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Overview
Marching Orders tells the story of how the American military’s breaking of the Japanese diplomatic Purple codes during World War II led to the defeat of Nazi Germany and hastened the end of the devastating conflict. With unprecedented access to over one million pages of US Army documents and thousands of pages of top-secret messages dispatched to Tokyo from the Japanese embassy in Berlin, author Bruce Lee offers a series of fascinating revelations about pivotal moments in the war.
Challenging conventional wisdom, Marching Orders demonstrates how an American invasion of Japan would have resulted in massive casualties for both forces. Lee presents a thrilling day-by-day chronicle of the difficult choices faced by the American military brain trust and how, aware of Japan’s adamant refusal to surrender, the United States made the fateful decision to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Hailed as “one of the most important books ever published on World War II” by Robert T. Crowley, an intelligence officer who later became a senior executive at the CIA, Marching Orders unveils the untold stories behind some of the Second World War’s most critical events, bringing them to vivid life. With this book, “many of the mysteries that have eluded historians since the end of the war are much clarified: the Pearl Harbor fiasco, D-Day, why the Americans let the Russians capture Berlin, and why the decision to drop the atomic bomb was made. This is the most significant publication about World War II since the recent series of books on the Ultra revelations” (Library Journal). It’s a story that, as historian Robin W. Winks said, “no one with the slightest interest in World War II or in the origins of the Cold War can afford to ignore.”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504013529 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 07/07/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 627 |
| Sales rank: | 483,259 |
| File size: | 20 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Bruce Lee is a military historian, author, and editor. His books include Marching Orders: How the American Breaking of the Japanese Diplomatic and Military Secret Codes Led to the Defeat of Nazi Germany and Japan and, with coauthor Henry C. Clausen, Pearl Harbor: The Shocking True Story of the Military Intelligence Failure at Pearl Harbor and the Fourteen Men Responsible for the Disaster. Lee has been an editor-researcher for Cornelius Ryan and has edited the works of other renowned historians and authors, including Gordon W. Prange, Admiral Edwin T. Layton, Ronald Lewin, Charles B. MacDonald, and Pulitzer Prize winner David J. Garrow.
Read an Excerpt
Marching Orders
The Untold True Story of How the American Breaking of the Japanese Secret Codes Led to the Defeat of Nazi Germany and Japan
By Bruce Lee
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1995 Bruce LeeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1352-9
CHAPTER 1
No one ever called Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson indecisive.
Now, with the debacle of Pearl Harbor only three weeks old and with the Japanese believing they rule the Pacific Ocean, Stimson decides that the greatest military disaster in America's history has been caused by the failure of the system of military intelligence. "The event had been foreshadowed by the Japanese diplomatic traffic of 1941," Stimson declares. He immediately sets out to rectify the problem. The action he takes dramatically changes the way the U.S. Army runs its intelligence operations and produces unexpectedly incredible results that affect the outcome of World War II.
One must read between the lines of official documents and the various biographies of Stimson and talk with men such as Henry C. Clausen, who later performed a one-man investigation into the root causes of Pearl Harbor on Stimson's orders, to comprehend that Stimson never blamed the fiasco of Pearl Harbor solely on the Navy, or solely on the Army. Stimson believes the American intelligence system of the time — and both he and Marshall share blame in this — is faulty from top to bottom. The system must be changed lest America lose the war.
Stimson has no control over the Navy. He cannot root out the incompetent, jealous turf-protectors in Naval Intelligence or Communications. But he can, and does, force a reorganization of the Army Intelligence system from top to bottom. This old system had been approved by no less a personage than Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, but Stimson forever changes the way the Army views the vital, super-secret product known as signals intelligence.
To digress a moment. Why does Stimson believe that he is partially responsible for the intelligence failure that causes Pearl Harbor? The answer lies back in time, when Stimson is secretary of state, in 1929, and Under Secretary Joseph Cotton tells him that a group of code breakers, known as the Black Chamber, is operating in New York City deciphering and reading the messages sent to foreign ambassadors in Washington. According to various official documents, during the 1922 Washington Disarmament Conference, which establishes the number of capital ships that every major navy is allowed to deploy at sea, and limits their tonnage and the caliber of their guns, the American delegates to the conference are presented virtually every morning, along with their morning newspaper, the instructions sent to the Japanese, British, Italian and French delegations with whom they are negotiating.
At the time, it matters not to Stimson that this so-called Black Chamber was originally created by the U.S. Army, and to hide its operations that the Army slipped the Black Chamber into the State Department's budget (only $40,000 per year), or that the information the Black Chamber produces guarantees the supremacy of U.S. Navy battleships in the Pacific for twenty-odd years. What matters to Wall Street lawyer Stimson is that the Black Chamber, by God, is damnably unethical.
Overnight Stimson shuts the operation down. It is not right to read the traffic of "our diplomatic guests," which is how, in 1931, Stimson explains his actions in his diary.
As a result of Stimson's failure to understand what is going on in the real world, the State Department withdraws its funding of the Black Chamber, and America's chief code-breaker of the time, Herbert Yardley, is fired. Yardley then goes public and writes a book that explains how the Americans have hoodwinked the Japanese about the numbers and tonnage and the caliber of guns they can use in their capital ships. Duly warned, the Japanese change their codes.
Fortunately, the Army is prepared for such weak-kneed predilections of various civilian appointees, even the secretary of state. The Army has secretly kept a second arrow in its quiver. Under the title of chief signal officer, the incredible cryptographer William F. Friedman continues reading the diplomatic mail of various countries, including Japan.
Friedman had been commissioned in the Army in 1918 and was immediately sent to France to seek a solution to various German codes. He succeeded and is credited with saving many American lives. He returns to America in 1921 to become head of the Signal Corps Code and Cipher Section, revising the War Department Staff Code. At the time, he and one assistant comprise the entire War Department Cryptographic section. In 1930, the U.S. Army creates the Signals Intelligence Service (SIS), which should not be confused with the British Secret Intelligence Service (or British SIS), because it is always more confusing to the enemy to have a number of different intelligence operations — all with the same initials — working against them. In 1930, the military in America and Great Britain know who their potential enemies will be: Germany, Japan and Russia. Unfortunately, the same can not be said about the British and American politicians of the time; most of them — especially the American isolationists — can't get their fingers out of their ears in this regard.
By 1934, the current secretary of war, Harry H. Woodring, hears the thunder and sees the storm clouds gathering on the world's horizons. He begins expanding the American SIS. By the time Germany invades Poland in 1939, the SIS staff is 19 in number. By the time Japan attacks Pearl Harbor in 1941, the staff has grown to 331. By the end of the war, in 1945, the total will be more than 13,000.
Meanwhile, the American Navy has been equally involved in cryptology since nearly as far back as the first radio transmission from a Navy ship in 1899. The Navy also has a code and signals section in the Naval Communications Service (NCS). In 1924, a young lieutenant, thirty-one-year-old Laurence C. Safford, is ordered to head up a radio intelligence unit, and he begins building up a radio intercept network. By the late 1930s, the U.S. Navy's cryptological organization numbers seven hundred officers and enlisted personnel (more than double the Army's manpower), and it has listening posts (intercept stations) in Washington State, Maine, Maryland, Hawaii, the Philippines, plus smaller stations in California, Florida, Guam and Long Island.
One can sense the conflict building between the Army and the Navy signals intelligence experts.
In the midtwenties Japan is using nine cipher systems to send its coded messages to its diplomats and military around the world. The most important of these is a machine-operated system called Angooki Taipu A, or Cipher Machine A. The code produced for this machine is for high-level diplomatic traffic. It is unreadable.
However, after a year of intense effort, Friedman and his Army SIS team breaks the Type A code in 1936, and Friedman labels the machine that makes the decipherment possible as Red. In 1938 the Japanese change their codes. Again they are unreadable. That is until September 25, 1940, when Friedman's team creates a miracle — a machine that produces the first totally clear, ungarbled decryption of the new code, which Friedman immediately labels Purple.
All of these code designations are lumped together by the American intelligence services into one catchall word: Magic. It is a fitting name, Magic, for as it turns out, the machine that Friedman and his team have created by virtue of their intellects proves to be as efficient as the original machine the Japanese built, if not superior to it.
Meanwhile, the British have been working on the codes used by the German military. They have succeeded in breaking the so-called Enigma codes (a name derived from a special code machine used by the German armed forces). Like the Americans, the British call their product of breaking the Enigma codes by a special term: Ultra. (From now on in the text that follows, when speaking of messages derived from the American breaking of various codes, I will use the term Magic; when I speak of the messages derived by the codes broken by the British, I will use Ultra.)
As Henry Clausen told this writer: "America had the brains and ingenuity before Pearl Harbor to break the Japanese diplomatic codes. What we lacked was the common sense about how to handle this information." At the time, the British agree.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill both believe that sooner or later their countries will have to fight the Axis. In July 1940, Churchill writes Roosevelt suggesting that secret information of a technical nature be exchanged between their nations. Roosevelt concurs. Sir Henry Tizard comes to Washington to talk matters over. He meets with Gen. George Strong, the Chief of the Army's Planning Staff, and Gen. Delos C. Emmons of the Army Air Corps. It is Emmons who reveals the American breakthrough with the Purple machine. (It is unclear whether Emmons let this slip on his own, or whether he was instructed by General Marshall to do so.) Anyway, the British become very excited, and London next proposes that the exchange of information be widened to include the full exchange of cryptographic systems.
Strong and Emmons report to Marshall recommending that America should give Great Britain the matrix that will allow them to create their own machine that can break the Japanese Purple code. Taking the stance that the Army is responsible for breaking Magic, Marshall authorizes the sharing of the machine's secret with the British — without clearing the matter with the U.S. Navy. When the news reaches Admiral Anderson, the Director of Naval Intelligence, and Adm. Leigh Noyes, the Director of Naval Communications, they are furious with Marshall for not consulting them. They believe Marshall is giving up too much without getting anything in return — they want the British machine that breaks the German Enigma code.
It is believed by many in the U.S. Navy that the British failed to reciprocate and give Marshall what he desired from the deal. But according to Louis Kruh, editor of Cryptologia, the opposite is the case. The British answered all the questions the Americans posed. By so doing the British saved the Americans several years of organizational effort in setting up their code-breaking operations. The British also gave the Americans a paper version of the German Enigma code machine, allowing the Americans to start their own deciphering of the German ciphers. The real problem appears that Marshall's unilateral decision to trust the British causes a breach between the Chief of Staff and the Navy when it comes to future code-related matters, which makes the Army-Navy debate about who failed to do what at Pearl Harbor ever so much more bitter.
To make matters worse, the British never acknowledge that the Americans provided them with the means to read the Purple codes until November 1993, after the publication of the Clausen/Lee book Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement, which carries British decrypts of Japanese diplomatic messages that Clausen obtained at Bletchley Park in 1945. These decrypts match those of the U.S. Navy and Army word for word. They prove beyond reasonable doubt that Winston Churchill, for his part, remained true to his word and did everything in his power to get these decrypts to Washington so as to avoid the debacle of Pearl Harbor.
But in releasing these British decrypts without comment in late 1993, the British Public Records Office (PRO) accidentally disclosed that America had indeed given the secret of Purple to Britain. For on one British decrypt dated August 23, 1941, Churchill writes a message to Menzies, his intelligence chief. Pens Churchill in his own hand: "In view of the fact that the Americans themselves gave us the key to the Japanese messages it seems probable the President [has seen this] already." To which Menzies replies in his own hand: "The Americans have had this message. C. 24/8/41."
On another Purple decrypt of December 4, 1941, Churchill writes: "Foreign Sect. US should see. I presume this is all right."
It is also important to recognize that while Friedman solves the secret of breaking the Japanese diplomatic Purple code before Pearl Harbor, we never break all of the messages we intercept. The all-important Japanese naval codes were almost never broken by anyone before the war. This contradicts the theories espoused by a number of British reporters and the book Betrayal at Pearl Harbor by Capt. Eric Nave and James Rusbridger. This coterie of conspiracy theorists claim that the JN-25 codes were being broken by the British on a regular basis and were being given the Americans before Pearl Harbor, and that Prime Minister Churchill withheld information from President Roosevelt that would have averted the disaster.
Now it's harder to put a stop to a headline-making, money-machine conspiracy theory than it is to kill a rattlesnake with a short-handled hoe. But this writer has done so. First, by interviewing Duane Whitlock, who, from November 1940 through March 16, 1942, was a radioman first class doing decryption and preparing intelligence reports based on Japanese traffic analysis for the U.S. Navy at Cavite and Corregidor. Whitlock points out that the Japanese Navy changed its code in the JN-25 series several times in 1941. Once in early August. Again on December 4.
"I know from firsthand experience," Whitlock says, "that from the fall of 1941 through the attack on Pearl Harbor we did not read any JN-25 codes. The first message we read of JN-25 on Corregidor was on March thirteenth, 1942. This message was the one in which the Japanese used the designator 'AF' to identify Midway. Nobody, including the British, with whom we worked closely, was reading JN-25 on a current basis up to the start of the war." (Whitlock later won the Bronze Star for his role in breaking the Japanese codes that led to victory at the Battle of Midway.)
This writer also interviewed Capt. Albert T. Pelletier, USN (Ret.), who, in 1941, was assigned as chief yeoman to OP-20-GZ in the old Navy Building on Constitution Avenue in Washington. "In 1941 we were reading only a tiny fraction of JN-25, at the very most ten percent of a given message," he says. "More troublesome was the fact that we received the intercepts via slow boat from the Far East, about two months after they were intercepted. They were horribly out of date by the time we worked on them. I was a code breaker. I specialized in place names, dates, ship names, arrival and departure dates. I tried to put meanings into code groups. But I wasn't a linguist. We didn't have enough linguists at the time. None were assigned to our office to work on JN-25."
Capt. Prescott Currier, USN (Ret.), is the third man to confirm to this writer that the Navy was not breaking JN-25 codes prior to Pearl Harbor. He was involved in breaking codes in Washington before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Later he served in the same capacity at Pearl Harbor. "We read the occasional small message in JN-25 before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor," he says. "But never did we read JN-25 on a general basis, because we never had the staff to do this. Later, during the war, when we were concentrating on JN-25 full blast, we were able to read only five or six percent of the total JN-25 intercepts."
This writer asked: Did the intercepted but undecrypted JN-25 messages prior to December 7, 1941, reveal the Japanese intentions to attack Pearl Harbor?
According to Currier, in 1946, after the congressional hearings into Pearl Harbor, the Navy assigned a group of cryptologists to study some twenty thousand previously unread JN-25 intercepts. Of this number, one thousand intercepts made prior to Pearl Harbor were carefully analyzed.
"In these particular intercepts," says Currier, "there are a couple of dozen messages that give enough solid evidence to show the Japanese are going to attack Pearl Harbor."
It is not until 1946, then — five years after Pearl Harbor — that the U.S. Navy knows for sure that the JN-25 codes carried specific information that could have prevented Pearl Harbor.
Perhaps the greatest failure of intelligence prior to Pearl Harbor, and let us go back in real time for this, is that in 1941 there is no central authority that reads all the intercepts in a calm fashion, analyzes them and compares them to past intercepts, correlates dates and events, and then presents them to the reader in plain English. Chief of Staff Marshall believes in 1941 that his staff must read the raw decrypt as it comes in from the field. This might have been all right for the days when Indian scouts were reading smoke signals and talking face-to-face with a company commander. But in a time of high-speed radio transmissions of worldwide significance — numbering around one hundred per day — in 1941, Marshall's concept proves to be unreasonable and unworkable.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Marching Orders by Bruce Lee. Copyright © 1995 Bruce Lee. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Cover Page
- Dedication
- Preface
- Foreword
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- Epilogue
- Appendix
- Index
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Copyright Page
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