TheCodeBreakers
enough to help it prepare for an impending attack.
The Japanese Army, personified by the combined War and Prime
Minister General Hideki Tojo, had panted for this war much more than
the Navy, and so might have been expected to produce striking
communications-intelligence results when the desired hostilities broke
out. The woeful actuality was summed up in one sentence after the
defeat
or iNippon by Lieutenant General Seizo Arisue, chief of Army
intelligence: "We couldn't break your codes at all."
An incident of 1943 epitomizes Japanese incompetence in this whole
field. It involved a future President of the United States, who, with his
crew, formed the subject of a series of dispatches the Japanese
apparently never solved.
These messages were transmitted by three brave Australian
coastwatchers, part of a widespread network whose members observed