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

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.