Lecture of Opportunity | David Hatch: The Cryptology Behind the Battle of Midway 

I think Rochefort's role in breaking JN-25 has been well understood since at least the late 60s. He got screwed by the Navy, but historians recognized him for his accomplishments and, thankfully, that recognition came before he died in 1976.

@ L Certainly one of the heroes Intel has no value unless brave men male use of it. And commanders correctly use it.

The officer who decided WW1 would end at the eleventh hour (of the eleventh day of the eleventh month) instead of at some time in that afternoon, inspired though he was, was denied a war bounty of [allegedly] £100k [an immense sum at the time] because of that inspired initiative. 'Jobsworths' rule OK . . . !

Our pleasure!

We were still doing manual morse intercept in the 80's, I was in the Marines in the 80's.

I was also an intercept operator, voice intercept, they would usually send out two ditty-boppers with one of us and throw in some analyst.

A Shemya survivor here. Spent 16 months, 4 days and 12 hours on "The Rock" back in the early 70s. ELINT 98J. ASA Lives!

@@829joliver In my day Shemya was a hardship tour, a year and outa' there. Did that change or did you extend for an early out? Heard stories about the winds of Shemya, true or not? Finish a can of beer and just throw it in the air and it went away?

@@dennisspencer1113 You are correct, Sir - As a "hardship tour", Shemya was only a year. And yes, I extended to qualify for an early ETS (Ironically, I had orders in hand for my next duty station - Sinop). Combined with the RIF for all first-term ASA enlistees, I got out 17 months early! This RIF didn't make my AFSS collogues happy as they were stuck with their original four year enlistments. In answer to your question, the winds on Shemya were fierce on many a day. I was there when the roof blew off one of the wings of the Composite Bldg directly above our third floor barracks rooms. The wind gust that evening was estimated to be 130 MPH...

Next time he better have an understudy because he might have a coronary and punch out while lecturing which will annoy the listeners. If it is asthma I feel sorry for him, if from smoking then shame on him. You never can tell.

I agree, I’m kinda ashamed to admit I had to stop listening about five minutes into the presentation; Couldn’t take the breathless panting, whizzing, and grunting…. My problem though, not the knowledgeable presenter.

King resisted the institution of convoys on the US east coast in early 1942; ships that had fought across the Atlantic were slaughtered. Caribbean tankers were badly hit too.

Actually the problem was with the Bureau of Naval Ordinance. King was and is considered one of the better theater commanders of WW2 and an excellent CNO, the convoy blunder notwithstanding.

Theft? Britain captured books from German U-boats and weather ships, but never let on . . .

Why would you need a computer? I would think I that at least one code book survived to the end of the war. (Speculation, sure, but still......)

@@stan.rarick8556 You also need the one time additive pads which were allegedly completely random. If you wanted to automate it , all you could do is do non carry subtractions from the intercept 5 digit numbers based on an incremented five digit number number starting 11111 and see what Japanese word was extracted. There are some simplifications available based on the example we saw in the talk. TEF

Good point. It happens with a great deal of repetition, doesn't it?

And i thought the war of game show host executives against techs was a newer phenomenon

@ Shandy Staggs Outsider was part of it, but the major issue was reporting directly to Nimitz rather than to his superiors in Washington.

Same with the faulty torpedos

Yeah, Alexander Vindman. He did the right thing and was punished by your beloved Trump, you filthy, worthless Karen.

Hence why Japan stopped updating its code books, since getting the books out to all its captured islands and surface units would have been a huge challenge. I wonder if the Japanese ever asked the question after Coral Sea & Midway - how did the American carriers show up in the right place to attack us at the right time?

....and the Japanese DIDN'T know about the un-sea cable.

I was stationed on a mountaintop working for the NSA in the early 1970s; at least we had a great library. I read about every book I could get by Mr. Toland. The Rising Sun was the first which got me hooked. Thanks for resurrecting fond memories. Have a safe weekend.

@@mountainmanws , Good on ya mate. Have you read Pearl Harbor: The REAL History - Mother Of All Conspiracies rense.com/general10/consp.htm ? What say you? Wayne Patterson has studied the Pearl Harbor history and has some disagreement with this information and he disagrees with Robert Stinnett in Day of Deceit. I tend to think that FDR did know what was happening and what was about to happen.

The Army tried to teach me Japanese. 46 weeks, 6 hours a day, plus 4 hours of homework. I couldn’t read a newspaper, but some of my classmates could.

@@robertewalt7789 6

@@mountainmanws Toland, a name which appears in Clancy's book, 'Red Storm Rising'. His other stories have similar 'coincidences' . . .

It is NOT the complexity of the language, it was the total LACK of books on Navajo.

Yeah how are the two things related?

@@rogerpattube In order to "crack" a cypher, it must be translated into the original human language. This cannot be done without detailed knowledge of the language. There were absolutely no sources of information on the Navajo Language outside of the United States at the time. Our Japaneze code-breakers were all competent in Japanese. Otherwise, they could not possibly have succeeded.

One reason being is the fact that there were never any Navajo code talkers in the Pacific. The Navajo code talkers were used only for local tactical messages where time to decode would take too long and never for over all command or strategic messages.

@ Stan .Rarick Japanese is complex. The number of Americans who spoke Japanese was very small. Even today the number is not large.

@ neil03152 Why was that luck?

Neil just is angry that Britain didn’t win a major naval victory

R.i.p. Rip

I just found Agawa's 'The Reluctant Admiral' (Kodansha 1979) in a consignment shop (Nichi Bei Busan) in Japantown, San Jose, California. I look forward to checking this out! CHEERS

GH1618 yes. Based on the alignment of forces by the IJN it would certainly indicate from one standpoint that from a chronological order the IJN was going to capture Midway first. Kondo’s invasion force was southwest of Midway and really not in a position to do anything else. This plan was flawed though. Wake Island should have shown the IJN that capturing an island doesn’t come all that easily. In addition, the IJN would have put themselves in a vulnerable position when performing an amphibious landing. From another perspective how the IJN placed their Main Force which was 300 miles from Midway it kind of shows Yamamoto wanted a US fleet to engage his Mobile Force to lure any carriers into battle in case they were there. The best approach is having your vessels in a position where it is flexible enough to handle either scenario. US carriers engage or they do not. Safer play is to assume they are there and the plan is to lure the carriers into battle first. It they so happen not to be there or don’t want to engage then attack and occupy Midway first. Had the IJN brought their battleships into the equation and used these vessels to shell Midway then they probably would have put themselves in a position to have their air fleet ready to hit any US carriers out there.

@ Great Horned Owl Nimitz is one of my heroes. I have always wondered about that. He did keep Layton.

Yamamoto knew the US Navy was mentality was tougher than most of the Imperial Navy because he gambled with them.

Easy slip of the tongue. Happens all the time on live TV.

In the United States...referring to how many Americans went over to learn Japanese as a Second Language.

Brian Jones - the presenter’s history on the US Navy’s cryptology efforts before and during the Midway campaign are dead nuts on. During his introduction Mr. Hatch indeed states that he is not an expert on the Battle of Midway. He has much more information than Parshall and Tully on the specifics - which is natural given that Mr. Hatch works for NSA.

Yamamoto had a fine strategic grasp of the Japanese dilemma - small, import dependent economy with a large population up against the world's single largest economy and a larger population than Japan's. However, Midway was an absolute train wreck of a plan. Everything was predicated on the element of surprise, as at Pearl Harbor six months earlier. Dispersing ships across five separated task forces approaching Midway, leaving the unscathed Zuikaku aircraft carrier behind, wasting two light carriers on the pointless Aleutians diversion, and then trying to control all the related ships and aircraft via coded radio traffic was an invitation to defeat in detail. To top it all, the Midway invasion talk force was spotted at 9am on 03JUN1942 and bombed by Midway based B-17s that afternoon. How could Yamamoto expect the carrier based air raid of 7am on 04JUN1942 to achieve surprise? Not one Japanese aircraft flew over Pearl Harbor during the weeks leading up to 03JUN1942, but it was assumed the American carriers would be there, just as they had been assumed to be there on 07DEC1941. Yamamoto was taking enormous risks again, as at Pearl Harbor and the Indian Ocean Raid of April 1942, and Nimitz turned out to be the superior poker player with Rochefort having worked out Yamamoto's "tells."

If you believe that book, the British did everything and we did nothing. The British did work on JN-25, and did make some progress, but no more progress than we made. After the war started, we made much more progress.

@Michael, Do you place any stock in Pearl Harbor: The REAL History - Mother Of All Conspiracies rense.com/general10/consp.htm

Rich Glenn - Commander Rochefort’s group, based in Hawaii, was the key. The matter is fully discussed in Adm. Layton’s memoire.

Michael Sommers the British only got were they where through the help of the Polish and their work with the Enigma machine.

@ Rich Glenn The Americans and British were cooperating. The British did not have substantial naval forces in the theater that could use the Japanese decrypts.

He has as a major health problem, hypertension and some other issues.

Ann Onymous but yet decrypts got bad again in Aug 1942 for the Battle of Savo Island? Come on. Let’s do batter.

Ann Onymous dude. Listen to yourself. You don’t make any sense. So per you the US just happened to get everything right for Midway and they absolutely knew it but yet for everything else you have some excuse for it.

Ann Onymous dude you don’t make any sense again. I just proved your code breaking doesn’t hold water. What happened at Savo Island was a fiasco. The US was not even prepared for night fighting. The only reason the US went on to win future battles because the number of vessels were already turning in their favor. Duh!!! The IJN were down 4 main carriers. The US brought over the Wasp and had the Saratoga plus Hornet and Enterprise. It’s now 4 to 2. The escort carriers the US had become more useful when you have 4 main carriers vs only 1 or 2. You seemed to be in the group that even if the IJN won at Midway it would not have mattered but yet you nor Parshall nor anybody can bring up a battle scenario in how the US was going to change the course of the war. None of you have any realistic imagination because you are all biases for the US. You and others think the battle of Midway needed to be a carrier vs carrier battle but when I introduce battleships you claim the US would have just ran away. 🤣😂 Funny how Parshall of Shattered Sword says the IJN battleships were too slow. 😂🤣 You never even envisioned the IJN capturing the Hornet and Enterprise. This easily could have happened. There is no way the US was going to run from the mere report of 2 battleships 6 cruisers and 10 destroyers heading east. Come on. They would have waited longer until they were done sightings of carriers. By this time the IJN planes would be attacking Midway and the IJN battleships are moving into position. And the funny part with your position of how the US was going to always run away then when exactly were they going to engage the powerful IJN force had they won at Midway. Well? Name the time and place. You can’t. Or are you going to say late 1944?

Ann Onymous Shoho was not available after Midway. It wasn’t even at Midway. She was sunk at the Battle of Coral Sea. Only Zuikaku and Shokaku were fleet carriers. Over 60 plane capacity plus over 30 knots. 34.5 to be exact. All the rest of the carriers were small carriers which none could do 30 knots. They only become valuable as “compliments” to the rest of the Main carrier force. They proved how ineffective they were alone. You keep referring back to code breaking but in reality it was simply the stupidity of the IJN with their flawed battle plans and even communications. At least I laid out a very realistic plan as to how the IJN could have captured the Hornet and Enterprise. You can’t even devise a battle plan that would have turned things around for the US after a major IJN victory at Midway. Quit saying this unless you can provide a battle plan scenario.

Ann Onymous never saw these weak responses from you. So in the end you agree Japan lost because of their stupidity. None of the other stuff like code breaking really mattered.

He and 'Vinegar Joe' must have had the same parents!

Yes, King wouldn't encourage a blackout on the east coast to avoid the German U-boats being able to see the profiles of the merchant ships and use there advanced (highly advanced over our early war torpedos) Long Line torpedos on these sitting duck merchant ships. He didn't want to panic the citizens of the east coast at the expense of the merchant marines of the times. We wouldn't want to ruin someones night out in New York just to protect a merchant mariner.

I would agree. King's prejudice against anything British was very unfortunate. I think it defies logic to think that you know how to fight the U-boats better than the people who had been fighting them for 2 years.

American torpedos- the first two years of the war the torpedos were mal-functioning. King knew about this but did not react. I read a story about a Naval aviator that wrote the CIC with his experience. He was Court Marshalled.

I think you're being unfair to Adm King. The US was slow to resct to U Boats on coast that issue was above his oay grade. As to the incredible and damnable scandal re the Mark14 torpedo blame BuOrd (Bureau of Ordnance). Check out the Drachinifiel channel and look it up "Failure is like onions"

There's probably more than 2,000 Native Americans too, which means he was referring to numbers in the military.

@@rogerpattube exactly

@ janis317 By armed you seem to be referring to the guns. Armored is another issue. Japanese battleships were more battle cruisers.

He did get some official recognition but not enough. There was a book out recently that gives credit for changing the World War, it wasn't just Midway, there were several other battles they changed. But the big thing is because Nimitz was able to manage the Pacific War with much fewer resources, it also allowed the allies to do better in Europe. Another thing Australia was virtually defenseless because it sent it's soldiers to help Britain and they fought in Europe and Africa. Most Austrailian soldier were gone before Japan started expanding its Empire in the Pacific.

He wasn't an enemy combatant in time of war?

@@rogerpattube Revenge for Pear Harbor.

war ,,he/they started it with murder at pearl, llama moto murder schmurder

typical empty channel

A rash act which risked compromise of Ultra/Magic. We got away with it . . .