War History
Posts: 69
Joined: 4/30/2010 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: rtrapasso The US diplomatic codes were a farce prior to Pearl Harbor, and to some extent even afterwards... the US knew it, and often would send sensitive material in diplomatic pouches, or even in some cases asking the Brits to transmit sensitive information in BRITISH codes... This came to a pretty abrupt end with the outbreak of war and the proliferation of US coding machines. During the war, Japanese successes against US (and apparently other Allied codes) was essentially zero... they had partially solved a low level cipher used between combat aircraft at one point, but that was of little use and they lost that when there was a change in code (rather frequent, esp. compared to the Japanese frequency in changing codes). Other than this, Japanese successes against Allied codes was practically zip. They got information by traffic analysis, radio intercepts of sometimes uncoded messages (it can be astonishing how far a radio signal can bounce sometimes), and seizing documents, though, as well as prisoner interrogations. Where the US and Brits had tens of thousands of people working on codes and intel(and of the entire conglomeration of folk, probably in the 100,000 range), the Japanese had a few folk (dozens?) usually assigned to military intel work (as opposed to internal secret police intel work). For instance, for the entire Philippines Theater operations they had one guy assigned to work afternoons on intel. He said he had a box of the Japanese equivalent 3x5 cards he kept in the closet as his resources. Apparently, intel work (like other things) was not high on the list of things Bushido. 2 Tokyo Rose reports that I am personally aware of: 1) The guys on their way to the Kiska invasion had no idea where they were headed when they boarded ship. Tokyo Rose interrupted the sweet warblings of the Andrews Sisters on shortwave radio. "All you boys headed for Kiska Island," she warned, "are in for a big surprise." She then listed their unit names, location and numbers, as well as the size of their assembling fleet at Adak, and informed the men of the exact time and date of their secret invasion. 2) The day the 96th division was supposed to land on Yap (their orders were changed and they were instead sent to Leyte a few days before their scheduled Yap landing) Tokyo Rose reported the division wiped out on the beaches. My father was in the division and heard the broadcast. So to just write off the Japanese intell ability so lightly is rather irresponsible. Not to mention that I am sure that Japanese intell services didn't give every piece of info they had to the propaganda radio ministry. This is a small snapshot of their actual abilities. Tokyo Rose (Iva Ikuko Toguri D'Aquino) was convicted in part for announcing ship movements. quote:
ORIGINAL: mike scholl 1 "While digging through the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Md., last summer," Toshihiro Minohara, a "young Japanese American professor [at Kobe University,] stumbled upon a document, declassified by the CIA about five years ago, that proved that Tokyo had succeeded in breaking the U.S. and British diplomatic codes. A few microfilmed documents, showing the Japanese translations of the telegrams, were attached... Unfortunately for them, the war wasn't run by diplomats. So once it started, reading the Diplomatic Code wasn't of much use in combat. Though I'm sure it was depressing for the Japs to read just how much Lend Lease material was being sent to Britain and Russia. Nice of you to focus on 1 part and totally ignore the first paragraph. Guess its easier to make your point by ignoring other facts that stand in the way of that point. "In contrast to the alliied side of the Pacific war the fact is widely unknown to historians that also Japan since the early 1930s was able to read the military and diplomatic ciphers of the United States as well as of Great Britain, though to a lesser degree than their enemies, and exchanged cryptographic information with the Axis partners, including captured code books."
< Message edited by War History -- 10/27/2010 10:33:39 PM >
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