Navy honors code-breakers whose work was key to Midway victory

Seventy-five years ago, 1,300 miles from Hawaii, U.S. forces turned back the Imperial Japanese Navy in what has been called the “Miracle at Midway.”

Aircraft from the U.S. aircraft carriers Enterprise, Yorktown and Hornet sank four of Japan’s front-line carriers — Akagi, Kaga, Soryu and Hiryu — northeast of Midway Atoll on June 4-7, 1942.

Author Craig Symonds said in his book “The Battle of Midway” that “there are few moments in American history in which the course of events tipped so suddenly and so dramatically as it did on June 4, 1942.”

At 10 that morning the Axis powers were winning World War II, he notes. That all changed at Midway. By 11 a.m. three of the Japanese carriers were on fire and sinking, Symonds said.

The fourth of those carriers — all of which had participated in the attack on Pearl Harbor just six months earlier — was subsequently dispatched. Japan was rocked, and would be on its heels for the rest of the war.

Unknown to Japan, America had a critical edge: Station HYPO Navy code-breakers working in a windowless basement nicknamed the “dungeon” at Pearl Harbor had cracked a portion of the Japanese Navy’s JN-25(b) code.

Analysts correctly predicted that Japanese Vice Adm. Chuichi Nagumo’s carrier planes were going to strike Midway on June 4, said Elliot Carlson in “Joe Rochefort’s War,” a book named after the station’s chief.

That knowledge allowed Pacific Fleet boss Adm. Chester Nimitz to send all his available carriers to ambush the Japanese.

On Friday more than 125 mostly Navy personnel gathered outside Building 1 at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard — where the code-breakers toiled — to commemorate what retired Rear Adm. Samuel Cox, director of the Naval History and Heritage Command, called “the most successful intelligence operation in history.”

“This was a case where the commander — Nimitz — trusted the intelligence (and) trusted the people who gave (it to him),” Cox said during his remarks.

The Japanese lost 292 aircraft and more than 2,500 men at Midway. The U.S. losses included the carrier Yorktown, 145 aircraft and 307 men.

On Monday the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which administers Midway; the Navy; and the National Park Service will commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Midway in an event that will be live-streamed from Midway Atoll at 7:30 a.m. at the USS Arizona Memorial visitor center.

Two Marine Corps veterans of the battle who will be on Midway for the anniversary were at the Station HYPO ceremony Friday.

Edgar Fox, now 94, was in a pillbox with another Marine on Sand Island at Midway with a .30-caliber machine gun, while John Miniclier, 95, was manning a wooden searchlight tower.

“We knew, about 30 May, how many (Japanese) ships were coming. … And all of us, (privates first class) and corporals and all the young officers that I knew, were ready to just do the job and stay there until we were winners,” Miniclier, who came in from Orlando, Fla., said.

He credits the Station HYPO intelligence with saving his life.

Fox, meanwhile, remembers 109 Japanese planes overhead in the initial attack. “We were strafed and bombed,” the Springfield, Mo., man said.

Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, sent a massive force east to finish what he had missed at Pearl — the Pacific Fleet carriers — with a complex feint toward Alaska and an invasion of Midway with follow-on forces to ensnare responding American aircraft carriers.

Leading the group of code-breakers, ship traffic analysts and Japanese translators in the basement was Cmdr. Joe Rochefort, who had his share of peculiarities, “chief among them a capacity for irreverence, sarcasm and blunt speech,” wrote Carlson.

Rochefort eschewed formality, and in the cigar, pipe and cigarette smoke-filled basement, the men called each other by their first names. Because of an overproducing air conditioner, Rochefort wore a burgundy corduroy smoking jacket and slippers.

A tour of the still-restricted space Friday, now used as shipyard classrooms, revealed remnants of the World War II switchboard through which Japanese messages were routed to code-breakers. Entry is though the same exterior stairwell leading to a 5-inch-thick, vault-type door.

In May 1942 HYPO was receiving between 500 and 1,000 Japanese intercepts a day but was able to translate only a portion of the five-digit codes.

Symonds, who also spoke Friday, gave as an example a partial message translation from May 25, 1942 — just two weeks before Midway: “Kaga and blank, blank, less, blank and blank, will depart, blank, and arrive, blank, blank.”

One of the group’s many successes was having U.S. forces transmit that Midway had a water problem to verify that the Japanese used “AF” to refer to Midway. Sure enough, the Japanese transmitted in JN-25(b) that “AF” had a water emergency.

“At Midway it all came together,” Adm. Scott Swift, head of U.S. Pacific Fleet, said at the ceremony. That included innovations in employing aircraft carriers and the intelligence that Station HYPO and other Navy efforts gleaned.

“We know now that the outcome of the Battle of Midway was the assured operational defeat of the Imperial Japanese Navy, which in turn resulted in the defeat of Japan’s strategic goals, a lesson we are well served to reflect on and recall, as it is as relevant today as it was then,” Swift said.