Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2004/11/11
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 11:16 PM 11/9/04 -0700, GREG LORENZO wrote: >> >The history books say that US Naval Intelligence was able to break Japan's diplomatic codes fairly quickly. The Naval Code (purple?) was a much harder nut to crack. I've always wondered if Germany and Japan were able to break allied codes during WWII. ----------------------- Well, the actual breaking of the Japanese Purple (Diplomatic) Code, later named MAGIC, was done by a US War Department (Army) team, though the two services later shared the decryption and, in fact, the Navy ran the field offices which either intercepted the message traffic or which interceipted and decrypted it, such as Stations CAST (originally Shanghai, later at Monkey Point at Fort Mills on Corregidor, PI, and then moved to Melbourne, Australia), HYPO (Pearl Harbor, intercept only), WHISKEY (Washington, DC), and another in San Francisco, California (intercept only?). The distribution of the 14-part Japanese message terminating negotiations was distributed by the Navy as it happened to be intercepted and decrypted during their day -- the two services shared the duties on a day-by-day basis. The British, of course, with grand Polish and significant French assistance, cracked the German high-level ENIGMA code, and later cracked a number of other codes including most of the tactical codes used by the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine. All of this was shared with the US and the British found themselves running, in response, one of the largest PURPLE centers in New Delhi, India. The Japanese never managed to do much with breaking US codes other than lower-level codes and this was countered by the US habit of sending much traffic in slang. The Japanese destroyed all of their decryption material at the end of the Second World War and, thus, we have gaps in our knowledge of their abilities. (The only PURPLE machines which survived the War were those built by the US: the Japanese managed to destroy ALL of their machines, even that at the Lisbon Embassy.) The Germans cracked the British Convoy Code early on and the British did not glom onto this until 1943 or '44. The Germans also managed to tap the trans-Atlantic cable and to decipher the scrambled talks between Roosevelt and Churchill, something not known until a decade or so after the War ended. (Fortunately, Churchill's circumlocutions and Roosevelt's ready responses to these made these intercepts far less valuable than they otherwise would have been.) The Italians, on the other hand, broke almost everyone else's codes. They even cracked ENIGMA and told the Germans that this Code was permeable to analysis and breaking, though the Germans did not react. The Italians had great fun in decoding the US State Department's standard diplomatic code -- during 1940 and 1941, they passed on all of the reports transmitted by the US military attache in Cairo, Lt Col Bonner Fellers, to the Germans -- Rommel was to later name him, "my Bonnie Feller", an odd ocassion for humor by that generally morose general. The US, UK, Germans, and Italians all cracked the Soviet codes in use during the War: the Verona Transcripts which surfaced a decade or so back are a product of that. Marc msmall@infionline.net FAX: +540/343-7315 Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir!