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

come along later and second-guess him and ask him why he hadn’t taken another course of action. If you can’t find the European Magic Diplomatic Summaries files that went across Eisenhower’s desk every day, it’s what the intelligence people want. They wouldn’t care if they destroyed priceless historical information. It would be more important to shred the material and protect their backsides in the long run.” Clausen is quick to point out that MacArthur was the complete opposite of Eisenhower when it comes to evaluating the help he received from his intelligence people. “He gave them full credit for easy operations,” Clausen says. “MacArthur would avoid difficult amphibious assaults and try to strike where the attack could be carried out with the minimum loss of life. He always credited his intelligence people for getting him this information.”

that never once bogged down, or for allowing the Germans to create a military stalemate that would have resulted in a negotiated surrender.

Battle of the Bulge!

As F. H. Hinsley writes in his magnificent work, “Whitehall still had to learn how to translate principle into practice.”

This means the German invasion of Denmark and Norway on April 9, 1940, comes as a complete surprise to the British. There had been many indications of an invasion, including the visual sighting of the German heavy cruiser Bluecher and other naval units moving toward Norway by Capt. Henry Denham, CMG. His report is ignored by the British Navy. It appears that every report slips past the various intelligence groups and interdepartmental meetings at every level.2 Again, the Germans achieve total surprise when they attack Belgium and Holland. They sweep around the northern flank of the Maginot Line on May 10 by driving through the Ardennes, which had long been believed to be impassable by an invasion force.

For example, the Battle of Britain opens with the Germans sending seventy aircraft on July 10, 1940, to attack the docks in South Wales. But the Royal Air Force (RAF) has the ability to husband its outnumbered forces. First, it is using the new weapon radar to locate incoming bombers. Second, use of new radio-interception

interception techniques allows the sloppy radio security of the Luftwaffe to be penetrated for an early deduction of the target to be hit, the number of bombers in the attack, and the flight patterns of the fighter escorts. When combined with the valor and sacrifice of the men and women of an understaffed RAF, this new technological method of fighting defeats a larger foe.

This means creating the machinery to break the Enigma ciphers, perfecting the decryption techniques, building the staff needed to analyze the decrypts, and creating a secure technique of getting all the information derived from Bletchley Park to the battlefield.

As Layton recalls the meeting, Richardson declared, “Now we know that the Japs are secretly violating their mandate for administering those islands. We have been trying to find out what’s going on out there for twenty years, and here you’ve done it in twenty days.”

The command at Pearl Harbor, and Layton, simply assumes that Washington is preparing the proper intelligence evaluations of how Japan was girding itself for war—but that is not the case.6

Of course, this is congressional hindsight in 1946, a year after World War II ends, but while hindsight it may be, in this case the judgment is accurate.

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.

For example, from the beginning, there is heavy emphasis by the Japanese on the importance of South America’s helping Japan defeat the imperialist forces of England and America. Tokyo wants to create trading links between Japan and its new Southeast Asian Sphere of Co-Prosperity and South America. This causes Washington to spend far more time on inter-American affairs than had been expected. The Japanese linkages with Chile, Brazil and Argentina were of paramount importance to Tokyo.

One of the first such reports is sent in early 1942 by the Japanese attaché in Sofia to the foreign office in Tokyo. Russia is reported to be focusing its attentions more and more on Iran, “overpowering [the] British politically and militarily,” because the British were pulling out their troops for service in India and Africa. The attaché says Russian subversive activity is increasing in Iran, that “the Turks were aware of what was going on, but were not going to publicize it.”

During this time, the siege of Malta intensifies. The Axis flies 9,599 sorties against the island in April 1942. The situation is so desperate that the American

aircraft carrier Wasp is sent to the region and successfully flies in forty-six Spitfire fighter planes. Also, as predicted in the Magic Summaries, Field Marshal Rommel makes his move to capture Tobruk and drive toward Alexandria, Egypt.

From Germany, Ambassador Oshima is reporting to Tokyo that Germany’s internal transportation is suffering because 10 percent of its railroad locomotives and its river barges are servicing the Eastern Front. In the coming year, the Germans plan to build 60,000 tons of new river barges, make all the railroads in Germany double-track line, build a new rail line linking Berlin and Ukraine, build 200 locomotives, 500 passenger cars and 1,000 freight cars. New electric plants are being built in specifically named areas, including one in Norway, which will service a new aluminum plant that has just been completed. The total German aluminum production is currently 250,000 tons per year, with another 50,000 tons coming from occupied France.15

According to Oshima, Hitler has told him that when Russian foreign minister Molotov visited Berlin in November 1941, only to have negotiations halted right afterward by the Russians, that “Hitler then knew that in all probability the theater of war would expand and he might have more to cope with than he could easily face.” In April 1941, Russia and Japan agreed to a five-year neutrality pact, which will be the subject of much discussion later in this book. Germany attacks Russia on June 22, 1941. By that November 23, German troops were only thirty-three miles northwest of Moscow. With the help of “General Winter” (i.e., bitter cold and heavy snow) the Russian lines hold. The Russians launch their first major counterattack of the war on December 5, while Hitler is preparing further attacks to the south. Japan attacks Pearl Harbor that December 7. Hitler declares war on America a few days later, as the Germans had promised the Japanese they would do, and which was revealed by the Magic intercepts.

As Oshima views the current situation in March 1942, the objectives of the German army are to seize the industries of European Russia, the raw materials of Ukraine and the oil fields of the Caucasus. To Oshima this means that “the vigor of Russia will dwindle greatly, the livelihood of her people will be threatened, and an internal revolution will spontaneously occur. Then the Stalin regime will crumple of its own weight. The threat of Communist Russia will be eliminated forever. That is how [Hitler] reasons.” Thus, Oshima declares, “There is no possibility of such a separate peace.”

What Oshima is recommending to Tokyo is that since Japan has already seized Korea and Manchuria, plus vast portions of northeast China, the Japanese must avoid war with Russia. The most important thing for Tokyo to do is establish “a thoroughgoing and comprehensive sphere of influence in the Far East.”

This is the first of many such messages intercepted in the months that follow. Washington and London now know how the Japanese are planning the future course of their war. Without Japan threatening to attack Russia from Manchuria, Stalin can safely call up his reserve divisions in Siberia to fight the Germans, which he does.

The brilliant analyses by McCormack’s staff proves the reliability of the Magic intercepts time and time and time again. It becomes almost virtually impossible for Marshall or Eisenhower to ignore the worldwide, postwar strategic implications of what the Japanese are reporting to Tokyo, or what Tokyo tells its diplomats in the field.

What McCormack discovers is that in 1940–41 the code breaking is being done “almost exclusively” by the military. Much of the work is done by the Army, which is responsible for military and military/analysis traffic, including “the large residual field that is loosely called ‘diplomatic.’” According to McCormack this means that during the war, the Army is not dependent upon the State Department for its information. On the contrary, the Army controls

all the sources of information and unilaterally determines the order of priority in which those sources are to be exploited.

Alfred McCormack talked with Henry Clausen about the problems that existed in terms of handling Magic material. McCormack found that the messages not considered important were summarily burned. Those that were important were circulated to a tiny group of people in raw, unevaluated form. Declared McCormack in his memo to Carter Clarke: “No personnel were assigned to a continuous study of the material; hence very little could be done to put any of it together in connected form.”

After Pearl Harbor, McCormack also writes: “It became apparent that the event had been clearly foreshadowed in the Japanese traffic of 1941. The Secretary of War, and no doubt others, then concluded that this traffic had not been given sufficiently close attention, and that some agency should be set up to deal with cryptanalytic intelligence in a more thoroughgoing fashion than previously had been thought necessary. The Secretary decided that the job ought to be undertaken by a lawyer having a special type of competence and training, such as may be acquired in the handling and presentation of large cases involving complicated facts.”18

The Secretary of War and the Chief of Staff, McCormack reasons, are “entitled” to have every item “carefully checked, evaluated and supplemented by all possible sources of intelligence … their time should not be wasted in reading odd and unchecked bits of information not related to attendant circumstances and given their proper value.” It also seems to McCormack that the daily reporting of decrypts is only one part of the job. “The real job was to dig into the material,” he said, “[and] study it in the light of outside information, follow up leads that it gave, and bring out of it the intelligence that did not appear on the surface.”

The most difficult part of the job, according to McCormack, is that “the most astute person, even if an expert on the Far East and possessed of a photographic memory, would derive very few connected impressions—and very little usable information—from merely reading the messages from day to day. They must be pieced together by the most painstaking and laborious process, involving collateral investigation, often of minute points.” By 1943, according to McCormack, the Army has so much information about Japanese shipping to and from Indochina and Thailand that it possesses a good picture of the ships and goods and problems that Japan is having in transporting raw material from the region and sending back the required imports. McCormack’s staff has accomplished this miracle by checking and rechecking decrypts against known Japanese merchant vessels—“high class detective methods”—so the picture is clear and up-to-date. The result is that McCormack’s staff establishes that the Japanese have 450,000 tons of shipping in the South Pacific.

McCormack hopes to create “the whole picture of Japanese shipping and water-born trade.” This is done in due course; American submarines and aviators succeed in sinking Japanese merchant ships beyond the wildest expectations of the Pentagon. McCormack predicts that within a year, by 1944, his staff will have “pretty well reconstructed the economic and political aspects of the [Far Eastern picture] and be able to make increasingly accurate diagnoses of Japanese capabilities, difficulties and plans.”

There are other problems. The MIS staff is too small for the amount of work that needs to be done. There were only 105 civilians processing and translating Magic traffic on December 7, 1941; as of February 1, 1943, there are 1,754 working at a signals center called Arlington Hall. (By the war’s end, there will be 13,000 men and women working on a wide variety of signal intelligence, including German police signals, direction finding, map making, etc.)

Only a small fraction of the world’s radio traffic can be monitored, McCormack points out. In 1943, the art of cryptography had outstripped cryptanalysis, to a point where despite the fact that modern machinery is capable of miraculous performances, “high level codes and

ciphers are no longer broken by cryptanalytic methods alone.… Today it is collateral intelligence which solves high-grade cryptographic systems.”

McCormack also sees how, in August 1942, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery takes command of the British Eighth Army in Egypt. This is after the Germans shoot down the plane carrying Lt. Gen. “Strafer” Gott, the British commanding general. When Montgomery suddenly appears on scene, replacing Gott, the British already know from Ultra decrypts the line of attack Rommel will make on a ridge of hills called Alam Halfa. The British also have a good idea of the date of the attack. By now, Bletchley Park is handling the Mediterranean Ultra with dispatch. So Montgomery is also aware of the status of Rommel’s reserves, his lack of fuel and ammunition, the morale

of his troops and his basic order of battle. Thus, Montgomery wins what historians call a “model defensive battle, by accepting the intelligence he was given.”21 A few months later, Montgomery wins the battle of Alamein. This changes the course of the war in Africa. Montgomery has understood the significance of Ultra material from the very moment he assumed command. He uses it to win the first battles he fights, and he believes in it ever afterward. During this time, Montgomery knows that almost every supply ship sent to bolster Rommel is being sunk, and that the Germans are blaming their Italian allies for leaking the dates and routes the ships are leaving and taking. Montgomery also knows Rommel is in ill health, that Hitler is concentrating his attention on Russia and is loathe to send reinforcements to Africa. (The British had also managed to capture Rommel’s radio-intercept unit in July, which taught the British how the Germans had successfully infiltrated the British radio nets and forced the British to improve their own radio security.) Nevertheless, the issue is in doubt as Montgomery attacks in the second battle of El Alamein in late October. British infantry strength is waning because the Germans still fight doggedly, counterattacking whenever possible. But even though he knows his own losses to

be horrendous, by November 2, Montgomery knows from Ultra decrypts that Rommel is in truly desperate shape. Montgomery also knew, via Ultra decrypts, that Rommel is begging Hitler’s permission to retreat. Hitler refuses, saying, “You can show your troops no other road than to victory or to death.” Rommel again requests permission to retreat. Not un...

However, once the Allied intentions are made plain, the Germans counter with ruthless efficiency. It is Ultra that now tells the Allies that the Germans plan to seize control of Tunisia, occupy the area of Vichy France and grab the French fleet at Toulon. (The latter move is countered by Admiral Darlan, who having failed to turn the fleet over to the British as he had promised, finally orders it scuttled in harbor, which is done.)

The lesson Eisenhower and his unblooded American generals learn from the Kasserine Pass debacle is that when it comes to fighting, the most valuable way to use Ultra is to supplement it by local intelligence gathered the regular way: i.e., patrols, POW interrogations, local radio intercepts, aerial photos.

The findings of this book are, therefore, contradictory to the writings of Prof. Richard H. Minear and former Justice William O. Douglas. In the early 1970s, after the publication of Minear’s work about the validity of the Tokyo war crimes trials, the Japanese began to publicly question world opinion that they had been aggressors. This predates the declassification the Magic Summaries starting in 1978. These Summaries show the lie by the Japanese for what it is.

This interpretation of Montgomery’s exploits is based upon Ronald Lewin’s magnificent work, Ultra Goes to War, published by McGraw-Hill Book Co. in 1978. This work was also commissioned by the author while he was an editor. In later years the author showed Lewin some of the research for this current work. Lewin said he was unaware of many of the documents he was being shown, but he believed they “were pure dynamite.” Speaking about Magic at Bletchley Park in Ultra Goes to War,

Lewin wrote: “And then there was the Japanese section.… The exact functions and achievements of this section have not yet been revealed.” (page 134) Another high-ranking intelligence officer, not wishing to upset his superiors, wrote the author: “I recall that Monty, somewhere in his autobiography, confessed to the press in North Africa that his modest habits required him to retire to his caravan, after a light supper, where he recites his prayers for Divine Guidance before retiring for the day. The fact is that his Divine Guidance came entirely from his Ultra briefer who flew out from Cairo each evening and crouched silently in the dusk near the unlit trailer until the pious general dismissed the press.”

For if von Kleist succeeds in his drive through the Caucasus Mountains, he will arrive at the junction of the borders of Turkey, Iraq and Iran. This will create the vital linkage that Japan seeks with Germany across the Persian Gulf. And should this linkup be achieved, the ramifications for the Allies will be catastrophic.

Hitler is overconfident. He believes the war in North Africa is going well for Rommel, and because of the success of the “Desert Fox,” Hitler thinks he can easily invade the Caucasus and then swing west through Iraq, attacking Egypt over the Suez Canal. But, by sending von Manstein to Leningrad, Hitler severely weakens his forces for the drive south.

By August 19, Army Group B is stalled, fighting inside the city of Stalingrad. Meanwhile, Army Group A is capturing Mount Elbrus, the highest mountain in the Caucasus. This will be as far south along the Black Sea that the weakened German forces can go. Both operations are doomed because of Hitler’s next decision. Seemingly on whim, he switches objectives. He becomes obsessed with the capture of Stalingrad; he forgets that he has sent his two Army Groups off on independent attacks that do not support one another. Apparently he is no longer concerned about the Caucasus, or the value of the oil fields that lie almost within Germany’s reach. By mid-September the two German attacks lose steam; Stalin now decides the time has come to counterattack. Although he still believes that a primary German thrust will be made against Moscow, he sees that the German Sixth Army, under General Paulus, and the Fourth Panzer Army, under General Hoth, are vulnerable on their flanks to both the north and the south. Why? Because these areas are not protected by German troops, but by weaker Italian and Hungarian forces.

On November 19, the Russians attack both the northern and southern flanks in a massive plan of double encirclement aimed at surrounding the German forces inside Stalingrad. Within four days, the Russians achieve their goal, linking their attacking forces on November 23, on the Don River at a city called Kalach. The entire German Sixth Army, and a portion of the Fourth Panzer Army, some twenty-two divisions totaling 330,000 men, are trapped. Hitler then seals the fate of his men in Stalingrad when he accepts Field Marshal Goering’s assessment that his Luftwaffe can supply the German forces in Stalingrad by a massive airlift. Hitler orders the Sixth Army to hold its position. Meanwhile, British code breakers who are reading the Luftwaffe’s Enigma ciphers can determine that the Germans have lost so many transport planes in trying to support Rommel in North Africa that there are not enough left to supply the Germans trapped at Stalingrad. (Almost every supply ship sent Rommel in recent months is sunk because the code breakers in Bletchley Park’s Mediterranean section knew when they were sailing and their destination; in turn, this forces the Germans to send unescorted transport planes with vital supplies to Tunisia.)

This means that Churchill can be confident that the Germans trapped at Stalingrad are facing annihilation. Thus, even before it happens, Churchill knows his “hinge of fate” is about to turn.

Thus, just as Hitler is sending off his troops toward Stalingrad, the Allies know his plans.

Meanwhile, the Japanese decrypts also tell the Americans that certain American codes are no longer secure.3 Allied code breakers breathe a sigh of relief. The new Japanese codes can be handled. The insecure American codes can be rectified. On June 1, American analysts decide that “the Japanese to a remarkable degree are assuming the leadership of the Axis powers in the initiation and formation of joint policies. This is

particularly true in relation to Latin America.… The Japanese are abler men, better informed, than their German and Italian colleagues.” This is particularly true in Mexico, where Japan is trying to organize a joint response by the Axis nations to a bill being debated in the Mexican Congress that would declare a state of war with the Axis.

In mid-June, the Berlin-Tokyo traffic reveals that Germany and Japan are concluding an agreement to supply each other with essential products under the terms of a “war-time economic agreement.” The material will be transported by seven German ships, four of which are already in Japan and three of which “will reach Japan soon.” In the commodities that are to be sent Germany will be 65,000 kilo tons of crude rubber, 10,000 tons of tin, 164,000 tons of oil products, manganese, quinine, opium, antimony, ferromolybdenum, molybdenum ore, asbestos, industrial diamonds, etc., for a total of 250,000 kilo tons. In

return, Germany will ship Japan “patents and samples of corresponding machines [machine tools] and equipment” needed to complete Japan’s military preparedness.

This report begins a series of strategic messages by Oshima and others, the interception and decrypting of which by the Allies will prove devastating to the German cause in Russia.