The Villains of the Piece

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(The former Naval Security Group Campus in Northwest Washington. Mac Showers worked here and lived nearby. Photo Naval Security Group).

OK- I am going to beat it to death, but Van Dyke goaded me into it. Sorry in advance. This is about everything that came after the war, and the effort of Chester Nimitz to protect the intelligence system that helped him win a war, and Forrest Sherman, who thought intelligence officers were worth keeping.

I was walking on the campus of the Naval Security Group at Nebraska Avenue several years ago. It is a nice place- a girl’s school the Navy had confiscated at the beginning of World War Two. It was around the time that the newly-established Department of Homeland Security was attempting to organize itself. It was remote duty in Northwest Washington- the only place to eat on post was a Subway, and the agony of the sameness of the menu was oppressive.

The glory days of the Naval Security Group were passed there and functionally the NSG had moved to Fort Meade. Walked toward a 12” BMT submarine sandwich, I passed one of the red-brick buildings and noticed it was named for one of the Redman Brothers.

I was looking for a picture of it this morning, and discovered the Redmans did a modest bit of legacy building- there is a Redman Avenue at least two NavComStas, a suitable tribute to a couple of self-aggrandizing officers who put careers before country.

I think that is borderline treason, but what the hell.

That is the depth of the animosity of the Radio Wars, a seventy-year bureaucratic struggle which the Navy harbored as two hostile tribes: cryppies and intel beanbags. It is a loopy way to come full circle, after all these years. The Line thought they finally had it settled, having established a three-star billet with a Line officer as Director of Naval Intelligence and Communications, but then the Fat Leonard ship-husbanding scandal smeared every Navy leader who came up through the Pacific Fleet.

Before that, it seemed like it was the final triumph of Richmond Kelly Turner, the Line officer who knew everything better than his intel folks, and who was supported by the Radio mafia to cut out the DNI, RADM Theodor Wilkenson, who was junior to Turner.

The number of weasels in this story is not limited to the Redman brothers and their co-conspirator in OP-20-G at Main Navy, Joe Wenger. Prime among them is Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner himself, who must bear a major share of the blame for the surprise at Pearl Harbor.

By the way, this isn’t about my tribe or the crypto tribe- all these officers were Deck folks, for the most part. The tribal thing came after the war.

That said, t he struggle between intelligence and Plans is well documented. The Navy did not care overmuch for intelligence, nor did it appreciate the remarkable advantage that radio intelligence brought to the table, along with the even more amazing contribution of the officers who were sent to Japan for language and cultural orientation.

Richmond Kelly Turner was a battleship sailor, the core value of the pre-war sea service. Guys like Joe Rochefort and Eddie Layton, and medically-retired submariner Jasper Holmes were the mavericks who brought innovation to code-breaking, and intuition into what it meant.

Nebraska Avenue has a long and storied association with Naval Intelligence, but specifically to the tribe of Radio Intelligence. Mac worked there after the war, doing Russian stuff. I made the pilgrimage there often in the Cold War.

But to the villains of the piece: John Redman was the younger of the two brothers, but wound up going further. Neither of the two- John nor Joe- were what we came to call “cryptologists.” They were deck officers, just like Mac Showers, undifferentiated from the rest of the Line. The Hawaiian Sea Frontier people periodically came to Mac to remind him that Deck officers went to sea- which almost killed him on a cancelled indoctrination patrol on a submarine that was lost with all hands.

The officers in question did have a subspecialty in communications, that is true. Jack was class of 1918 at the Academy (graduating with the class of 1919 due to war) and an Olympic wrestler. The pivot to this story is about the role of Admiral Turner, as director of War Plans, and that of the Director of Naval Intelligence, which came down to a senior to junior relationship.

You know who is going to win that one.

Turner specifically withheld the diplomatic decrypts of Japanese communications that would have indicated, by any reasonable analyst, that Hawaii was a likely target for surprise attack.

In my mind, that is case closed. But my resentment is not stoked by long-ago staff wars in the OpNav bureaucracy conducted by men now dead in buildings that no longer exist. It was the legacy of the struggle of the Radio Wars, which lasted all of Mac’s long career, and mine thereafter, and the wreckage that remains today.

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(Jack Redman with his Legion of Merit pinned to his wash khakis. Photo Naval Security Group).

I mentioned the other day that John “Jack” Redman wrangled orders to Pearl Harbor shortly after the victory at Midway to become the PacFlt Communications Officer. I recall one of the conversations with Mac about how weird that must have been, for Redman to be on the same staff, and if they had ever interacted. He paused, thought for a moment, and said he had not. Strange.

Meanwhile, Redman was using Chester Nimitz’s private circuit to send messages back to Joe Wenger at Main Navy to pile up accusations about Rochefort. When Nimitz was informed about Redman’s use of his private code, he was furious, and refused to speak to him for weeks. The actual messages that were exchanged had been destroyed, so the depths of the skullduggery were never plumbed. Wenger authored the hatchet job memo that Jack forwarded through the Navy leadership to undermine HYPO’s independence.

We all know that knowledge is power- and Jack tried to retain as much power as he could. His organization’s intentional withholding of intercepts and tips with British, Indian and New Zealand allies, who were also working on the decryption of other Japanese codebooks, was considered to have collectively held them all back. Information was only shared between organizations after the intervention of his brother, Admiral Joe Redman in September 1943 as the Pacific war shifted to an offensive struggle.

That is about as much positive as I can find about his brother.

On May 2, 1945, Jack assumed command of the battleship USS Massachusetts (BB-59) which he held through the end of the war. Wiki says he was Director of Naval Communications, the position his brother held, from August 1949 to September 1951. He stayed in the Communications world in his next assignment on the then-toothless Joint Staff, and finished as Commandant, Twelfth Naval District in San Francisco, from 1954 to 1957. He retired from the Navy on October 1, 1957, with the rank of Vice Admiral, and Congress let him retire in that rank (all Admirals are permanent two-stars, though customarily are permitted to retire in the last grade served, absent misconduct). He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

I will try to find him sometime. I am assuming that the buildings and roads are named for Jack, but perhaps the brothers colluded to share the glory they stole from Rochefort.

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(Joseph Redman. Photo Naval Security Group).

Joe Redman was the older, and enabler of Jack. He was Naval Academy Class of 1914. He had the standard deck officer career path in the Gun Club, and commanded USS Tuscaloosa (CA-37) a new construction heavy cruiser from December 1939 to May 1940. On December 7, 1941, he was serving as the assistant to Rear Admiral Leigh Noyes, DNC, and thus involved in Admiral Turner’s stonewalling of Admiral Kimmel. Following the reorganization of naval communications in February 1942 and the departure of Noyes, Redman succeeded him as DNC until September 1942. Redman then went to the South Pacific to command USS Phoenix (CL-46) which had survived the attack at Pearl. He returned to Washington as DNC in an unusual second tour, from April 1943 to August 1945. He retired with the rank of Rear Admiral, and is also buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

I may re-think my plans to join them there. Eternity is too long, you know?

Every year the Admiral Joseph R. Redman Award is given to the midshipman of the graduating class at the United States Naval Academy who has “demonstrated the greatest achievement in the professional courses in Electrical Fundamentals and Applications” and is nominated by the Electrical Engineering Department.

So, that is the legacy of the ringleaders. Richmond Kelly Turner was, for whatever else he was, a fighter, and is buried with his WWII comrades Nimitz, Spruance and Lockwood (with spouses) as per their agreement in life. To the best of my knowledge, none of the Comms weasels paid a dime for what they did, and lived to the end of their lives with the honor that really belonged to other people. Joe Rochefort handled it pretty well, by all accounts, though he burned his personal papers, much to the frustration of history (and El liot Carlson in particular).

Joe Wenger, possibly the most mendacious of the lot, was awarded the National Security Medal from President Eisenhower for his ” planning and organizational work in communications research. ” No shit. He centralized the crap out of it. He and Mac are in the NSA Hall of Fame, along with Joe Rochefort.

The Redmans are not. Either of them.

Oh, and the footnote I like the best? Use Phoenix survived the Japanese but did not survive the Royal Navy. Her most ignominious moment came at the hands of the Royal Navy. Sold to the Argentinians after the war, she was renamed Marshall Belgrano and sunk by HMS Conquerer for violating the British declared exclusion zone around the Falklands, accounting for half the Argentinian casualties in the war.

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Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
twitter: @jayare303

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