THE CODEBREAKERS

by DAVID KAHN

  As he was completing the message, Stark called him back. He had reconsidered and wanted Marshall to add the usual admonition to show the message to the naval opposites. Marshall added: “Inform naval authorities of this communication.” Stark offered the Navy communication facilities, but Marshall said that the Army’s could get the message out as quickly.

  Marshall gave the message to Bratton to take it to the War Department message center for transmission to the commanding generals in the Philippines, Hawaii, the Caribbean, and West Coast, after vetoing a suggestion that it be typed first. As Bratton was leaving, Gerow called out that if there was any question as to priority, to send it to the Philippines first. Bratton, greatly agitated, gave the message to Colonel Edward French in the message center and asked how long it would take to get it out. French told him that it would be encoded in three minutes, on the air in eight, and in the hands of the addressees in twenty. Bratton returned and reported to Marshall, who did not understand the explanation and sent him back for a clarification. He still was not sure and sent Bratton back a third time, after which he was finally satisfied with the answer.

  Meanwhile, French had had the message typed anyway and then ordered it encoded on a machine that was operated from a typewriter keyboard. During the few minutes that this took, he checked his Honolulu circuit, and found that since early morning interference had been so bad that the small 10-kilowatt War Department radio could not “bust” through it. He knew that R.C.A. in San Francisco had a 40-kilowatt transmitter which would have no difficulty in getting through, and that Western Union in San Francisco had a tube running across the street from its office to this R.C.A. office. He had also learned on the previous day that R.C.A. was installing a teletype circuit from its office in Honolulu to Short’s headquarters at Fort Shafter. French figured that this would therefore be his most expeditious route; after the message had been encoded, he personally carried it over to his bank of six Western Union teletypes and, at 12:01 p.m. December 7, sent it on its way. Western Union forwarded it at 12:17, and 46 minutes later it was received by R.C.A. in Honolulu. Local time was 7:33 a.m. The first wave of Japanese planes was then only 37 miles away—so close that the Army radar operators at Opana Point, who had tracked the flight for several hours and had been told to “Forget it” when they first reported it, were about to lose it in the dead zone of the nearby hills. But though the teletype connection for Fort Shafter had been completed the day before, it was not in operation pending tests on Monday. R.C.A. put Marshall’s message in an envelope marked “Commanding General” for hand delivery.

  In Tokyo, Togo had been received by the Emperor. He read the text of Roosevelt’s message, then a draft of the imperial reply that he and Tojo had prepared. It stated that the 14-part note was to be considered as Japan’s response. Hirohito assented, and at 3:15 a.m. Togo withdrew from the Divine Presence. Deeply moved, he recalled, “I passed solemnly, guided by a Court official, down several hundred yards of corridors, stretching serene and tranquil. Emerging at the carriage entrance of the Sakashita Gate, I gazed up at the brightly shining stars, and felt bathed in a sacred spirit. Through the Palace plaza in utter silence, hearing no sound of the sleeping capital but only the crunching of the gravel beneath the wheels of my car, I pondered that in a few short hours would dawn one of the eventful days of the history of the world.” Even as he pondered, Japanese planes were circling over Pearl Harbor.

  In stark contrast to the calm stillness of Tokyo was the hectic bustle of the Japanese embassy on Massachusetts Avenue.

  Soon after the one o’clock message had been decoded, Okumura finished typing the first 13 parts. But he decided that this rough draft did not suit the formality of a document to be delivered to the Secretary of State. He began retyping it from the very beginning, being assisted now by a junior interpreter, Enseki. His task was complicated by two messages sent up from the code room, one ordering the insertion of a sentence that had been accidentally dropped, one changing a word. This required the retyping of several pages, including one just completed with a great deal of trouble. At about 12:30, the code room finally gave him the 14th part of the ultimatum, but Okumura was nowhere near finished with the first 13. Nomura kept poking his head in the door to hurry him on. A few minutes after one, when it was evident that the document would not be finished for some time, the Japanese called Hull to request a postponement to 1:45, saying that the document they wished to present was not yet ready. Hull acquiesced.

  At almost exactly the time that the call to Hull was being placed, Commander Fuchida and his flight of 51 dive bombers, 49 high-level bombers, 40 torpedo planes, and 43 fighters arrived over Pearl Harbor. He fired a “black dragon” from his signal pistol to indicate that the squadrons should deploy in the assault pattern for complete surprise. Nine minutes later, he wirelessed the message “To, to, to”—the first syllable of the Japanese word for “Charge!” and the signal to attack. As the planes moved into position for their runs, he felt so certain that he had achieved complete surprise that, at 7:53, two minutes before the first bomb even fell, he jubilantly radioed “TORA! TORA! TORA!” (“Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!”)—the prearranged codeword that indicated surprise. On Akagi, Nagumo turned to a brother officer and grasped his hand in a long, silent handshake. At 7:55, the first bomb exploded at the foot of the seaplane ramp at the southern end of Ford Island in the middle of Pearl Harbor.

  Okumura was still typing. His fingers struggled with the keys as torpedoes capsized Oklahoma, as bombs sank West Virginia, as 1,000 men died in the searing inferno of Arizona. At 1:50 p.m. Washington time, 25 minutes after the attack had started, he reached the end of his typing marathon. The two ambassadors, who were waiting in the vestibule, started for the State Department as soon as it was handed to them.

  The Japanese envoys arrived at the Department at 2:05 and went to the diplomatic waiting room [Hull wrote]. At almost that moment the President telephoned me from the White House. His voice was steady but clipped.

  He said, “There’s a report that the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.”

  “Has the report been confirmed?” I asked.

  He said, “No.”

  While each of us indicated his belief that the report was probably true, I suggested that he have it confirmed, having in mind my appointment with the Japanese Ambassadors….

  Nomura and Kurusu came into my office at 2:20. I received them coldly and did not ask them to sit down.

  Nomura diffidently said he had been instructed by his Government to deliver a document to me at one o’clock, but that difficulty in decoding the message had delayed him. He then handed me his Government’s note.

  I asked him why he had specified one o’clock in his first request for an interview.

  He replied that he did not know, but that was his instruction.

  I made a pretense of glancing through the note. I knew its contents already but naturally could give no indication of this fact.

  After reading two or three pages, I asked Nomura whether he had presented the document under instructions from his Government.

  He replied that he had.

  When I finished skimming the pages, I turned to Nomura and put my eye on him.

  “I must say,” I said, “that in all my conversations with you during the last nine months I have never uttered one word of untruth. This is borne out absolutely by the record. In all my fifty years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions—infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any Government on this planet was capable of uttering them.”

  Nomura seemed about to say something. His face was impassive, but I felt he was under great emotional strain. I stopped him with a motion of my hand. I nodded toward the door. The Ambassadors turned without a word and walked out, their heads down.

  The warlords’ hopes of shaving the warning time to the closest possible margin had quite literally gone up in th
e smoke of attack, and Japan had started hostilities without giving prior notification. Later, this failure to declare war would be made part of the charges on which the Japanese war criminals were tried—and convicted, some of them paying with their lives. Togo would try to exonerate himself by throwing the blame on the embassy personnel for neglecting to decipher the cables promptly and to type the ultimatum at once. Perhaps some lawyer’s talking point might have been salvaged if the ambassadors had grabbed Okumura’s original copy, no matter how messy, and taken it to Hull at 1 p.m., or if they had taken the first few pages of the fair copy at 1 p.m. and directed the embassy staff to rush the other pages over as completed. But even if the entire document had been delivered on time, the 25 minutes that remained until the attack would not have been sufficient time for all the steps needed to prevent surprise: reading the document, guessing that a military attack was intended, notifying the War and Navy departments, composing, enciphering, transmitting, and deciphering an appropriate warning, and alerting the outpost forces. This was just what the shoguns intended. But just as a multitude of human errors on the part of Americans, cascading one atop the other, helped make tactical surprise perfect, so a series of similar human errors on the part of the Japanese deprived them of their last vestige of legality.

  Shortly after the attack commenced, Tadao Fuchikama, a messenger for the Honolulu office of R.C.A., picked up a batch of cables for delivery. He knew that the war had started and that it was the Japanese who were attacking the ships in the harbor, but he felt he had his job to do anyway. He glanced at the addresses on the envelopes, including the one marked “Commanding General,” and planned an efficient route. Shafter was well down the list. His motorcycle progressed slowly through the jammed traffic; once he was stopped by National Guardsmen who had almost taken him for a paratrooper. At 11:45, almost two hours after the last attackers had vanished, Marshall’s warning message was delivered to the signal officer. It got to the decoding officer at 2:40 that afternoon and to Short himself at 3. He took one look at it and threw it into the wastebasket, saying that it wasn’t of the slightest interest.

  The fourteenth part of the Japanese ultimatum, as distributed to MAGIC recipients

  In Tokyo, Grew was awakened at 7 a.m. by the telephone, summoning him to a meeting at 7:30 with Togo. On Grew’s arrival, the Foreign Minister gave him the Emperor’s reply to the President. He thanked Grew for his cooperation and saw him off at the door. Four hours had elapsed since the attack had begun, but Togo never mentioned it. Shortly thereafter, Grew learned of the outbreak of hostilities from an extra of the Yomiuri Shimbun hawked outside his window. The Japanese soon closed the embassy gates and prohibited cipher telegrams. Grew ordered execution of the State Department regulation to destroy all codes. The embassy’s second and third secretaries, Charles E. Bohlen and James Espy, locked the code room from the inside and destroyed the several score documents. “No Japanese interrupted that process,” Grew wrote, “nor could he have, since the heavy door of the code room was securely locked. None of our codes, nor any part of them, nor any of our confidential correspondence fell into the hands of the Japanese.”

  The last page of the Japanese note as typed by First Secretary Katzuso Okumura and handed to Secretary of State Cordell Hull while Pearl Harbor was being attacked

  The Japanese themselves were not so smart. They did all right in Washington, breaking up their last code machine and burning all remaining codes after encoding a final message that they were so doing—the last message sent on the Washington-Tokyo circuit, and read, of course, by the American code-breakers. But in Honolulu, police guarding the consulate after the attack smelled papers burning and saw smoke coming from behind a door. Fearing a conflagration, they broke in and found the consulate staff burning its remaining documents in a washtub on the floor. The police confiscated what proved to be the telegraph file plus five burlap sacks full of torn papers. These reached Rochefort’s unit that evening. Woodward was still working long hours in an attempt to break the PA-K2 messages that Mayfield had brought. Since the attack, the fear of sabotage had swelled to enormous proportions. “Nothing coming to light,” his notes read, “so it was decided to reverse the process of deciphering, allowing for the encoding party to have either purposely encrypted the messages in this manner or possibly to have made an error in using the system employed due to confusion. This netted results.”

  At about 2 a.m. on December 9, he cracked one of the messages picked up in the consulate. It was one sent from the Foreign Ministry to Kita on the 6th: “Please wire immediately re the latter part of my #123 any movements of the fleet after the 4th.” With this, he was soon able to unlock the other PAK2 messages—including the long one setting up Kühn’s light-signaling system. At about the same time in OP-20-GZ, Kramer, who had been too busy with the 13 parts on Saturday to work on this message, was breaking out charts of Oahu and Maui to help in degarbling the message, which was finally reduced to plaintext by Thursday. Marshall later said that it was the first message that clearly indicated an attack on Pearl to him—but this was, of course, after the fact. The information from it was immediately passed to counterintelligence units in Hawaii, where invasion was thought highly probable. Their agents interrogated residents in the neighborhood of the houses mentioned in the dispatch and listened to recordings of KGMB want ads, but found that the signal system had never been used. They arrested Kühn, who confirmed this. He was convicted on espionage charges and imprisoned at Leavenworth Penitentiary until after the war, when he was paroled to leave the country.

  On December 7, while Honolulu was still reeling from the devastation of the attack, F.C.C. monitors there picked up a Japanese-language news broadcast from station JZI in Japan. The announcer boasted of a “death-defying raid” at Pearl, reported other events, and, about halfway through the broadcast, declared: “Allow me to especially make a weather forecast at this time: west wind clear.” The O.N.I, translator noted that “as far as I can recollect, no such weather forecast has ever been made before” and that “it may be some sort of code.” It was the long-awaited winds code execute, apparently sent indicating war with Britain to make sure that some Japanese outpost that had not reported destroying its codes by the codeword HARUNA would burn them.

  Shortly after noon in Washington on the day after the attack, the President of the United States stood before a stormily applauding joint session of Congress and opened a black looseleaf notebook. When the cheers had subsided into a hushed solemnity, he began to speak:

  Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

  He alluded to the fatal Japanese delay in delivering the ultimatum:

  The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its Government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in Oahu, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to the Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. While this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or armed attack.

  The war was on. The most treacherous onslaught in history had succeeded. Japan had cloaked the strike force in absolute secrecy. She had dissembled with diplomatic conversations and with jabs toward the south. She had—in a precaution whose wisdom she but dimly realized—swathed her plans in a communications security so all-enveloping that not a whisper of them ever floated onto the airwaves.

  But if the cryptanalysts had no chance to warn of the attack and save American lives before the war, they found ample opportunities to exert their subtle and pervasive talents during the struggle. In the 1,350 days of conflict in which an angry America turned Japan’s tactical victory at Pearl Harbor into total strategic defeat, the cryptanalysts, in
the words of the Joint Congressional Committee, “contributed enormously to the defeat of the enemy, greatly shortened the war, and saved many thousands of lives.”

  That, however, is another story.

  * Not the same thing as the American name J for the J series of Japanese codes.

  * Whence, apparently, its codename. In American prewar military and naval parlance, the codeword ORANGE meant Japan in official papers such as war plans, and even in personal letters between high-ranking officers. In the 1930s, Lieutenant Jack S. Holtwick, Jr., a Navy cryptanalyst, built a machine to solve a Japanese diplomatic cipher that was abandoned in 1938. American cryptanalysts could very naturally have called it the ORANGE machine. As the successors of this system appeared, each increasingly enigmatic, their American codenames might well have progressively deepened in hue.

  * Not to be confused with Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.

  * This is the literal translation made by Mr. Cory of GZ and given in MAGIC. But Friedman and others have contended that it does not take into account the Japanese tendency to speak in circumlocution and by indirection. The spirit of it might better be rendered into English, Friedman suggested, as “on the brink of catastrophe” or “on the verge of disaster.” Kramer conceded that the words should not be interpreted as mildly as the English seems to indicate, but could imply “relations are reaching a crisis.” The British translated this phrase as “Relations between Japan and (name of country) are extremely critical.”