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Now it's harder to put a stop to a headline-making,
money-machine conspiracy theory than it is to kill a rattlesnake with a short-handled
hoe. But this writer has done so. First, by interviewing Duane Whitlock, who, from
November 1940 through March 16, 1942, was a radioman first class doing decryption and
preparing intelligence reports based on Japanese traffic analysis for US Navy at Cavite
and Corregidor. Whitlock points out that the Japanese Navy changed its code in the JN-25
series several times in 1941. Once in early August. Again on December 4.
"I know from firsthand experience," Whitlock
says, "that from the fall of 1941 through the attack on Pearl Harbor we did not read
any JN-25 codes. The first message we read of JN-25 on Corregidor was on March thirteenth,
1942. This message was the one in which the Japanese used the designator 'AF' to identify
Midway. Nobody, including the British, with whom we worked closely, was reading JN-25 on a
current basis up to the start of the war." (Whitlock later won the Bronze Star for
his role in breaking the Japanese codes that led to victory at the Battle of Midway.)
This writer also interviewed Capt. Altert T. Pelletier, USN (ret.), who, in 1941, was assigned as chief yeoman to OP-20-GZ in
the old Navy Building on Constitution Avenue in Washington.
"In 1941 we were reading only a tiny
fraction of JN-25, at the very most ten percent of a given message." he says.
"More troublesome was the fact that we recieved the intercepts via slow boat from the
Far East, about two months after they were intercepted. They were horribly out of date by
the time we worked on them. I was a code breaker. I specialized in place names, dates,
ship names, arrival and departure dates. I tried to put meanings into code groups. But I
wasn't a linguist. We didn't have enough linguists at the time. None were assigned to our
office to work on JN-25."
Capt. Prescott Currier, USN (Ret.), is the
third man to confirm to this writer that the Navy was not breaking JN-25 codes prior to
Pearl Harbor. He was involved in breaking codes in Washington before the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor. Later he served in the same capacity at Pearl Harbor.
"We read the occasional small message in
JN-25 before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor," he says. "But never did we
read JN-25 on a general basis, because we didn't have the staff to do this. Later, during
the war, when we were concentrating on JN-25 full blast, we were able to read only five or
six percent of the total JN-25 intercepts."
This writer asked: Did the intercepted but
undecrypted JN-25 messages prior to December 7, 1941, reveal the Japanese intentions to
attack Pearl Harbor?
According to Currier, in 1946, after the
congressional hearings into Pearl Harbor, the Navy assigned a group of cryptologists to
study some twenty thousand previously unread JN-25 intercepts. Of this number, one
thousand intercepts made prior to Pearl Harbor were carefully analyzed.
"In these particular intercepts,"
says Currier, "there are a couple of dozen messages that give enough solid evidence
to show the Japanese are going to attack Pearl Harbor."
It is not until 1946, then - five years after
Pearl Harbor - that the US Navy knows for sure that the JN-25 codes carried specific
information that could have prevented Pearl Harbor.
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