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Index: WW-II ISLAND SURVIVORS TELL STORY; I WAS
THE RADIO OPERATOR; Part I, By Lt. Robert D. Gibson I WAS THE RADIO OPERATOR;
Part II, By Lt. Robert D. Gibson MORSE TRIVIA, S O S? MORE TRIVIA, "MAYDAY";
Cracking the Japanese Purple Code; by Fred B. Wrixon ***************************************
WW-II ISLAND SURVIVORS TELL STORY; A new book, mentions air dropping radio
to downed aircraft survivors. Bill Howard Decades later survivor, savior
meet By AMELIA DAVIS ¸ St. Petersburg Times, published April 1, 1998 ------------------------------------------------------------------------
ELLEAIR -- Fifty-three years ago on an island halfway around
the world, Lt. John McCollom and two other survivors of a military plane
crash were waiting in a jungle for a savior. It was World War II, and there
was everything to fear: the Japanese, an unfamiliar, treacherous terrain,
native tribesmen said to practice cannibalism and the worsening of injuries
suffered in the crash that killed 21 others. Three days passed and finally
the survivors were spotted by a military search plane in part of New Guinea
called Hidden Valley. A young Army Air Forces officer, Ed Imparato, now
of Belleair, was told to figure out a way to get them out. Forty-seven harrowing
days later he did. Imparato and those he rescued never met -- until noon
Monday. That is when McCollom drove from his home in Delray Beach to shake
Imparato's hand. "It's good to see you Ed, finally after all these years,"
McCollom said. Over lunch, the two men talked of the May 13, 1945, crash
and its permanent effect on their lives. McCollom, who suffered only a broken
rib, had a twin brother who died in the crash. Like the others, Robert McCollom
is buried at the crash site. Imparato wrote a book about the incident. Titled
Rescue >From Shangri-La, it was published last year. McCollom, 79, told
Imparato, 81, and three friends who joined them Monday, that he had kept
in contact with the other two survivors through the years. Cpl. Margaret
Hastings, who was severely burned in the crash, died of cancer in 1978,
he said. Tech. Sgt. Kenneth Decker, who came out of the crash with a deep
head gash, broken elbow and severe burns, lives in a retirement home in
Seattle. McCollom said he will join Decker for his upcoming 87th birthday.
As Imparato was preparing to write his book, he traced McCollom to his winter
home in Delray Beach. "I never knew who Ed was until he called me up one
day," McCollom said. Imparato's book describes the 47-day ordeal before
the three were air-lifted in a glider from a clearing the size of a football
field. It tells how they existed on hard candy and water for five days until
canned tomatoes, a radio and other supplies could be airdropped through
the jungle foliage. It also tells about their first encounter with the island
natives. McCollom talked about that meeting Monday. "We looked up and there
over a ridge were about 30 of them lined up," McCollom said. "We smiled.
They smiled. We moved a little closer. They moved a little closer." Finally,
McCollom stepped forward and offered his hand to the nearly naked man who
appeared to be the leader. As it turned out, these islanders were not the
headhunters they had feared. They were a friendly tribe who over the course
of the next weeks traded them sweet potatoes and pigs for colorful shells
McCollom had requested in the airdrops. Two shells got them a pig. One shell,
enough sweet potatoes for a meal. While Imparato planned their eventual
rescue, military medics who parachuted into the jungle treated their injuries.
Other paratroopers arrived to clear the strip of land for the glider. When
McCollom and the others were well enough to hike 47 miles to the takeoff
site, the rescuers were ready. "I never doubted we'd get out," McCollom
said Monday. "At least I knew I would. I figured if Maggie and Ken didn't
make it, I'd build a raft and float out. I'd seen a river." Now there's
talk of a movie. Imparato has an agent and reported there is some interest
in his book. So who would McCollom choose to portray him in a film? "Me,"
McCollom said. "I still have my hair." Submitted by THE WILLIAM L. HOWARD
ORDNANCE TECHNICAL INTELLIGENCE MUSEUM e-mail wlhoward@gte.net Telephone
AC 813 585-7756 ********************************************** I WAS THE
RADIO OPERATOR; Part I, By Lt. Robert D. Gibson Forward, The following two
part series is a true story written by (then T/Sgt.) Robert D. Gibson. It
was originally published in "Air Force Magazine" sometime during WW-II,
and subsequently was published in a pamphlet by the Training Literature
Division Scott Field Illinois "in the hopes that it might impart on the
student radioman the great importance and responsibility that would be his
as a flying radio operator". I reproduce it here, word for word, as it was
written, for the same reasons, and to further enhance our knowledge of the
events and procedures of the period. Also of interest is the stile of writing,
terminology used, and the "Go Gettum Boys" sentiment the story obviously
conveys. Dennis Starks; MILITARY RADIO COLLECTOR/HISTORIAN military-radio-guy@juno.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You Can't Ride the Beam in Combat, We flew against the Japs over Bali and
Java. They chased us out of Singapore. We ran into them again flying ammunition
from Northern Australia to Port Moresby. We were always outnumbered in those
early days of the war and, all in all, we took quite a licking. But even
then we were sure the Jap Air Force would get a good drubbing before it
was over. My job was radio operator. And I know first hand that a radio
operator is a mighty important man on every combat mission. If that sounds
like bragging it isn't meant to be. I don't mean just me: I mean every radio
operator. And I can show you what I mean. But that's getting ahead of my
story--about seven months ahead to be exact. Back in November, 1941, we
left the United States on what was to have been a three-week survey trip
of the Ferry Command's southern route to Africa. Seven months and 696 hours
of flying time later we arrived back in the United States by boat from Australia.
Meanwhile, we had been in India, Singapore, New Guinea, Australia, Burma,
Java and Bali. We were in Egypt when we first heard of the outbreak of war.
Instructions came through to pick up Lieutenant General Brett in Cairo and
take him to wherever wanted to go. And the only places he wanted to go were
where the fighting was the thickest. Before I got into the Army I used to
think that Generals stayed a comfortable distance away from the actual fighting.
But after being with General Brett, I changed my mind. He is the "goingest"
man I've ever met. We took the General to India and then to Australia where
he left us and we went to Java. That's where the going really got tough.
It's always tough taking a beating. But for the number of planes we had
down there, we did a lot of agitating. As radio operator (I was a Technical
Sergeant at the time), it was my responsibility to guide our plane in and
out of the combat zones. The Dutch and British who were operating the anti-aircraft
guns had very itchy fingers. If the radio man didn't send in the right recognition
signals at the right time, he and his crew would probably be cited for valor,
but posthumously. Some of the time, particularly when flying ammunition
from Australia to Port Moresby, we flew without a navigator so we could
get the maximum amount of cargo into the plane. It isn't cheerful flying
without a navigator, but sometimes you just have to do it. And with air
raids occurring very often, it was up to the radioman to determine whether
we would be coming in under a bombardment. Ther were three signals we paid
special attention to. One was QQW which meant that the sending station was
having an air raid alert, The second was a QQQ which indicated that an air
raid was in progress. And the most looked for was the QQZ, or "all clear".
If the radioman wasn't on the beam all the time, he would be bringing his
plane into his station with anti-aircraft firing at him from beneath and
Jap bombers greeting him from above. Even with all our preparation and the
constant watching of our assigned frequency, we got into a lot of trouble.
I remember when we were trying to get from Rangoon, Burma to Bandoeng, Java.
We told Batavia that we were on our way to Bandoeng. But when we got over
Bandoeng we were met with some of the most terrific ack-ack fire we had
ever experienced. Bandoeng didn't have a radio, no one had told them we
were coming, they just weren't taking any chances. They let us have it.
The only thing we could do was turn around and go back to Singapore. But
that meant danger and it would probably have meant the end of us if I hadn't
been luck enough to have picked Singapore's radio frequency before we left
Rangoon. Actually, there was no official reason why I should have known
Singapore's frequency but I had found out long before that you can't know
too much when you're in the combat zone. Without those signals, Singapore
would have brought us down so fast it wouldn't have been funny. Any unidentified
plane, no matter what insignia, was fair bait. But to get back to the Japs
and the reasons why we think we can take them. First of all, about the much
talked about Jap Zero planes. I'd be a fool to say that they aren't any
good--they gave us too much trouble for that. They climb at a terrific rate
of speed and maneuver with precession. But a couple of burst and they fall
apart... the Jap plane makers apparently don't have too much regard for
their pilots. They were giving them practically no protection and very little
fire power. The boys in the later model B-17s don't bother much about the
Zeros. What's more, the Zeros don't mess around with the 17s. Those Japs
look mighty good when they have you out numbered, but when you are strong
enough to fight they often run like hell. Once over Java we were flying
a heavily armored LB-30. Fifteen Japs came down us and our gunners opened
up. All but three of them left in a hurry, and those didn't hang around
very long. The japs seem to like being heroes but they don't like getting
bullets tossed at them. The Zeros I saw were not particularly fast. One
time in an armed B-24 on the way to Rangoon, we saw three Zeros about five
miles away. Major Paul F. Davis for my money the hottest pilot in the Far
East, pushed the plane down to tree-top level and we started running. They
chased us for 50 miles and were still five miles away. Up in the high Altitudes,
around 30,000, the Zeros don't have enough soup to make more than two passes
at you. They don't like to dive because it's tough pulling their flimsy
planes out. Over Bali one bright morning, a lot of Japs jumped one of our
ships out of the sun. Just as one of them came in on their rear gunner,
his gun jammed. So he fired his flare gun right in the Jap's face. They
never saw one guy get out of a place in such a hurry as that Jap did. On
another occasion, the blankets they had piled in the back of the ship accidently
caught on fire. They tossed the burning blankets out of the ship and the
Japs high-tailed it for home. They must have thought we had a new kind of
secret weapon. One thing the Japs could do well was strafe our planes on
the ground. In the early days, communications were pretty bad and we got
a lot of surprise air attacks. It was especially bad around Port Moresby.
That New Guinea town is located in a sort of valley with mountains around
it. The Japs could come tearing over the mountains before we had an inkling
that they were around and they'd give us hell on the ground. ***********************************************
I WAS THE RADIO OPERATOR; Part II, By Lt. Robert D. Gibson The Japs did
very little night bombing and their bombers seemed slow compared to our
models. They invariably flew with a lot of pursuit protections. Their pursuit
planes looked mighty potent from a distance--lined up and flying in smart
style. But when you went in with our heavy bombers and started blasting
away. it was "you take high road and I'll get to Tokyo before you." I don't
want to sound as if we can wipe the Japs out of the skies with two 17s and
a 24. Many Japs are hard, fearless fighters. But when we get anything near
numerical equality down there, I'll bet a ten-day furlough that they'll
be easy pickings. Does a radio operator need gunnery training? The answer
is that in combat you are a gunner first and a radio operator afterwards.
You can't fight this war with dots and dashes. On a tactical mission, you
can't have a weak link because the Japs will find it soon enough. Gunnery
means self-preservation. Next to being able to man a gun, the most important
job the radioman has to do is to pay strict and constant attention to his
assigned radio frequency. This can't be over-emphasized. You have to glue
yourself to that frequency even if there is a complete silence. And you
have to take it fast. When the sending stations shoot out the information,
they don't take a long time to do it. In many cases, they don't have a chance
to repeat their instructions, especially when they're telling you there's
an air raid in progress. One day we were peacefully flying from Soerabaja
to Bandoeng. The radio had been dead for a long time. Suddenly, and for
no more than a second, the flash came in that they were having an air raid.
We had to turn out to sea and wait for the all clear. If any radioman had
let his attention wander from that frequency for just a split second, the
plane would have come into Bandoeng under Jap bombing. Here in the States
it's quite different. You can ride the beam and somebody gives you the weather
reports. But in combat, you're on your own. And the more able you are to
adapt yourself to all sorts of new conditions, the longer you are going
to live. Every time you get in a new country, you get a new code to work
with. And you have to know it cold. You can have the best damned fighting
crew in the Air Forces but if you don't know your code and recognition signals,
brother, you're through. And the business about adapting yourself to new
conditions is mighty important. We left early one morning to go from the
Gold Coast to El Fasher, Egypt, and we didn't realize we were losing time
going east. Before we got to El Fasher it was dark. I took three first -class
bearings and El Fasher was completely blacked out two miles away. They were
taking bearings on us but our radio compass wasn't designed to pick up C.W.
If he was shooting bearings on us, I figured, why couldn't that situation
be reversed? So we turned the plane to the right and our indicator moved
to the right. That showed we were going away from the station. We made a
180-degree swing back on coarse and came right in. Another time, going from
Australia to Port Moresby, we were given just enough gas to make the 800-mile
jump in a heavily loaded B-17. It was the radioman's job to bring the plane
in. If we varied from the course to any extent, our gas would run out over
the ocean. In cases like that the radioman has just got to be on his toes.
Generally speaking, it's a smart idea to have your plane identification
down pat. In the South pacific, some or our planes were scaring hell out
of our own boys because they looked like Zeros. But it wasn't all work.
You get your share of laughs. One day off in Darwin, for instance, when
we decided to go to the movies. They showed us a James A. FitzPatrick travelogue
about Bali. Filmed in peacetime, it ended with the usual--"and now with
fond reluctance we take leave of the sunny isle of Bali." Fond reluctance,
hell, we took leave of sunny Bali 10 minutes before an air raid. ***********************************************
MORSE TRIVIA, S O S? What does S O S stand for? The Answer: Believe it or
not, S O S, the international distress signal, doesn't stand for anything.
Some people think that it stands for "Save Our Ship" or "Save Our Souls,"
but it's just not true. Those famous three letters don't stand for a thing.
In fact, they were only chosen to indicate distress because they're easy
to communicate in Morse code: three dots, three dashes, three dots, and
because of their distinctiveness. (Source: "Knowledge in a Nutshell" by
Charles Reichblum) *********************************************** MORE
TRIVIA, "MAYDAY"; Why do pilots say "mayday" when they're in trouble? The
Answer: You see it in movies all the time. A plane has some technical trouble
and starts to nosedive, so the pilot grabs the radio and shouts "Mayday!
Mayday!" leaving the audience wondering what the month of May has to do
with the plane's predicament. Actually, the word "mayday" has nothing to
do with the month of May. Instead, it comes from the French word "m'aidez,"
which means "help me," an appropriate thing to say when your plane nosedives.
(Source: The American Heritage Dictionary) Neat. The actual pronunciation
for "aidez" is... ay-day. "Help me" is... ay-day MWA (Aidez-moi) Actually,
I like the French version of what to say when your airplane takes a final
nosedive... MERDE! (aka the 4-letter word that starts with S and ends with
T, and is often the last thing a pilot is heard to say in the "black box"
voice cockpit recorder...) We now continue with the petty bickering of the
proposed FCC reclassification of our licenses. :-) _Ray_ KB0STN ***********************************************
Cracking the Japanese Purple Code; by Fred B. Wrixon The following is taken
from the November 1997 issue of WORLD WAR II magazine. Several weeks ago
I accidently sent a MIME encoded version of this excerpt to the list (I
was sending it to my little brother as he wanted a copy to show our grandfather).
Although I requested that this posting be ignored, some backchannel traffic
expressing interest in this article has prompted me to repost it. This excerpt
is my Holiday gift to those on the list. I have found this magazine to be
a valuable resource for those who have an interest in World War II, and
would urge list members to subscribe. As always, questions or comments are
welcome. This will be my last excerpt for a good while as I have now finished
my graduate work and am beginning the great job search. Happy Holidays to
all!!! Edward Wittenberg ewitten507@aol.com -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Undercover American cryptanalysts successfully cracked the Japanese diplomatic
code known as 'Purple.' By Fred B. Wrixon The efforts by U.S. cryptanalysts
to break the Japanese codes between 1935 and 1939 especially the diplomatic
code nicknamed "Purple" by the Americans, were called "Magic." Cracking
the Japanese code was one of the crucial factors in the Allied victory in
World War II. Once deciphered, the code provided the Allies with invaluable
details on Japanese movements and attack plans. The coded messages were
originally produced by a Japanese cipher machine called 97-shiki O-bun Injiki,
or Alphabetical Typewriter 97. The name was based on the year of its invention,
1937, which was year 2597 according to Japan's ancient calendar. The 97
was better known as the Purple machine because the code it generated was
called Purple by the Allies; the choice of that code name has yet to be
fully explained. The Japanese had every reason to cover their dispatches
with cryptic shields in 1937. They were deeply involved in a war with China,
were forming alliances with bellicose Germany and Italy, and were rearming
their Pacific island possessions in anticipation of a large-scale expansion.
They had also been jolted by revelations that the United States had been
reading their private telegrams for 16 years before the 97's creation. Americans
first began reading Japanese messages during a naval disarmament conference
in Washington, D.C., beginning in November 1921. During the meetings, diplomats
from Japan and other nations conferred by cable with their overseas capitals.
Those exchanges were not confidential, and they had been read, in a number
of instances, by Herbert Yardley and his Cipher Bureau staff. Yardley was
a World War I Army veteran of the Military Intelligence Division, MI-8.
After the war, he began working for the newly formed Cipher Bureau, which
was created in 1919 as a joint operation between the U.S. State and War
departments. The bureau came to be known as the American Black Chamber,
named after the European mail-interception rooms of earlier centuries. Yardley
had the secret cooperation of cable companies in New York City, a key junction
of world communications. The bureau's discoveries were sent to U.S. diplomats
in Washington by a daily courier service. When he had first begun trying
to break some sample Japanese communiques, Yardley had not found it easy.
After months of painstaking study, however, he had awakened from a fitful
sleep and realized that he finally understood a group of two-letter code
words. Yardley and his bureau associates were then able to read many of
Tokyo's messages, which discussed numbers and types of warships, how Japan
would negotiate at the 1921 disarmament conference and what limits she would
accept. That specialized knowledge was very helpful to U.S. negotiators.
They used it to gain a clear advantage over Japan in the limits placed on
ships and tonnage by the Five-Power Treaty, which also was signed by Great
Britain, France and Italy in 1922. Throughout the 1920s, the United States
and Japan warily observed each other's naval maneuvers and conducted audio
surveillance with improving radio technologies. From the Philippines to
Guam, Hawaii and Puget Sound in Washington state, the U.S. Navy had set
up listening posts to monitor the airwaves for military and diplomatic communiques.
The U.S. Army called their stations monitor posts. They included Fort Mills
in the Philippine capital of Manila, Fort Shafter in Hawaii and the Presidio
in San Francisco. The monitor posts and their operations did not meet with
everyone's approval, however. By the late 1920s, domestic cable companies
were becoming uncooperative. Also, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson cast
airwave eavesdropping and deciphering activities in an unfavorable light.
In 1929, Stimson stopped State Department funding for the Cipher Bureau,
which then closed. About that action, Stimson later said, "Gentlemen do
not read each others' mail....The way to make men trustworthy is to trust
them." But when Stimson served as Secretary of War in the 1940s, he reversed
that opinion and began to read decoded intercepts. With no steady employment
to support his family in the Depression-dominated 1930s, Yardley made a
desperate decision. In serialized Saturday Evening Post articles and a book,
The American Black Chamber, he wrote a controversial expose of his code
and cipher breaking. The book caused a sensation in Japan, which then followed
the lead of other countries and adopted a new coding system using devices
that provided multiple choices of alphabetical replacements. Mechanical
shifts and electrical impulses greatly varied the alphanumerical substitutions
for original letters. One such machine was built to cover two primary foreign
office channels, one for world capitals and the other for the Far East.
Some historians refer to it as the Angoolki Taint A, "Cipher Machine Type
A." While there is some uncertainty about the machine's actual name, all
agree that it was certainly technically advanced for the 1930s. Cipher Machine
Type A was connected to electric typewriters for plain message input and
for encrypted output. A wired disk called a rotor (some accounts say there
were two) provided multiple alphabet substitutions. The rotor principle
employed an insulated substance like rubber that was formed in a circle
2 to 4 inches in diameter. Around its circumference were electrical contacts
linked randomly with wires that were connected to other contacts on the
rotor's opposite face. The rotor was positioned between insulated plates
implanted with contacts to match those on each disk's face. One plate was
connected to the input typewriter keys representing plain letters, and the
other plate was linked with the output cipher typewriter keys. Each touch
of an input typewriter's key sent an electric current through the contacts
on each face of the plates and rotor to the output cipher key. At one time
in the machine's early years, a list of 240 indicators provided many choices
for the rotor's starting position. The electric circuit routes were varied
in two other ways. First, a device called a pinwheel with 41 pins, some
movable, altered the rotor's rotations and thereby its contact points. Second,
a plugboard with double-ended plugs was entered twice by the encrypting
current - the first at the keyboard and rotor input and the second at the
rotor exit and the output typewriter. This resulted in a form of inverse
substitution with concealing letters. There are also some descriptions of
a Cipher Machine Type A with a "half rotor" process. In this version, a
rotor had a fixed shaft bearing 26 "slip rings," linked with the electrical
contacts and slipped around the shaft, maintaining the electrical circuits
when the rotor was moved. In the full- and half-rotor versions, a central
purpose was to encipher separately a six-vowel and 20-consonant division
of letters. These were the 26 letters of Romaji, a Roman alphabet. Though
an awkward system, it was used by the Japanese for easier transmissions
of their ideographic writing. The resulting ciphertext crossed the airwaves
as groups of five letters preceded by sets of five digits. This system was
a dauntingly complex challenge for the U.S. Army code-breaking team in 1936.
The code-named it "Red" and used statistical and alphabetical charts, lexicons,
stacks of graph paper and mostly pure brainpower to try to break the code.
The team belonged to the Army Signal Corps' new Signal Intelligence Service
(SIS), which worked in the Munitions Building in Washington, D.C. Led by
famed cryptologist William F. Friedman, the team included among its more
prominent members Frank Rowlett, Solomon Kullback, Abraham Sinkhov, Robert
Femer, Genevieve Grotjan and Albert Small. From the letter and number pattern
of the dispatches, the SIS staff discerned the six-and-20 division of vowels
and consonants that identified the Romaji style. They also applied lessons
reamed from U.S. Navy analysis of a Japanese navy machine that enciphered
the syllables of kata kana, a type of Japanese code similar to Morse code.
It was Rowlett who first lifted the Red code's cover. He put together some
unusual aspects in a series of three transmissions. When he mentioned his
ideas to Kullback the following morning, the two began to make headway.
According to historian David Kahn, they had found parts of plain text that
spelled "oyobi"ŽJapanese for "and." By early 1937, full decryptions were
available to the resident and top policy-makers. Then in 1938 intercepted
dispatches indicated that a new mechanism would supplant the Red code machine.
The SIS learned in February 1939 that the new process was about to be activated
for Tokyo and its embassy exchanges. The use of the Red system to make this
announcement and others was a crucial mistake, since decipherable Red messages
included phrases that were repeated in text sent by the new Alphabetical
Typewriter 97. The first of those new dispatches was intercepted in March
1939. The 97 was developed by naval Captain Risaburo Ito. He had also helped
design the Red code machine and, ironically, had translated Yardley's articles
about his code- and cipher-breaking successes. Ito no doubt tried to make
the new mechanism impenetrable. The 97 operators also used electric input
and output typewriters. They applied a three-letter code for numerals and
punctuation and had two code books, the Ko for basic instructions and the
Otsu for special plugboard settings and switches. The plugs provided wiring
variety like the Red system, but the switching arrangement was new, a special
adaptation of telephone technology. Rotary-type phone equipment was arranged
in banks of six-level, 25-point stepping switches (also known as uniselectors).
Their main function was to direct incoming current from an input terminal
to one of a series of output points. The outgoing terminals were usually
in the form of a fan-shaped arc. The input-output current contacts were
made by a device called a wiper. Each stepping unit was a switch with six
levels, and each level had 25 steps. Every level operated independently,
though the connecting wipers all had coordinate movements. Thus input current
was sent a choice of 25 potential output points by stepping the wiper on
that level to the point of the output terminal. With each wipers having
multiple "arms," the process could repeat itself if the switch was a rotary
type. When a wiper arm left terminal 25, another arm moved to the first
terminal on that level. Such automatic systems for linkages between phone
lines were a standard process by the 1930s. Ito and his associates made
them a primary cryptographic aspect of the 97 by having the switch banks
replace the rotor system. Instead of the rotor and pinwheel movements, message
input impulses were substituted (enciphered) as the uniselectors, and wipers
sent the current among the multiple outlet terminals. Added complexity came
from retaining the plugboard aspect and some of the six-vowel, 20-consonant
arrangements. Later U.S. analysis found that the groups of six were not
always vowels. The plugs were again double-ended (or inverted), and that
brought the current through the board twice. The plugs were also assigned
vowel and consonant positions. A vowel impulse entered the input terminal
and was sent to one of the 25 output points. Then each of the levels of
the switch had six output wires linked the plugboard's inverted vowel positions
that were themselves purposely rearranged or permuted. The consonant letters
had other routing varieties too, with different numbers of switches affecting
the input-output patterns and the plugboard order. The SIS team compared
Red and 97 intercepts and tried to discover the latter's new secrets. For
a time, the Navy's OP-20-G code-breakers capably aided them until concerns
about Japan's naval cryptosystems required their full attention. Two pivotal
SIS discoveries eventually helped pierce the Purple haze. The staff had
determined that Purple had aspects of the Red's six-and-20 letter divisions,
but the efforts to define these arrangements were time-consuming. Then,
in 1935 a new team member from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Leo Rosen, found a faster way to test possible letter substitutions and
variations. He used telephone selector switches the very process fundamental
to the unseen 97! Another major cryptanalytic breakthrough was made in September
1940 by Genevieve Grotjan, who identified pivotal intervals between message
letters and their ciphertext equivalents. Locating such patterns helped
reveal how the positions of letter replacements were advanced in the Purple
code. Grotjan's discovery formed a real foundation upon which the other
staff members helped build. Their combined efforts led to the first two
solutions of Purple on September 27, the same day that the Tokyo-Berlin-Rome
Tripartite Pact was signed. The next advance involved building analogs of
the Alphabetical Typewriter 97. Two were constructed by Rosen at a cost
of $684.65 in the autumn of 1940. Each was a maze of wires and clattering
relays inside a black wooden box, and they did indeed speed solutions. Other
analogs were built by the Navy, and some were given to tin British to avoid
decryption transfer delays Though Tokyo's foreign office communiques carried
many clues about impending conflict with the United States, no known Purple
decryption conveyed specific facts about Pearl Harbor as a certain war target.
But the December 1941 disaster did lead to a greatly increased demand for
signals intelligence. (Some credit the term "Magic which refers to U.S.
efforts to break Japanese codes between 1935 and 1939, to Friedman who called
his team magicians.) Germany had warned Japan that some Japanese codes had
been compromised before Pearl Harbor. It seems incredible that Japan's leaders
failed to alter the 97 significantly or replace it at some point after full-scale
hostilities began. Of course, embassy traffic was not intended to convey
active military details. But skilled analysts could learn much from such
clues as the sites contacted, number of messages exchanged, policies discussed
and even offhand opinions about current events in different combat zones.
Indeed, Purple experts gained immensely valuable information from a diplomat
at the highest Axis levels. He was Hiroshi Oshima, Japan's Berlin ambassador
and a former military attache. His careless communiques divulged top Nazi
secrets. Oshima's Purple coded cables to Tokyo provided details about many
political, economic and military matters during the early war years. In
late October 1943, Nazi concern about an Allied invasion of Europe was increasing.
Oshima toured Germany's own defense line, the Siegfried Line, and its European
Westwall fortifications. Oshima's lengthy comments about defensive preparations
were coded and radioed to Tokyo. The intercepted messages revealed facts
that combined - with information from spies, resistance groups, aerial photography
and intelligence gained from the Ultra operation that broke German ciphers
directly benefited General Dwight Eisenhower's plans for the June 1944 D-Day
invasion. Oshima continued his reports as the war dragged on, trying to
make the best of the Reich's ever-worsening prospects. When returned to
Tokyo after the war, he reportedly denied that he had sent messages detailing
German defenses. Interestingly, the only intact portion of a 97 ever found
was located in the ruins of Japan's Berlin embassy. When hostilities ended
in September 1945, the facts about Purple's solution gradually emerged.
Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall wrote that it "contributed
greatly to the victory and tremendously to the saving in American lives."
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