“That's not the way this is supposed to work.”Ĭodebreakers Set a Trap to Confirm Japanese Attack
This side channel “worked great within the theater, but you can see how folks in Washington would say Rochefort is short circuiting the system,” Symonds says. Layton and Rochefort were friends, and had spent three years together in Japan earlier in their careers, studying the language and culture. In practice, however, Rochefort chose to bypass this chain of command and communicate Station Hypo’s findings directly to Nimitz’s intelligence officer, Lieutenant Commander Edwin T. Redman’s department would then put together that data with intelligence acquired from other locations and send it all out to the operational commanders, including Admiral Chester W. Redman, director of OP-20-G, the Navy’s Code and Signals Section. Officially, Rochefort reported to Captain John R. “Rochefort’s job was to gather information, raw data for the most part, and send to Washington,” says Craig Symonds, professor of maritime history at the Naval War College and author of The Battle of Midway. Back in March, a Japanese plane reporting weather conditions near the islands had also mentioned “AF,” suggesting strongly that the designator referred to Midway.īut not everyone was convinced the codebreakers were right.
naval and air base on Midway Atoll, two tiny islands located in the central Pacific, around 1,200 miles northwest of Pearl Harbor. Station Hypo had little doubt as to what “AF” referred to: the U.S. The radio traffic they intercepted that May suggested that Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind behind the Pearl Harbor attack, was preparing a major invasion, involving four Japanese aircraft carriers along with many other ships, at a location designated with the initials “AF.” Navy's cryptologic and intelligence developments from 1925 to 1947. Captain Joseph John Rochefort was a major figure in the U.S.
0 kommentar(er)
