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

As stated earlier, only five weeks after Pearl Harbor, Secretary of War Stimson determines for himself that within the Army, and probably within the Navy, there had been a terrible failure on the part of the G-2 (intelligence) staff to properly evaluate, coordinate and disseminate the information derived from the Purple decrypts. So Stimson calls on his old friend, Alfred McCormack of Cravath, Swain and Moore on Wall Street, to come to Washington and take over the task of making sense out of Magic. The first so-called Magic Summaries that McCormack produces are rough. But they are far better than reading raw original texts without the benefit of expert opinion. By mid-March 1942, McCormack’s new operation is churning out a daily Summary for the Chief of Staff that contains complex information written clearly in grammatical English. For the first time, these Summaries present Marshall, Stimson, and others with a detailed daily briefing of world events as seen through the eyes of Tokyo and its representatives stationed around the world. Reading them carefully gives one a sense of viewing World War II through the eyes of the Foreign Minister of Japan. It is an eerie, awesome and frightening sensation.