Why Japanese Admirals Couldn't Explain How Americans Predicted Every Attack

A 42-year-old US Navy officer named Joseph Rochefort spent eight months in a basement at Pearl Harbor, working fourteen hours a day in carpet slippers and a smoking jacket. By April 1942 he had cracked JN-25, the operational code the Imperial Japanese Navy had been told was mathematically unbreakable. He gave Admiral Nimitz the date, the place, and the size of the Japanese strike force preparing to attack Midway. Three Japanese fleet carriers were sunk in six minutes on the morning of June 4th, 1942. Vice Admiral Nagumo never knew how the Americans had found him. He died believing he had been beaten by overwhelming material superiority.
This is the story of the man in the basement, the team that worked beside him, and the war that should have been lost in 1942 but was, instead, quietly won. Joseph Rochefort never received public recognition for what he did. The Distinguished Service Medal Admiral Nimitz recommended for him in July of 1942 was killed by political enemies in Washington. He was reassigned to a floating drydock in San Francisco. The medal was finally awarded to his family by President Reagan in 1986, ten years after Rochefort's death. This is the basement that won the Pacific war.
📚 SOURCES AND FURTHER READING:

Elliot Carlson, "Joe Rochefort's War: The Odyssey of the Codebreaker Who Outwitted Yamamoto at Midway" (Naval Institute Press, 2011)
Edwin T. Layton, "And I Was There: Pearl Harbor and Midway — Breaking the Secrets" (William Morrow, 1985)
Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, "Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway" (Potomac Books, 2005)
Walter Lord, "Incredible Victory: The Battle of Midway" (Harper & Row, 1967)
Samuel Eliot Morison, "History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Volume IV: Coral Sea, Midway and Submarine Actions" (Little, Brown, 1949)
US Naval History and Heritage Command, Station HYPO records
Naval Security Group archives, OP-20-G correspondence

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