PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (AP) — Six months after the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan sent four aircraft carriers to the tiny Pacific atoll of Midway to draw out and destroy what remained of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
But
this time the U.S. knew about Japan's plans. U.S. cryptologists had
cracked Japanese communications codes, giving Fleet Commander Adm.
Chester Nimitz notice of where Japan would strike, the day and time of the attack, and what ships the enemy would bring to the fight.
The
U.S. was badly outnumbered and its pilots less experienced than
Japan's. Even so, it sank four Japanese aircraft carriers the first day
of the three-day battle and put Japan on the defensive, greatly
diminishing its ability to project air power as it had in the attack on
Hawaii.
On Monday, current Pacific Fleet commander, Adm. Cecil
Haney and other officials flew 1,300 miles northwest from Oahu to Midway
to mark the 70th anniversary of the pivotal battle that changed the
course of the Pacific war.
Midway is now a National Wildlife
Refuge hosting more than one million seabirds. Navy photos of the
ceremony show an honor guard standing at attention next to a field of
ground-nesting Laysan albatross and other seabirds.
"After the
battle of Midway we always maintained the initiative and for the
remaining three years of the war, the Japanese reacted to us," Vice Adm.
Michael Rogers, commander of the U.S. Fleet Cyber Command, told a crowd
gathered outside Nimitz's old office at Pearl Harbor on Friday to
commemorate the role naval intelligence played in the events of June
4-7, 1942.
"It all started really in May of 1942 with station Hypo
(the Combat Intelligence Unit at Pearl Harbor) and the work of some
great people working together to try to understand what were the
Japanese thinking, what were they going to do," Rogers said Friday.
Intelligence wasn't the only reason for U.S. victory.
The
brave heroics by dive bomber pilots, Japanese mistakes and luck all
played a role. But Nimitz himself observed that the code-breaking was
critical to the outcome, said retired Rear Adm. Mac Showers, the last
surviving member of the intelligence team that deciphered Japanese
messages.
"His statement a few days later was 'had it not been for
the excellent intelligence that was provided, we would have read about
the capture of Midway in the morning newspaper,'" said Showers said in
an interview.
Japan's vessels outnumbered U.S. ships 4-to-1,
Japan's aviators had more experience, and its Zero fighter planes could
easily outmaneuver U.S. aircraft.
But Japan, unlike the U.S., had little knowledge of what its enemy was doing.
Japanese
commanders believed a U.S. task force was far away in the Solomon
Islands. Then, as June 4 neared and Nimitz prepared his troops, Japanese
commanders failed to recognize signs of increased military activity
around Hawaii as an indication the U.S. had uncovered their plans to
attack Midway, the site of a small U.S. base.
The U.S. lost one
carrier, 145 planes and 307 men. Japan lost four aircraft carriers, a
heavy cruiser, 291 planes and 4,800 men, according to the U.S. Navy and
to an account by former Japanese naval officers in "Midway: The Battle
That Doomed Japan, the Japanese Navy's Story."
The defeat was so
overwhelming that the Japanese navy kept the details a closely guarded
secret and most Japanese never heard of the battle until after the war.
Nimitz
got his intelligence from Showers and a few dozen others relentlessly
analyzing Japanese code in the basement of a Pearl Harbor administrative
building.
Japanese messages were written using 45,000 five-digit numbers representing phrases and words.
The cryptographers had to figure out what the numbers said without the aid of computers.
"In
order to read the messages, we had to recover the meaning of each one
of those code groups. The main story of our work was recovering code
group meanings one-by-painful-one," Showers said.
At the time of
the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, they understood a small
fraction of the messages. By May 1942, they could make educated guesses.
A key breakthrough came when they determined Japan was using the letters "AF" to refer to Midway.
Showers
said Cmdr. Joseph Rochefort, the team's leader, and Nimitz were
confident the letters referred to the atoll. But Adm. Ernest King, the
Navy's top commander, wanted to be sure before he allowed Nimitz to send
the precious few U.S. aircraft carriers out to battle.
So Nimitz
had the patrol base at Midway send a message to Oahu saying the island's
distillation plant was down, and it urgently needed fresh water. Soon
after, both an intelligence team in Australia and Rochefort's unit
picked up a Japanese message saying "AF" had a water shortage.
Showers
was an ensign in the office, having just joined the Navy. He analyzed
code deciphered by cryptographers, plotted ships on maps of the Pacific,
and filed information.
Now 92 and living in Arlington, Va., the
Iowa City, Iowa, native went on to a career in intelligence. He served
on Nimitz's staff on Guam toward the end of the war, and returned later
to Pearl Harbor for stints leading the Pacific Fleet's intelligence
effort. After the Navy, he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Showers
said commanders weren't always as open to using intelligence to plan
their course of attack the way Nimitz was. Some were suspicious of it.
But Midway changed that.
"It
used to be a lot of people thought intelligence was something
mysterious and they didn't believe in it and they didn't have to pay
attention to it. Admiral Nimitz was fortunately what we call
intelligence-friendly," Showers said.
Screeners employed by private companies are already used at 16 airports under the agency’s Screening Partnership Program. Republicans have pressed for greater use of private screeners and welcomed last week’s announcement.
