Codebreaker in the Far East

by Stripp, Alan

• ISBN13: 9780192853165
• ISBN10: 0192853163
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-09-07
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This unique work, written by the editor of the bestselling Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park , is the first to chronicle the British wartime successes in breaking Japanese codes during World War II. Other veterans of Bletchley Park have described how they broke the German Enigma machine to produce Ultra intelligence which helped to hasten victory in the war. There have also been been accounts of how the United States broke the Purple cipher and a navel code, even before Pearl Harbor. Here, Alan Stripp details the monumental British achievement at Bletchley Park and the Far East as these remarkable people broke codes of dazzling variety and complexity, powerfully contributing to the victory in Burma three months before Hiroshima. This firsthand account shows the magnitude of the task: grappling with one of the world's most daunting languages, learning the skills of cyptanalysis, turning out decrypts against the clock, and weaving together all the strands of intelligence to help vanquish a dogged and resourceful enemy who had never known defeat. It is a success story that conveys the sheer excitement of reading the enemy's mind, offering many surprises along the way: who would have expected Japanese signals to reveal not only what they were up to in Asia but also details of German aircraft, the latest U-boats, even the Normandy beach defences. With fascinating explanations of how codes were sent, intercepted, and broken, this personal and readable narrative makes perfectly clear vital importance of codebreakers to the outcome of the war.

Author Biography

Alan Stripp is Director of the Cambridge University Summer Schools on British Secret Services. Until the end of the Second World War he worked at Bletchley Park and in Delhi, breaking Japanese codes, before switching to Persian and Afghan codes. He is the editor of Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley (OPB, 1994),

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. vii
Foreword	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. xiii
Tours of Duty
Cambridge, Bedford and Yorkshire	p. 3
Bletchley Park	p. 13
Marching Orders	p. 29
Delhi	p. 39
Naini Tal, Agra and Abbottabad	p. 48
Bangalore, Singapore and Cambridge	p. 58
Japanese Puzzles
Japanese Codes and Ciphers: what were they like?	p. 65
What did they tell us?	p. 80
How were they sent?	p. 89
How were they intercepted?	p. 93
How were they broken?	p. 100
What is so special about signals intelligence?	p. 109
Loose ends	p. 121
Traffic analysis	p. 121
The index	p. 122
Interrogation	p. 123
Japanese cryptographic security	p. 125
The Japanese as codebreakers	p. 128
The Japanese language	p. 131
The Chinese Telegraphic Code	p. 135
Japanese language courses	p. 139
Glossary of technical terms	p. 144
Cover-names	p. 151
A Tangled Web
Clandestine Groups and their Signals	p. 157
General Slim and Signals Intelligence	p. 165
Phuket Island	p. 172
Deception in the Burma Campaign	p. 179
Select bibliography	p. 192
Notes	p. 194
Index	p. 201
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