MIDWAY, THE INTELLIGENCE BATTLE & A LESSON

The Battle of Midway took place between June 4th and June 7th, 1942, it marked the turning point in the war against Japan. A massive victory to the US aided by Australian forces.

Recently I watched the latest movie on this subject. It was a blood, guts and glory affair in many ways. The script was lacking, the actors were obviously acting in too many cases but to outweigh those failings the CGI was stunning, it was almost as if you were on those ships or in those aircraft in the height of battle. Bombs, bullets and crashing aircraft littered the screen.

The writers had paid a great deal of attention to historical information as they stitched together a number of individual events depicting great courage and stoicism on both sides of the battle. The USN deckhand who literally used his feet to steer a bomb that had dropped from its underwing mounting on an aircraft and slid across the deck of a carrier, another instance where a seaman, 3rd class, leaped into the rear gunner's position of a deck bound bomber and began firing at a Japanese fighter that was plunging towards him at a rapid rate of knots. His effort resulted in the attacking aircraft being shot up so badly that the pilot missed his target by just a few meters and plunged into the sea alongside the ship. Admiral 'Bull' Halsey saw the event and called for the seaman to his side, he promoted him to Seaman 1st class on the spot.  Another example was the incredible decision by a Japanese officer who elected to go down with his ship when it became too badly damaged to be salvaged and was eventually torpedoed by his own side and sent to a watery grave.

US NAVAL INTELLIGENCE

Whilst the action aspects of the film were fascinating, it was the accounts of just how the Intelligence group 'Station Hypo', based at Pearl Harbour had cracked and uncovered the Japanese plans to hit Midway.

Not the least fascinating aspect was the makeup of the intelligence team, many of whom were musicians from the Band on the USS California which had been badly damaged at Pearl Harbour just 6 months earlier. Commander James Rochefort, who headed up the team, reasoned that their musical abilities made them excellent mathematical problem solvers. Between them, they set to work on the Japanese code JN-25, and successfully identified that there was to be a full-scale attack on Midway.

THE AUSTRALIAN CONNECTION

The US and it's friends had been working assiduously on cracking the Japanese JN-25 code with much of the original work having been carried out pre-war, 1939, in Hong Kong by the Royal Navy's Far East Combined Bureaux a tri-service effort set up to focus on Japanese codes, one of which was designated code 'D'. The US Navy named this code JN-25. Australia's Commander Eric Nave, who had been transferred from the RAN to the Royal Navy, led the code-cracking team at that time. 

Commander, later Captain Nave was the man who wrote the Australian Code Watchers code in the early 40s. 

In May 1941 on his return to the RAN he set up a small Naval Intelligence cryptographic group in Melbourne which was quickly joined with Army Intelligence and became the SIB, The Special Intelligence Bureaux. In 1942 SIB became part of FRUMEL, (Fleet Radio Unit), a combined US, Australian and British intelligence team. Internal politics, including clashes with Commander Rupert Long and US Navy officers, saw Nave sidelined at least for a while.

Commander Nave had a reputation for withholding information on various codes and keys to codes to the extent that some of his colleagues used to look forward to him having a day off when they would find the keys to his safe and help themselves to the information.

It is widely thought that Nave was the RAN intelligence expert that in 1949, examined the Somerton Man code whilst in his home state of South Australia. His earlier reputation could be said to cast some doubt on his published findings.

LESSONS FOR THE SOMERTON MAN CASE

What can be learned from these events and how could that impact the ongoing work on the Somerton Man case? Please bear with me and I will explain.

In one scene of the film, Admiral Nimitz asked Commander Rochefort a question, he wanted to know how they had cracked the Japanese code and how reliable were the findings. He wanted a no gloss version, he wanted facts on which he could base his decisions.

Rochefort responded with an analogy that went something like this:

 'Imagine that we were to organise a party on an island, we would, of course, refer to the island by name, we would set about sending invitations then organising the various items and supplies we would need including food, alcohol, maybe flowers and so on. Well, this is exactly what we have here. From an analysis of coded Japanese radio traffic, we have been able to identify and even confirm the location of an upcoming 'party'. We have identified the location and the various invitees, what they're objectives will be, what items they would be supplying and exactly when and from which direction they will be coming.'

What impressed me most was just how they identified the target. For some time the group had known that the Japanese were planning a major operation in the Central Pacific which would sometimes be referred to as 'AF' and they had suspected that it was Midway but they needed it to be confirmed.

Rochefort gained permission for an 'in the clear' message to be sent from Midway to Navy HQ. The message spoke of problems with the water filtration plant on Midway and they were running out of fresh drinking water. Sure enough, a few days later a Japanese message was intercepted stating that 'AF' was running out of drinking water. The target was Midway and it was confirmed.

LESSONS LEARNED?

Behind all these stories and conclusions reached, was a massive effort, hundreds if not thousands of short messages were intercepted with not all of them being completely decoded. The analysts relied upon collecting small scraps of readable information from all of these messages and gradually built a picture of what was really being planned. Interestingly this was the case with the VENONA coded cables, rarely was a cable completely decoded, they relied on building completed pictures from scraps of decodes.

We can apply much of this lesson to the Somerton Man case and in particular the Code Page. Over the years we have collected small scraps of information from the disguised micro writing found in various locations, including the larger letters of the 'code'.

THE LETTER Q

From the letter Q, we have the string XJ232XRANX35XCA23. The letter X is a delineator and the full interpretation is as follows:

1. The J232 was the hull number of HMAS Deloraine and RAN (Royal Australian Navy) corvette

2. The number 35 is somewhat of a challenge, it is possible that it stands for 35 minutes, the time between the Deloraine leaving Sydney Harbour followed by the New Orleans.

2. CA 23 was the hull number of USS New Orleans, a US Navy cruiser that had been badly damaged in battle and arrived in Sydney Harbour on December 24th, 1942 for repairs.

3. From Naval records, specifically the Log of the Deloraine, we know that these two ships were close together in Sydney Harbour on the morning of 7th March 1943 as the New Orleans steamed out toward its homeport at Puget Sound. The Deloraine had been assigned as a screen as the New Orleans departed.

To clarify a point, this information about the two ships was written down in the clear, it was not encoded. That doesn't necessarily mean that all of the information on the code page is in the clear but some quite definitely is.

The telephone numbers

Neither the nurse's telephone number nor that of the bank which was also found was encoded, they were in the clear. In the post previous to this, we published another telephone number, it too was in the clear. Of these telephone numbers, two had an X prefix and one had the prefix CA. These are both Adelaide prefixes, the X is for Somerton, Glenelg, Brighton and the CA was for a central Adelaide number.

The next steps for this blog in regards to telephone numbers, and we do have more, is to source a full list of Adelaide telephone number prefixes and assess how many of the found and yet to be found strings of letters and numbers could be yet more telephone numbers from Adelaide. There is a proviso, we must allow for the fact that some numbers may also be from the Sydney area. That is because the ship movements were from Sydney Harbour in 1943 and the Adelaide numbers were written down between late 46 and late November 1948.

There is much work to be done and it will take time. If others want to take up the challenge, I will be publishing again the instructions on how to uncover the micro code together with examples. It doesn't stop with the code page as you will read in the next post.