(Joseph Wenger, shown here as a Rear Admiral, who was one of the conspirators to get rid of Joe Rochefort and centralize control of Radio Intelligence in Washington. He would probably deny it, if he were around).
Captain Garth: “Joe! You’re guessing!”
Commander Rochefort: “We like to call it ‘analysis.’”
– Dialogue from the 1976 Universal film MIDWAY
When I worked on Ford Island, the filming of some of the action shots in Pearl Harbor for the film “Midway” wwas the only eason some paint had been slapped on the historic buildings, the only real maintenance that was done for years. The bunkroom we used on duty days had been the set of Patricia Neal’s office, and I often thought of her seated in front of the window that overlooked the courtyard.
A lot happened between the devastating attack that cost 2,403 American lives and wounded more than a thousand more and the inconclusive Battle of the Coral Sea. Even more remarkable was the ambush orchestrated by Chester Nimitz on the Japanese fleet off Midway in June of 1942.
Under the leadership of Joe Rochefort, Station HYPO grew increasingly confident of their ability to recover the gust, and sometimes more than the gist of Japanese naval communications. The Intelligence Center- Pacific Ocean Area is stood up, bringing imagery analysis and topographic and regional analysis to the signal advantage of the radio intelligence produced by the Fleet Radio Unit.
I am not talking about Operation WATCHTOWER- the American invasion of Guadalcanal, nor the big gun battle off Savo Island where the Japanese sank four cruisers, three Yanks and one Aussie. This was the real stuff, and for a taste of the horror of what it was like to be on a steel ship exchanging gunfire with others at point-blank range, I commend the account contained in “Neptune’s Inferno,” by James D. Hornfischer. But with the COMINT support produced by HYPO, it could be said that by September of 1942, the threat to Australia had been eased with the first outright defeat of Japanese ground forces at Milne Bay in Papua, New Guinea. It was, to quote the old warrior Winston, not the beginning of the end, but certain could be called the end of the beginning.
But that is the stuff from the history books. What I am talking about is the bitter bureaucratic infighting that abruptly removed Joe Rochefort from command at HYPO, and the astonishingly mendacious conduct of the people in Washington who typify the REMF (“Rear Echelon Mo Fo’s”) who had some important career issues to settle.
Admiral Nimitz thought enough to recommend Joe for the Navy Distinguished Service Medal, the non-combat equivalent of the Navy Cross. Late in June, only a month after the greatest triumph of American nautical arms and for opaque reasons, COMINCH Admiral Ernie King, denied it.
In October, with the Marines engaged in the desperate fight to secure Henderson Field on the Canal, King approved a plan shaped by leadership of the Radio Intelligence mafia in Washington to relieve Joe Rochefort of command. The men responsible were RADM Joseph Redman, Director of Naval Communications, his brother, Captain John Redman, and a careerist barracuda named Joseph N. Wenger, all of whom either were already or would make two stars.
Joe Rochefort was many things, as author Elliot Carlson observes: “a tall, slender, taciturn officer who spoke quietly but knowingly, radiating authority and his own distinct brand of bemused seriousness. “ Joe also had a capacity for irreverence, sarcasm, and blunt speech that astonished even his closest friends.” He was human. But he was also the finest combination of cryptologist, linguist and analyst in the Pacific. His blunt talk may have set the course, but he was punished by Washington for accurately predicting the location of the Japanese Kido Butai, the IJN Carrier Striking Force- off Midway.
The Redmans had predicted the target was Dutch Harbor in Alaska. They were wrong, and Joe was right. Clearly, Joe had to go.
Two-front wars never work out that well in my experience, and Joe had at least two of them going on. He rightly regarded the dismissal of his DSM as evidence that the REMFs were out to get him. A quiet investigation was initiated from Washington, the secret results including the observation that Joe and Eddie Layton were at loggerheads, and there were troubles in paradise and it was Joe’s fault. The establishment of the IC-POA had caused him to be made the Officer in Charge, a duty he did not want.
Nothing could have been farther from the truth, but both men had agreed to parrot the story, in case the simmering war between the Director of Naval Communications and his OP-20-G radio intelligence folks, the Director of Naval Intelligence, and Station HYPO was being attributed to a “too close” relationship between Layton and Rochefort.
There was a war on that had nothing to do with the Nazis or the Japanese.
Reading the words of Jasper Holmes about how it went down, and hearing Mac describe what happened in person is still amazing. There was the memorandum Mac gave me a copy of, drafted probably by Wenger, in which CAPT Redman grandly puffed the successes of Washington recommended applying it to HYPO. There was the campaign to associate Joe and Eddie Layton with a leak to the Chicago Tribune about the Japanese order-of-battle at Midway that could only have come from COMINT. (It did, but the leak was in the Fleet).
Then John Redman appears in Pearl as the new Comms officer on the staff, and beings a dialogue with his Washington conspirators via Admiral Nimitz’s Flag privacy circuit, something specifically not authorized by the Admiral.
A relief for Rochefort was ordered in without the approval of the 14th Naval District Commandant or Admiral Nimitz.
The Redmans wanted Joe in the worst way, and that is just what they did to him.
Joe Rochefort got Temporary Alternative Duty orders in mid-October to report back to Washington for meetings and discussions. Joe knew something was going on. Although the orders specified he would return to Hawaii, he told Jasper we knew he would not be back. He gave Jasper the keys to his desk and some military papers, and Jasper did not see him again until long after the war. When he walked through the big steel door and up the steps from The Dungeon, it was 25th of October, and that was it for Joe and HYPO.
The bastards got him. Not that Joe helped himself in the Star Chamber sessions with the Radio Mafia when he arrived in DC. He did take time to write to Jasper a week or so later, and explained what had happened, and predictably, urged his former shipmates to give their full support to his relief.
“The only probable explanation of what happened to Rochefort,” Holmes reports in Double Edged Secrets, that he “became the victim of a Navy Department internal coup It was,” said Holmes, “another blow to our morale.”
As I said, the key conspirators in Washington all made Flag. After the war, Joe Wenger became the first Deputy Director of the Armed Forces Communications Agency, precursor to NSA, and then the Deputy at the newly established NSA. They are very good at what they do.
Joe? He wound up going back to sea, as skipper of a floating dry dock. He did not get his DSM while he lived, but as the wartime figures passed away, Mac Showers remembered. Joe died in 1976, but Mac kept the pressure on, and in 198 6, President Ronald Reagan presented the Distinguished Service Medal to Joe’s kids.
Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303