Marching Orders: The Untold Story of How the American Breaking of the Japanese Secret Codes Led to the Defeat of Nazi Germany and Japan

by Bruce Lee

The paper claims that when the Pentagon’s European Order of Battle Section brought items directly to Marshall’s attention, “it has been estimated that 35 percent were taken from Ultra/Magic traffic.” Yet another 32 percent of information received from other intelligence sources was corroborated by Ultra/Magic sources. The remaining 32 percent of the information adjudged to be accurate came from operational cables from various Allied commands abroad. In summation then: The ability of the British and the Americans to break the enemy’s Ultra/Magic radio traffic provided Marshall with information about the strategic intentions and the disposition of the Axis forces in Europe that was believed to be 67 percent correct. This is probably the greatest intelligence success in military history.

“The paltry sum that Washington spent prior to 1941 to create the machine that broke the Japanese Magic ciphers produced the best return on investment in American military history.”2 Now, let’s estimate the contribution that breaking the Ultra/Magic codes made to Allied military effectiveness. Prime Minister Churchill said the results were worth many, many more divisions. Admiral Chester Nimitz rated the value of breaking Magic as the equivalent of another whole Pacific Fleet. And General Thomas Handy, Deputy Chief of Staff of the US Army during the entire war, claimed that it shortened the course of the war in Europe by a full year.

This is the only book that collates and compares the actual orders issued by General Marshall with the information he received from the Magic Summaries on a daily basis during the war—and, later, into the early months of America’s occupation of Japan. (2) It is the first book to point out that Generals Eisenhower and Bradley, and Field Marshall Montgomery, benefited prior to the invasion of Europe by knowing that (a) Hitler had swallowed the Allied deception plans about where they would land in Europe; (b) the Allied leaders knew the disposition of the German forces defending the beaches; (c) the

Allies also knew why Hitler would not release reserve forces to defend against the Allied invasion. This gave the Allied generals the confidence to endure terrible casualties, plus the fortitude to keep committing troops even when the success of the invasion was in doubt. Marching Orders is also the first book to explain the political and military considerations that led General Marshall to order Supreme Commander Eisenhower to halt on the Elbe River and let the Russians capture Berlin. And it is the first book to show how the use of Ultra/Magic intercepts, especially the diplomatic traffic between Tokyo and Moscow, helped the Allies reach the tragic decision to use atomic weapons on Japan and end the war in a “quick and decisive manner.”

Today, British intelligence experts claim that the Allied breaking of Ultra/Magic shortened the course of the war by two years!

As it was, however, a new and uncertain President Harry S. Truman was faced with the fact, in the short period of time that the atomic bomb was first tested successfully on July 16, 1945, and the time the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, that Japan had not agreed to the Allied demand for unconditional surrender. Furthermore, Truman had no choice but to accept as valid the horrific casualties anticipated in an American invasion of Japan. And given the additional information gleaned from Magic/Ultra sources that (1) the Japanese had issued orders to kill all their Allied POW in the event of an invasion of Japan, and (2) the Japanese militarists had been given the approval of Emperor Hirohito to try to establish a new treaty between Japan and the Soviet Union that would divide China between the two nations, Truman was forced to use atomic weapons against Japan.

The total of wartime dead between the years 1939–1945 is 53 million! This averages 7.5 million people killed each year of the war. Thus, if the Allied use of the Ultra/Magic decrypts helped shorten the course of the war by two years, it means the potential saving of 15 million lives!

The attacking American forces would suffer 833,000 casualties in the first thirty days of the two proposed invasions of Japan. If the invasion lasted sixty days, the casualties would double. If the invasion lasted ninety days, the casualty figure would triple. The significance of the first figure—883,000 casualties—is this: The figure represents nearly three times the casualties suffered by America during the entire war. And, in 1945, this figure represented fifteen percent of our total armed forces, or nearly one percent of America’s total population of the time.

He replied that it was not until May 1945 that the British had begun to study casualty estimates for the invasion and forcible occupation of Japan. Foot and another RNVR officer named Rich were given all the casualty figures for the invasions made during the war, from Dieppe to Okinawa, and were told to work out a probable casualty rate for a seaborne invasion of Japan. In his letter Foot said: “I have never been able to forget our conclusion. The invasion would have cost 600,000 Allied dead, plus 900,000 Japanese dead. We specified that we counted service dead only, taking no account of civilian casualties.” I also had concluded in Marching Orders that if we had not dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, and

if we had merely continued our already scheduled fire bombings of 140 Japanese cities—in which from 100,000 to 300,000 civilians were already being killed in each attack—that the continued conventional bombing of Japan would have cost more than 14 million Japanese civilian dead! It took months for this issue to fade from the public eye. Finally, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote a New York Times op-ed article in which he said the decision to drop the atomic bomb “was the most tragic decision in our history.” He then said that he had “problems in seeing how a responsible President [Truman] could have done otherwise.”

The tragedy of the Smithsonian situation becomes apparent when one considers that Marching Orders was the first book to reveal how, in 1945, the US Army fooled the Japanese into believing we had never broken their diplomatic codes. This deception allowed the occupation government of General Douglas MacArthur to stay one step ahead of the new Japanese government in its attempts to control its ill-gotten wartime gains by creating secret bank accounts and dummy corporations around the world. Our reading of the postwar Ultra/Magic traffic also revealed that one of the first actions taken by the new post-war Japanese government was to create and finance a world-wide propaganda campaign depicting America and Great Britain as war criminals for their use of the atomic bomb. In explaining this new Japanese program to its embassies around the world, Foreign Minister Shigemitsu said that Tokyo’s reason for the campaign was to keep Emperor Hirohito from being named a war criminal, and to mitigate the Allied charges of myriad atrocities committed by the Japanese throughout the course of the Pacific war, especially their atrocities against Allied prisoners of war.

Instead of warning the American public about the forthcoming propaganda campaign, however, Washington invoked the excuse of national security. No one

was to know that the Allies had broken the Japanese and German codes during the war. Meanwhile, the Japanese kept spending more and more money around the world building their anti-American, anti-British campaign. The Japanese policy of denial continued. During the 1980s, for example, Japan spent more money lobbying Washington and people of influence than did any other country or organization....

As Chief of Staff Marshall viewed the world situation in January, 1942, only three weeks after Pearl Harbor, it looked like this: Nazi Germany and Italy together had invaded and occupied the following countries—Norway, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Sardinia, Albania, Greece, Morocco, French West Africa, Tunisia, Libya,

Syria, Abyssinia, Italian Somaliland, Madagascar, Rumania, Hungary, Iraq, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and all of Russia from within 30 miles of Moscow southward including the Crimea. For its part, Japan had invaded and occupied the following: Manchuria, Korea, all of northeast China, Formosa, Hong Kong, the Philippine Islands, French Indo-China (later to be called Vietnam), Malaya, Burma, Thailand, Sumatra, Borneo, New Guinea. In simple terms this meant that Japan controlled nearly one-quarter of the world’s population at the time.

Marshall knew that the Allies would never be able to achieve this numerical superiority in trying to regain the territory already occupied by Axis forces. Unless, of course, we knew about the enemy’s strategic and tactical intentions so we could use fewer men in attacks against relatively lightly-defended enemy positions. And this is where our ability to read the secret codes of the Axis gave us the vital edge. Consider the following: In June 1942, only seven months after Pearl Harbor, the US Navy won the battle of Midway. This changed the course of the war in the Pacific. Then, in August 1942, General Montgomery won his first victory at the battle of Alam Halfa. This changed the course of the war in North Africa and Europe. The common denominator of these two battles was that they were won because we had broken the Japanese and German radio codes.

daily briefings prepared by the European Order of Battle Section for General Marshall. An extensive search for these briefings has been unsuccessful. Only a few copies have been found; they are incredible in their detailed knowledge of the daily operations of the German army. Senior archivist John E. Taylor advised me that if these briefings do, in fact, exist that they would not be released.

When I began working on this project, I agreed with the conventional wisdom, expressed so well by Gordon Craig, that America’s “failure during the war against Hitler to coordinate its political with its military strategy was one of the main causes of the cold war, which it also conducted, in large part, with little regard for diplomacy and which ended with something less than a triumph.”1 Craig also points out that Eisenhower’s statement to General Marshall

in 1945 that “‘Berlin is no longer a particularly important objective’—is strikingly typical of the American leadership’s stubborn denial of any vital connection between politics and war.” Craig also makes the argument that immediately after Pearl Harbor, Anthony Eden’s proposal that “Britain and the U.S. concert their attitude toward political and territorial questions that were bound to arise in the future and then discuss them with the Soviet government was completely ignored in Washington.”

By overlaying the Magic Summaries on American strategy and studying the resulting events, one could see that the American Army—especially Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Chief of Staff Marshall, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower—had a far better understanding of the intentions of our enemies, and of the self-serving diplomacy of our allies, i.e., the British, the Russians, the French and others, than anyone previously thought.

For example, the Magic Summaries allowed General Marshall to refuse the urgent pleas of Prime Minister Churchill that British-American troops should capture Berlin ahead of the Russians. (I used to agree with Churchill on this point.) But as my research proves, Marshall

and his staff foresaw Churchill’s proposal forcing American troops into potentially bloody clashes with the Russians for no valid reason. This is not widely known, but I am convinced that this is one reason Marshall ordered Eisenhower to halt his final attack through Germany on the banks of the river Elbe—and not advance on Berlin—in March 1945, before Eisenhower began the assault from the Rhine River. More important to Marshall, as the Magic Summaries reveal, was ending the war in the Pacific quickly and preventing a last-minute alliance between Russia and Japan.

I agree with the comment made to me by a specialist at the National Security Agency, who was kind enough to unofficially review my manuscript, that “it is often very difficult to conclude how communications intelligence was used, even in the face of overwhelming circumstantial evidence that it must have been used in a certain way.” Thus, I am sure this work will draw criticism from certain quarters. In writing this work, however, I followed what I believed to be the rule of reasonable conclusions. In other words, if primary documentation makes a case for the linkage between supremely informative intelligence and tactical and strategic decisions that directly relate to that intelligence, then historians must, at the very least, consider the evidence.

The Army is not happy, even today, with discussing anything other than its politically correct version of the way it fought World War II. After the war Marshall acknowledged that American military leaders “discussed political things more than anything else.… But we were careful, exceedingly careful, never to discuss them with the British, and from that they took the count that we didn’t observe these things at all.…” As Warren Kimball explains, the American military’s public protests that they were not politicians were belied by their private actions.

Why does Stimson believe that he is partially responsible for the intelligence failure that causes Pearl Harbor? The answer lies back in time, when Stimson is secretary of state, in 1929, and Under Secretary Joseph Cotton tells him that a group of code breakers, known as the Black Chamber, is operating in New York City deciphering and reading the messages sent to foreign ambassadors in Washington.

At the time, it matters not to Stimson that this so-called Black Chamber was originally created by the U.S. Army, and to hide its operations that the Army slipped the Black Chamber into the State Department’s budget (only $40,000 per year), or that the information the Black Chamber produces guarantees the supremacy of U.S. Navy battleships in the Pacific for twenty-odd years. What matters to Wall Street lawyer Stimson is that the Black Chamber, by God, is damnably unethical.

As a result of Stimson’s failure to understand what is going on in the real world, the State Department withdraws its funding of the Black Chamber, and America’s chief code-breaker

of the time, Herbert Yardley, is fired. Yardley then goes public and writes a book that explains how the Americans have hoodwinked the Japanese about the numbers and tonnage and the caliber of guns they can use in their capital ships. Duly warned, the Japanese change their codes. Fortunately, the Army is prepared for such weak-kneed predilections of various civilian appointees, even the secretary of state. The Army has secretly kept a second arrow in its quiver. Under the title of chief signal officer, the incredible cryptographer William F. Friedman continues reading the diplomatic mail of various countries, including Japan.

By 1934, the current secretary of war, Harry H. Woodring, hears the thunder and sees the storm clouds gathering on the world’s horizons. He begins expanding the American SIS. By the time Germany invades Poland in 1939, the SIS staff is 19 in number. By the time Japan attacks Pearl Harbor in 1941, the staff has grown to 331. By the end of the war, in 1945, the total will be more than 13,000.

In 1924, a young lieutenant, thirty-one-year-old Laurence C. Safford, is ordered to head up a radio intelligence unit, and he begins building up a radio intercept network. By the late 1930s, the U.S. Navy’s cryptological organization numbers seven hundred officers and enlisted personnel (more than double the Army’s manpower), and it has listening posts (intercept stations) in Washington State,

Maine, Maryland, Hawaii, the Philippines, plus smaller stations in California, Florida, Guam and Long Island.

The most important of these is a machine-operated system called Angooki Taipu A, or Cipher Machine A. The code produced for this machine is for high-level diplomatic traffic. It is unreadable. However, after a year of intense effort, Friedman and his Army SIS team breaks the Type A code in 1936, and Friedman labels the machine that makes the decipherment possible as Red. In 1938 the Japanese change their codes. Again they are unreadable. That is until September 25, 1940, when Friedman’s team creates a miracle—a machine that produces the first totally clear, ungarbled decryption of the new code, which Friedman immediately labels Purple.

Meanwhile, the British have been working on the codes used by the German military. They have succeeded in breaking the so-called Enigma codes (a name derived from a special code machine used by the German armed forces). Like the Americans, the British call their product of breaking the Enigma codes by a special term: Ultra.

As Henry Clausen told this writer: “America had the brains and ingenuity before Pearl Harbor to break the Japanese diplomatic codes. What we lacked was the common sense about how to handle this information.”

Taking the stance that the Army is responsible for breaking Magic, Marshall authorizes the sharing of the machine’s secret with the British—without clearing the matter with the U.S. Navy. When the news reaches Admiral Anderson, the Director of Naval Intelligence, and Adm. Leigh Noyes, the Director of Naval Communications, they are furious with Marshall for not consulting them. They believe Marshall is giving up too much without getting anything in return—they want the British machine that breaks the German Enigma code.

The British answered all the questions the Americans posed. By so doing the British saved the Americans several years of organizational effort in setting up their code-breaking operations. The British also gave the Americans a paper version of the German Enigma code machine, allowing the Americans to start their own deciphering of the German ciphers. The real problem appears that Marshall’s unilateral decision to trust the British causes a breach between the Chief of Staff and the Navy when it comes to future code-related matters, which makes the Army-Navy debate about who failed to do what at Pearl Harbor ever so much more bitter.

They prove beyond reasonable doubt that

Winston Churchill, for his part, remained true to his word and did everything in his power to get these decrypts to Washington so as to avoid the debacle of Pearl Harbor.

The all-important Japanese naval codes were almost never broken by anyone before the war. This contradicts the theories espoused by a number of British reporters and the book Betrayal at Pearl Harbor by Capt. Eric Nave and James Rusbridger. This coterie of conspiracy

theorists claim that the JN-25 codes were being broken by the British on a regular basis and were being given the Americans before Pearl Harbor, and that Prime Minister Churchill withheld information from President Roosevelt that would have averted the disaster.

“I know from firsthand experience,” Whitlock says, “that from the fall of 1941 through the attack on Pearl Harbor we did not read any JN-25 codes. The first message we read of JN-25 on Corregidor was on March thirteenth, 1942. This message was the one in which the Japanese used the designator ‘AF’ to identify Midway. Nobody, including the British, with whom we worked closely, was reading JN-25 on a current basis up to the start of the war.”

According to Currier, in 1946, after the congressional hearings into Pearl Harbor, the Navy assigned a group of cryptologists to study some twenty thousand previously unread JN-25 intercepts. Of this number, one thousand intercepts made prior to Pearl Harbor were carefully analyzed. “In these particular intercepts,” says Currier, “there are a couple of dozen messages that give enough solid evidence to show the Japanese are going to attack Pearl Harbor.”7 It is not until 1946, then—five years after Pearl Harbor—that the U.S. Navy knows for sure that the JN-25 codes carried specific information that could have prevented Pearl Harbor.

Perhaps the greatest failure of intelligence prior to Pearl Harbor, and let us go back in real time for this, is that in 1941 there is no central authority that reads all the intercepts in a calm fashion, analyzes them and compares them to past intercepts, correlates dates and events, and then presents them to the reader in plain English.

They were required to keep Tokyo informed of day-to-day events in Europe (and elsewhere in the world). In their zeal to report, these men told Tokyo all they could find out about Hitler’s intentions, the planning of Hitler’s top subordinates, where the Germans planned to attack, where to defend, the almost daily status of Germany’s economy, her military and strategic reserves. These include the German plans for defending against an Allied invasion in Europe, the campaigns forthcoming in Russia and on the Western Front, to say nothing of the Italian Front or Africa. They reveal German hopes for espionage and diplomatic intrigue in England, the Vatican, America and South America.

But what these diplomats do not realize is that by the end of the war, everything they tell Tokyo is being read in Washington and London in about twenty-four to forty-eight hours. In Washington, D.C., only ten men are privileged to be on the list to read the Daily Magic Summaries.10 For the U.S. Army they are Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, the assistant chief in charge of OPD (Operations and Plans Division), the assistant chief of staff in charge of G-2 (Intelligence). At the Navy’s request, a copy goes to the secretary of the navy. At the State Department’s request copies go to the secretary of state and to the assistant secretary of state in charge of the Department’s signals intelligence. A copy also goes to Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, unfortunately, never seems to pay much attention to the material during the course of the war, and to his military adviser, Adm. William D. Leahy, and to Adm. Ernest B. King, Chief of Naval Operations (CNO).11

Anyway, after reading the material, all the recipients are required to return their copies to Special Branch (Army) for immediate destruction, and a careful record is kept.

“The general has not been born who, after winning a battle, would admit he won thanks to a well-functioning intelligence service,” claims Wilhelm F. Flicke in his manuscript War Secrets in the Ether.13

And, of course, only recently has it been revealed that the Germans possess first-class intelligence about Allied operations throughout World War II by virtue of the fact that

German intercept stations carefully monitor the radio messages of the governments in exile that reside in London during World War

These German intercepts are especially valuable to Berlin because the cryptographic systems used by the Allied governments in exile are of poor quality, and the messages are extremely informative. As soon as a minister for a government in exile learns something from the British government, he passes it on to his brother embassies in exile around the world. It is claimed that almost everything the British, Americans and Russians try to keep secret in London, the exiles diligently tattle. The Balkan governments and ...