The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) (24 page)

While in Japan, Layton and Rochefort studied not only the language but also the culture. After the few hours of formal classroom study, they went out into the streets to strike up conversations. “I was most interested in why [the] Japanese do certain things they way they do,” Layton recalled, “why they think the way they do—why they approach a problem the way they do.” What both men learned was that in Japanese culture, as well as in their language, “there is more nuance than directness.” Even if the words were clearly understood, they might not reveal the true meaning of any given statement.
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Layton went back to sea in 1939 as the commanding officer of the destroyer-minesweeper USS
Boggs
, but in February of 1941 he was assigned to Kimmel’s staff as his intelligence officer. After Nimitz took over as CinCPac, he told Layton, “I want you to be the Admiral Nagumo on my staff, where your every thought, every instinct, will be that of Admiral Nagumo’s; you are to see the war, their operations, their arms, from the Japanese viewpoint and keep me advised about what you (as a Japanese) are thinking.” Of course it was not Nagumo that Layton should have been channeling, but Yamamoto. Nagumo, as we have seen, was merely a link in the chain, and not a particularly imaginative one. Yamamoto was the prime mover. Still, Layton got the idea. It was his job not only to monitor whatever fragments of information Rochefort’s hard-working team was able to glean from the Japanese message traffic but also to draw conclusions about what they meant as well. Soon a regular routine evolved in which Rochefort talked to Layton, often several times a day, on a secure phone line, summarizing what he had found and what he thought it meant, and then Layton would go see Nimitz.
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Layton briefed Nimitz every morning at precisely five minutes to eight. If a message came in that suggested a special urgency, Rochefort would call Layton or send a messenger to his office. If it was something of particular significance, Layton would go to fleet headquarters early or, more rarely, show up in the middle of the day. When that happened, Nimitz would interrupt whatever he was doing to see him. In effect, Rochefort was the cryptanalytic scientist doing the lab work in the Dungeon; Layton was the spokesman whose job it was to convince Nimitz to trust Rochefort’s conclusions. In Australia, the head of Station Cast, Lieutenant Rudolph Fabian, provided similar intelligence briefings for Admiral Leary and General Douglas MacArthur, yet without the kind of mutual trust and confidence that emerged in Hawaii.
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One problem in the command relationship was that technically Rochefort did not work for Nimitz but for the Commandant of the 14th Naval District, and he reported to Redman in Washington, where a new office called Combat Intelligence (OP-20-GI) was supposed to collect the data and do the analysis. Layton, who was on Nimitz’s staff, was not in this chain of command. But because Rochefort and Layton were such good friends, based on their years together in Japan, there was a strong sense of partnership to their efforts. Then, too, Rochefort believed that he was uniquely placed to provide both the raw data as well conclusions about what it meant. “I felt that I had the knowledge and experience of being able to estimate and form a judgment on what [the] traffic actually meant,” he said later. “I was in a better position to say what they meant than anyone else.” As a result, the Layton-Rochefort partnership effectively bypassed Washington and took intelligence estimates directly to the theater commander, a practice that Redman increasingly deplored and resented.
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The unrelenting work schedule yielded results. In February the team at Hypo achieved a kind of breakthrough, and soon they were filling in many more blanks in the Japanese message traffic. By April, they were often able to intercept, decrypt, and translate Japanese messages within hours of the original transmission. On April 5, three days before Halsey and the
Enterprise
left Pearl Harbor to join the
Hornet
en route to Tokyo, Rochefort was working on an operational message that had been sent from Combined Fleet headquarters at Hashirajima. It was addressed to the aircraft carrier
Kaga
, still undergoing repairs at Sasebo. One number group in the message stood out. Rochefort had already determined the code for “invasion group,” and now he saw that code used in close association with the letters “MO.” Rochefort suspected at once that it referred to Port Moresby. The Japanese had used a variety of other geographical designators for Moresby, including RZ, RZQ, and RZP, and all of these had appeared with increasing frequency in messages from Inoue’s Fourth Fleet. Now, with this new intercept, Rochefort concluded that the Japanese were planning an invasion that would involve the Kaga and at least one other carrier, initially misidentified as the
Ryūkaku
, though it subsequently proved to be the small carrier
Shōhō
.
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Rochefort called Layton on the secure phone and told him that he had “a hot one,” and that he was sending the raw decrypt over by messenger. “It looks like something is going to happen,” Rochefort told him, “that the man with the blue eyes will want to know about.” When the courier arrived, the many blanks in the message left its meaning ambiguous to a nonexpert. Though it was clear enough to Rochefort, anyone not versed in reading such messages would conclude that it was hardly a smoking gun. Over the next several days, however, more clues arrived. All that week, the men of Station Hypo focused on the growing pile of evidence that the Japanese were about to launch an offensive through the Coral Sea to Port Moresby. Holmes recalled that “the chart desk was strewn with charts of New Britain, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands.” After the British station in Colombo, Ceylon, intercepted a message that referred to special orders for Carrier Division 5—the
Shōkaku
and
Zuikaku
—Rochefort’s team studied the traffic for any reference to those two carriers. “Each incoming message was quickly scanned for references to [Inoue’s] Fourth Fleet or Carrier Division 5,” Holmes recalled. “We lived and breathed and schemed in the atmosphere of the Coral Sea.”
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It paid off. By midmonth, the stream of messages indicated quite a bit about both the target and the time frame, though it was less clear which units would participate. The Japanese were evidently planning a major operation in the South Pacific. There were references to at least four carriers, two cruiser divisions, and a destroyer squadron, plus various landbased units. Altogether nearly three hundred surface units appeared in the message traffic—the largest assembly of warships in the war to date. In this regard, it was unclear what Nimitz could do about it. By now both the
Enterprise
and
Hornet
were beyond recall, more than halfway to Tokyo with Doolittle’s bombers. That left only the
Yorktown
, still in the South Pacific after the Lae-Salamaua raid, though in serious need of a refit and resupply, and the
Lexington
, which was in Pearl Harbor having her big eight-inch guns removed and replaced by antiaircraft guns. With the departure of Vice Admiral Wilson Brown for San Diego, the
Lexington
task force was now under the command of Rear Admiral Aubrey “Jake” Fitch, a short, broad-shouldered brown-shoe officer who had earned his gold wings in 1930. Even assuming that Fitch’s
Lexington
group could get to the Coral Sea in time to join the
Yorktown
, the two American carriers might prove insufficient to interfere with the thrust, given the size of the Japanese commitment. At an April 18 staff meeting, the general agreement at headquarters was that “CinCPac will probably be unable to send enough force to be
sure
of stopping the Jap offensive.”
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The next day, Doolittle’s bombers completed their mission over Japan’s cities, and Halsey’s two carriers began steaming back toward Pearl, though it would take them a week to get there. Layton briefed Nimitz on April 22 that Rochefort’s intercepts offered clear “evidence of a powerful concentration in the Truk area,” and he suggested that “this will be the force which will make the long expected attack to the Southwest.” Jasper Holmes urged Rochefort to tell Nimitz that he should order Halsey not to return to Pearl at all but to refuel at sea and steam directly south to the Coral Sea. Rochefort reminded the enthusiastic Holmes that it was not the place of Navy lieutenants, or commanders for that matter, to tell four-star admirals what they should do. Their job was to provide the information that would allow the admiral to make his own decisions.
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Nimitz did not order Halsey to steam southward; the logistic realities made such a decision impossible. Nonetheless, he did trust Rochefort’s analysis and, despite the odds, was determined to commit his other two carriers to confront the Japanese offensive. He notified King that it was his “strong conviction” that the Japanese thrust toward Port Moresby “should be opposed by [a] force containing not less than two carriers.”
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The message triggered alarms in Washington. Redman remained distrustful of Rochefort and the assessments of Hypo. Station Cast, by now removed to Melbourne, Australia, and referred to as Belconnen, reported the Japanese objective as “RO,” not “MO,” and suggested that the target might be the Aleutian Islands rather than Port Moresby. If Rochefort were mistaken, Nimitz would be sending his last two carriers in the wrong direction. Though Rochefort was able to demonstrate that Belconnen had incorrectly decrypted the code, Redman remained skeptical. In fact, he was more than a little annoyed that Rochefort had bypassed him by taking his analysis directly to Nimitz. Redman wanted all intelligence intercepts to be sent to OP-20-GI in Washington, interpreted there, and then disseminated out to the fleet commanders. Rochefort should confine himself to purely tactical matters while Washington dealt with the broader strategic questions. Redman couldn’t complain about this to Nimitz. He did, however, express his doubts to King.
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With Nimitz urging instant action and Redman expressing skepticism, King took the unusual step of writing directly to Rochefort to ask for “Station Hypo’s estimate of … future Japanese intentions.” In effect, King wanted Rochefort to defend and justify his assessment.

Rochefort wired back his response only six hours later (with a copy to Nimitz) in a concise report that made four main points:

1. The Kidō Butai was in the process of withdrawing from the Indian Ocean, and its next effort would be in the Pacific.

2. The Japanese did not plan to invade Australia.

3. A new plan of operations involving some, but not all, of the Kidō Butai was preparing to strike southward from Rabaul through the Coral Sea toward Port Moresby.

4. There were hints of another, even larger operation that would take place after Port Moresby, though its scope and objective were not yet clear.

The summary was remarkable for both its candor and its accuracy, and it convinced King that Rochefort knew what he was talking about. King even suggested that the American force in the Coral Sea might be bolstered by sending several American battleships there—the rehabilitated survivors of the Pearl Harbor attack.
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Nimitz, too, accepted Rochefort’s conclusions, but he was skeptical that sending battleships to the Coral Sea offered any kind of solution. He thought the battleships too slow, too vulnerable, too difficult to keep full of fuel, and in any case unlikely to affect the balance of power in the South Pacific. Nimitz ordered them back to the West Coast, mainly to get them out of the way. Instead, he would pit his two carriers against the three (or possibly four) carriers that the Japanese committed to the operation. He was willing to accept the odds because of, in his words, “the superiority of our personnel in resourcefulness and initiative, and of the undoubted superiority of much of our equipment.” It was still remotely possible that Halsey could get to the Coral Sea in time, but even if he couldn’t, Nimitz was determined to oppose the Japanese thrust anyway. He ordered Fletcher to head for Noumea to restock the
Yorktown
’s near-empty larder and equip the Wildcat fighters with new self-sealing fuel-tank liners. Meanwhile, Fitch’s
Lexington
task force would steam from Pearl Harbor for the Coral Sea. The two carrier groups would rendezvous on May 1, at which time they would constitute “a single force under [the] command [of] Rear Admiral Fletcher.”
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