There was furious infighting between the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy, to a degree that would have been comic if it weren’t taking place in the middle of a war. For several decades the two services had built small and separate code-breaking operations, which were competitive to a point where it sometimes was not clear who the real enemy was. “Nobody cooperated with the Army, under pain of death,” said naval code breaker Prescott Currier. This was an overstatement, but not by much.
