victory there came about because Theobald, the American commander, refused to believe what his cryptographic team told him. Their decrypts warned that while the Japanese would bomb the American base at Dutch Harbor, they would land troops to seize Attu and Kiska. Theobald would not be swayed from believing the invasion would be against Dutch Harbor, and he positioned his ships accordingly. When Yamamoto's attackers did exactly what the decoders had forecast, Theobald's task force was in the wrong place by a thousand miles. It failed to prevent the Attu and Kiska landings.

Otherwise, the great surge of Japanese expansion was over. After Midway, despite a few abortive efforts to mount new drives, the war machine of the Rising Sun was put on the defensive.

"Midway was essentially a victory of intelligence," Nimitz later wrote. George Marshall added that as a result of cryptanalysis, "we were able to concentrate our limited forces to meet their naval advance on Midway when otherwise we almost certainly would have been some 3,000 miles out of place."

At a postbattle staff conference at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Nimitz singled out Joe Rochefort: "This office deserves a major share of the credit for the victory at Midway."

One result of the battle nearly caused disaster for the codebreakers. Along with accounts in the American press exulting over the Midway victory was a sidebar story that caused U.S. cryptographic teams consternation and dismay. The story's headline was NAVY HAD WORD OF JAP PLAN TO STRIKE AT SEA. Appearing in three large dailies owned by Roosevelt-hating Colonel Robert McCormick, the story related that navy commanders knew in advance about Japanese plans, the strength of their forces and the fact that a move against "another base" was only a feint. The gaffe could have cost the Americans their entire intelligence advantage over the Japanese. Investigations found that a reporter aboard American ships in the Pacific had been allowed to see U.S. intelligence summaries and had, with remarkable insensitivity, filed his account, to which equally obtuse censors had given approval. Whether because of this break or as the result of their natural precautions about cryptographic security, the Japanese did make changes in their codes that Allied codebreakers had difficulty in overcoming.

 

 

Countering New Drives on Port Moresby

 

Douglas MacArthur adopted a complex attitude toward codebreakers. His powerful ego and adherence to old army values caused him to project the image that reliance on such undercover chicanery was beneath him. In making his decisions he needed no other source of advice than his own superior brain. His sycophantic staff, revering him as "The General," followed by practicing a studied "negligent indifference" toward signals intelligence. Yet he was too shrewd a commander, and they were too intent on seeing him win, not to make use of the advantages the codebreakers provided.

After their escape from Corregidor in late March 1942, MacArthur set up his cryptographic team, together with an Australian unit and a British contingent from Singapore, as the nondescriptly named Central Bureau in Brisbane. His real attitude toward signals intelligence, as Edward J. Drea has pointed out in his book
MacArthur's Ultra,
was indicated by the fact that one of his first appeals to the War Department was for cryptanalytic support. In his study
MacArthur as Military Commander,
Gavin Long commented about The General, "The prescience with which he may at times seem to have been endowed was generally the outcome of the cracking of Japanese codes."

Intelligence informed him that the Imperial forces had decided on two new campaigns against Port Moresby. An overland drive would be made across the Papuan southeastern sector of New Guinea. In addition, decodes revealed that the Japanese would try to take the port in a new seaborne invasion.

The overland campaign was launched first. On July 22 the Japanese began unloading at Buna, on the northern coast of New Guinea, the army division that had been turned back in the Coral Sea battles. The troops faced a formidable obstacle: the Owen Stanley Range, thirteen thousand feet high and almost constantly immersed in rain clouds. The sole passage was by the Kokoda Trail, hewed through the jungle and up and over the mountains, so narrow that in places only men walking in single file could traverse it. The hot, humid climate and incessant pounding rain turned the trail into a seventy-eight-mile-long horror of ankle-deep muck and slippery roots, the scene of what Morison called "the nastiest fighting in the world."

The troops sent in by the Japanese were crack infantry, trained in jungle warfare, their supplies carried on the backs of New Guinea natives. Driving the Australian defenders steadily before them, they came within sight of Port Moresby. There the determined Aussies, aided by rushed-in American GIs, dug in and stopped the advance. The battle dragged on for days, then weeks, while Allied planes smashed Japanese attempts to replenish their troops. In the end, the starving, disease-ridden remnants of the Japanese force retreated back to Buna.

Yamamoto's new sea campaign against Port Moresby concentrated first on taking the anchorage at Milne Bay, on the southeastern tip of New Guinea. The Australians had a small garrison there and had constructed an airfield. Yamamoto wanted the airfield to provide air cover for his landings at Port Moresby.

Allied decodes informed MacArthur of this new threat. He quickly reinforced the troops at Milne Bay and had his new air commander, Major General George C. Kenney, organize his meager forces into as strong a defense as he could manage. The aggressive Kenney directed preemptive air strikes against Japanese airdromes at Rabaul and Buna, greatly reducing the number of planes they could send to protect the landing at Milne Bay.

Lacking the equivalent of the Allies' codebreaking, the Japanese expected only a minimal defense of the port. On August 24, 1942, they sent in a landing force composed of overage recalled reservists. When this group was shot to pieces and radioed for help, a special Naval Landing Force went in. They fared no better. After another week of bitter fighting, the Japanese gave up. The Melbourne cryptanalysts deciphered the Imperial Navy's order for the evacuation of Milne Bay.

Yamamoto's grand design of using Port Moresby as a base against Australia was frustrated. In contrast, MacArthur brought a new spirit to the Australian people. On his arrival he had found a nation cowering in fear of conquest. Some among Australian military leaders had been convinced they must be ready to surrender the continent's less populated areas in the hope of holding the more populous parts. MacArthur rejected their pessimism, signaling his aggressive attitude by announcing that he meant to make his base of operations not in the relative safety of Melbourne or Brisbane but at Port Moresby. "We'll defend Australia in New Guinea," he proclaimed.

In view of MacArthur's successes at Milne Bay and Port Moresby, which supplemented the victory in the Coral Sea, the Aussies took heart that The General might well deliver on his promise.

 

 

 

11

 

USSR: Intelligence Guides the Major Victories

 

 

Histories of World War II generally leave the impression that military intelligence had little to do with the Soviet Union's defeat of Nazi Germany. The reasons given are instead the inexhaustible resources of Soviet manpower, the grit of the Russian people, the vastness of Soviet territory and the miseries of the Russian winter. Yet disclosures released to the public only in recent years have shown that in the Soviet Union, as elsewhere on the Allied side, secret knowledge of German intentions, plans and orders of battle informed the Soviet responses and, at crucial moments^ made the difference. While much of this information came from agents and spies, codebreakers also played their part.

The Soviets themselves became increasingly adept at conducting what they called
razvedka,
the gathering of intelligence from such varied sources as scouting parties, aerial reconnaissance, prisoner interrogation, reports from agents and partisans, electronic direction finding and the like.

In addition, their military intelligence benefited from two powerful political and ideological forces. One was hatred of Hitler and Nazism. The other was love of Marx and Communism. Together, these strong undercurrents kept a flood of diverse secret information flowing into Moscow to supplement their own
razvedka
operations.