(Chart of the organization of the 14th Naval District from Jasper Holmes’ book Double Edged Secrets. Naval Institute Press).
OK- this might get a little dry, but I am left with no choice. The Dungeon was where the magic of the cryptologists, linguists and analysts happened. You have seen the diagram that Mac drew on cocktail napkins, and thank God he did. Those of us- and several have appeared, they know who they are- to comment on the various subterfuges and strategies they used to actually get inside the basement space.
It does not look much like it did, the Navy not having much use for history, though I have heard there are still a couple charts on one of the walls. We are going to try to do something about that, and soon, before anything else is lost forever in the former 14th Naval District HQ.
But I digress. I think it is time to step back a little and describe how the organization that started with what Tex Biard called “ten officers” of whom he thought five were brilliant.
What they achieved was historic, but this was a conflict of truly historic dimensions across an ocean area of vast expanse, and prevailing in fleet-on-fleet encounters at sea were vital. But then as now, boots on the ground is the true measure of whether success is enduring, or can be stolen by bold counter-attack.
There were two wars to deal with, as you know. I think I told you- early on in my tipsy Boswell to Mac Showers Johnson, I came to his attention for bad mouthing General Douglas MacArthur, who I have always considered to be an ambiguous historical figure. All through the war, the General attempted to take credit for things that either he was not responsible, or that he imagined. Air Corps success against surface ships was one periodic burr that got under Jasper Holmes’ saddle (among others), but Admiral Chester Nimitz sternly admonished his staff not to comment on the public relations exercise being conducted by the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Southwest Pacific Area, starting immediately upon MacArthur’s assumption of command in April of 1942.
By insulting “Dougout Doug,” I had violated a direct from Chester Nimitz, and it took several glasses of wine to get past that with Mac, as I explained that I was not assigned to a staff that had not existed in nearly seventy years.
My point was that MacArthur’s inability to work cooperatively with Nimitz created a situation in which there were two wars: The US Navy one, and the Army version that would hop across the islands to reclaim the lost colony of the Philippine Islands.
(FADM Chester Nimitz at his desk, still in use at the Pacific Fleet HQ. Photo USN. Note his dog, Makamapa at his feet.)
I am not going to try to re-fight all that, and Admiral Nimitz took a similar phlegmatic approach to things. So did Joe Rochefort. It didn’t matter who got the credit, so long as there was victory.
It did not work that way back in Washington. But before we get to the part where Joe Rochefort, arguably the finest cryptologist, linguist and analyst in the Pacific got shit-canned, we have to talk about the structure that was building to support an offensive that was going to seize ground from a determined enemy.
OK- I was going to tell you about how Hawaii shifted over to the offensive. To do that, the Fleet Radio Unit was going to have to be joined by other disciplines, including aerial photography and reconnaissance and objective research, like the seashell knowledge Chief Kenneth Kearns found in the person of Ditlev Thaanum.
(FADM Ernie King. A hard drinker in peacetime, he vowed to go on the wagon ‘for the duration.’ He did. Photo USN).
There was a lot of stuff to know if you are going to drive across the wide Pacific and drive a bayonet into the heart of a samurai warrior. According to Jasper, the Marines had a few questions. In March of 1942, before the battle of Midway, the Commandant wrote to Admiral Ernie King, Chief of Naval Operations and Commander in Chief, United States Fleet. If the Marines were going to be expected to root Japanese out of the thousands of islands between Honolulu, they really needed an intelligence support activity that could answer the basic requirements of the Fleet Marine Force.
The request called for 81 officers and 121 enlisted personnel from the whole range of the Deprtment of War and the Navy in the theater: Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, with a U.S. Navy commander or captain as officer-in-charge. The first commander was going to be Joe Rocherfort, and his charter was “to collect, collate, and disseminate intelligence to all forces operating in the central Pacific area.”
In July, the Commandant, 14th Fourteenth Naval District was directed to establish the Intelligence Center, Pacific Ocean Area. ‘IC-POA’ sounds, well, a bit icky. But that is how things work. So, we have an intelligence command that is going to support an aggressive war against an implacable and vicious foe.
More on how that happened, and what Jasper and Mac did inJIC-POA, will have to come tomorrow. In the meantime, I was up early, and with the books and papers strewn across the dining room table, snow driving across the windows in the pre-dawn, and I thought I saw the ghostly figure of a tall man in Service Dress whites. I blinked and of course there was nothing there. But I was mildly interested in the fact that Jasper Holmes book was open to the chapter on Tarawa, where the Higgins boats had come to grief on the reefs five hundred yards from the beaches.
I looked at the paragraph that seemed to leap out: “The Fifth Amphibious Force had obtained good information on the tides but, in the compromise to get the best combination of moon, surf, and tide, it had encountered an unpredictable “low dodging tide.” This factor was responsible for many Marine casualties, and left an unfortunate impression that intelligence had done a poor job on beach information.”
I took a sip of coffee. The truth always depends on who is left to tell the tale, you know?
Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303