Codebreakers Victory (45 page)

Tragically, the earlier tip-offs by Ultra and Magic had bred among Allied commanders a dependence on their output. Without having German plans and intentions verified by the codebreakers, Allied leaders discounted warnings from other sources. From the Ardennes sector came GI reports of hearing the muffled roar of powerful engines, POWs' confessions that a great attack was in the offing and local residents' accounts of seeing armor and men massed behind the front. All was ignored. As the BP analysis put it, "There is a risk of relying too much on Source. His very successes in the past constituted a danger."

Allied commanders were so convinced the war was in its midwinter doldrums that when the blow fell Montgomery was playing golf in Belgium and had received Eisenhower's permission to go back to England to celebrate Christmas with his family. Eisenhower was attending his valet's wedding, and other officers were on R and R in Paris. While some Allied intelligence officers expressed concern about the buildup, none felt sure enough to counter their generals' prevailing expectations.

Before dawn on December 16, the area that German messages had referred to as "the quiet sector" erupted. Artillery blasted the green or tired GIs crouched in their frozen foxholes. Searchlights bouncing their beams off low-lying clouds provided light for the "storm battalions," made up of the most battle-experienced officers and men, to infiltrate the American lines. A special operation of English-speaking Germans, dressed in U.S. uniforms and driving jeeps, slipped through to create confusion and near panic among the rear echelons. The big tanks of the Sixth Panzer Army, followed by those of the Fifth, rolled over the defenders. SS troops once again followed the fighting legions to perpetrate such atrocities as the massacre of American prisoners at Malmédy.

Hitler's new version of an Ardennes surprise had its moment of success. But in the end the counteroffensive went as his generals had predicted. The Germans simply lacked the strength to push through to Antwerp. Even though the American troops' shock was great, they put up a defense stubborn enough to throw the offensive off schedule on its very first day. The Germans' drive to capture Allied fuel dumps to replenish their fast-waning supplies came within a quarter mile of the huge reserve at Stavelot in Belgium but could advance no closer. Similarly, the push to gain control of the road and communications hub of Bastogne and make the Americans there surrender was frustrated. The Germans sent to negotiate the capitulation received General Anthony McAuliffe's famous single-word reply, "Nuts," which had to be translated for the Germans as "Go to hell." When the bad weather ended, the GAF's efforts to support the army were overwhelmed by masses of Allied planes swarming over the German columns. As soon as the drive started and full use of wireless was resumed, BP was decoding every phase of the attack. According to Hinsley, "Thanks to the exceptionally prompt decryption of copious high-grade Sigint, the Allies encountered no surprises once they had overcome the initial shock." Eisenhower and his generals, reading the German commands' operational and reconnaissance orders for each day, knew when the Sixth Panzer Army changed its course from trying to reach Antwerp to trying to take Liege, when the Luftwaffe reached its peak and began its precipitous decline and when the attack finally stalled.

Hitler's dream soon became a nightmare. Pummeled by Allied aircraft, pounded from the south by Patton's divisions and from the north by Americans temporarily assigned to Montgomery, hamstrung by Hitler's refusal to countenance withdrawals, the German armies suffered losses far greater than those of the Allies.

Bradley later wrote in his memoir that he and other U.S. generals foresaw, as GIs grimly slowed down the German drive, the opportunity to turn from defensive to offensive operations and cut the German salient at the waist, entrapping the fuel-starved German armies. But as at Falaise, Montgomery foiled the plan by having to "tidy up" his lines before launching his attack, a full five days after Patton had begun his assault. Monty's caution, combined with foul weather that held up both offensives, permitted the bulk of German forces and equipment to escape.

Nevertheless, the battle left the Wehrmacht badly wounded. As Churchill summed up, "This was the final German offensive of the war. It cost us no little anxiety and postponed our own advance, but we benefited in the end. The Germans could not replace their losses, and our subsequent battles on the Rhine, though severe, were undoubtedly eased."

Rundstedt, who never favored the offensive and left much of its conduct to subordinate commanders, called it "Stalingrad No. 2."

Montgomery gave the final benediction, in a blessed reversal of his earlier opinions: "The battle of the Ardennes was won primarily by the staunch fighting qualities of the American soldier."

And all those years after, we in whom the Bulge had planted seeds of doubt were assured that our efforts had not been in vain.

 

 

 

18

 

Closing In on the Empire

 

 

As the Japanese were forced to surrender island after island, further rich treasures in captured documents fell into Allied hands. They included codebooks, copies of strategic plans, and manuals relating to such equipment as radar and underwater sonar gear. On Makin the captures amounted to basketfuls; on Kwajalein they rose to more than a ton; on Saipan they soared to more than fifty tons. This tremendous inflow pressed new cadres of translators back at Pearl Harbor and in Australia to the limit.

One especially useful trove of information came in a single recovered briefcase. On the night of March 31, 1943, Admirals Mineichi Koga and Shigeru Fukudome were inspecting defenses in the Palau islands. When a patrol plane reported, mistakenly as it turned out, that a U.S. fleet was approaching, the two admirals decided to leave for a safe haven at Davao, in the Philippines. They took off in planes that became separated from each other in a storm. The plane bearing Koga, commander in chief of Japan's Combined Fleet, was never seen again. When strong head winds made Fukudome's plane run short of fuel it made a crash landing off the Philippine island of Cebu. The admiral survived by clinging to a seat cushion for eight and a half hours. He was rescued, but not by Japanese troops. His captors were native fishermen loyal to Allied guerrillas on the island. All this time Fukudome had held on to his briefcase, which the fishermen recovered and turned over to the guerrillas. Soon an American submarine was carrying it to the Allied Translation and Interpretation Section in Melbourne. The contents included Koga's Decisive Battle plan for the approaching phase of the war as well as a highly informative study of carrier fleet operations.

Although the Japanese should have expected that their code materials had, by captures such as these, fallen to the Allies, they continued to make only routine obligatory changes in their code systems. It was as though, cryptologically, they had already surrendered. The changes did more to complicate the tasks of Japanese code clerks than to frustrate Allied cryptanalysts. After the June-to-August blackout in 1942, Allied codebreakers were never again shut out for more than short periods.

The new information strengthened the arsenal of intelligence the Allies brought to the next big battles. Although the Japanese warlords knew that a major new Allied fleet operation was forming up to strike them, they could only guess where the blow would fall. They were ripe for another grand deception. Air raids against their bases in the Palau islands convinced them that these would be the objective of the Allied offensive. Instead, Nimitz ordered a giant leap past the Palaus and into Guam, Saipan and Tinian, three of the main islands in the Marianas chain. While Guam was the primary objective, Nimitz directed the first attack against the more northerly island of Saipan, since possession of it would cut off Japanese air support of the garrison on Guam.

One morning the inhabitants of Saipan looked out on serene waters. The next morning they saw the front edge of an invasion fleet that totaled more than six hundred ships. The contrast with the skimpy three-carrier force the U.S. was able to scrape together for the Battle of Midway was a tribute to American productivity. The task force bearing down on Saipan included seven battleships, twenty-one cruisers, scores of destroyers and fifteen aircraft carriers. Transports carried more than 125,000 troops. The landings came on June 15, 1944, at the same time that the Allies in Europe were trying to hold on to their Normandy beachheads.

Control of the Marianas was another of those crisis points vital to both sides. Allied leaders thirsted for the strategic advantages that bases there would provide. They would bisect the supply lines connecting Japan and the Asian mainland with their strongholds in the south. An airfield on Saipan could put Japan itself within reach of America's new B-29 Superfortresses. Also, recapture of Guam would have spirit-lifting significance: it had been a U.S. possession for forty-three years before the small Marine garrison had been overwhelmed two days after the raid on Pearl Harbor.

For the Japanese, their Marianas bases were bastions of the inner defense ring to which they had withdrawn after the first wave of Allied island-hopping successes. They, too, knew that from Saipan U.S. planes would come within striking distance of their homeland, the Imperial Palace, the emperor himself. The Marianas must be held at all costs.

Even though the invasion of Saipan surprised the Japanese by its boldness, their military chiefs had been anticipating that they would have to fight battles such as this closer to home. Characteristically, their planners were not content with a purely defensive posture. They continued to ready their depleted forces for the Decisive Battle. This could come, they believed, in the next big clash between the Allied and Imperial fleets. The Japanese plan called for smashing the Allied ships in a three-phase attack. First, submarines would waylay the Allied fleet and reduce its numbers. Second, the newly organized First Air Fleet would use the islands still under Japanese control as "stationary aircraft carriers" to send land-based bombers and fighters against the Allied ships. And third, the Mobile Fleet would then sally forth to administer the coup de grâce. The plan was, of course, another variation on the strategy that had yielded the legendary success of 1904.

Once again, though, the Japanese were at the enormous disadvantage of having their plans revealed by signals intelligence. Decodes precisely spotted the locations assigned to the submarines, which were dispatched one after another by a trio of Allied destroyer escorts. One of these vessels, the USS
England,
made six kills in just twelve days. Further, once the Japanese plan for using the islands as stationary carriers was known, the airfields were subjected by Allied forces to incessant air and naval bombardments that destroyed many of the planes before they could go into action. Thus, two phases of the plan were neutralized before the real battle began.

Nevertheless, the Mobile Fleet, under Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, sailed on into the Marianas, observing radio silence in order to avoid detection. The mighty new battleships
Yamato
and
Misashi,
which had been steaming south to blast the ships protecting MacArthur's invasion at Biak, were called back to join Ozawa.

Allied submarine sightings and direction-finding combined with decoded messages to keep Allied commanders informed as to when and where
Yamato
and
Misashi
and their escorts would link up with Ozawa's force, where they would refuel, and what course they would follow. The powerful additions to the Mobile Fleet were worrisome; each battleship was a behemoth the length of three football fields, protected by fourteen inches of armor plate and carrying giant 18.1-inch guns capable of hurling a 3,200-pound shell nearly thirty miles.

But the combat would feature aircraft and submarines, not battleships. On June 18, the eve of the battle, when his scout planes sighted the U.S. fleet, Ozawa felt obliged to break his radio silence and send a message to coordinate the next day's carrier- and land-based air attacks. He had no way of knowing that the Allies' preemptive air and naval bombardments had put the stationary carriers almost out of commission. Allied signal teams pounced on his broadcast and used it to gain an exact fix on his fleet's location. Admiral Spruance, in charge of the Allied task force, surmised that Ozawa, to keep his ships beyond the range of U.S. carrier aircraft, would launch his planes from well out, expecting them to land on Marianas airfields rather than return to their carriers.

There followed, on June 19 and 20, what U.S. fliers dubbed the "great Marianas turkey shoot." Inexperienced pilots flew most of Ozawa's planes, for the veterans had been shot down in earlier battles. Intelligence units aboard the U.S. warships awoke to the fact that the Japanese were using flight coordinators who, by radio, assigned targets and lectured the green pilots on how to attack. Translations of these instructions were quickly radioed to combat-hardened Hellcat pilots who gleefully agreed on their countermeasures. Of the sixty-nine planes that lifted off from Ozawa's carriers in his first wave, forty-two were lost. In addition, about fifty of the land-based planes from Guam went down. In this one day Japan's naval arm lost three-quarters of its waning stock of aircraft while doing only negligible damage to the Allied fleet.

Making matters worse for Ozawa, U.S. submarines stole in among his ships and sank two of his carriers, including Japan's newest, which he was using as his flagship.

Operating with minimal information, Ozawa presumed that many of his planes had made it to Guam rather than been shot down and would return to his carriers the next day. What came instead were hordes of Hellcats. They sank a third carrier, seriously damaged other ships and destroyed additional planes. Of four hundred aircraft with which Ozawa had entered the battle, he retreated with only thirty-five able to fly. The troops in the Marianas were left to fend for themselves.

American fly boys had enjoyed a rousing couple of days. For the marines and infantry GIs invading Saipan the story was much less buoyant. In a scenario that was becoming all too familiar, the prelanding bombardments did far less damage than the Americans had hoped, the invaders faced enemy soldiers holed up in caves carved into the island's foundation rock, progress had to come redoubt after burned-out redoubt, and the Yanks had to hold against a final sacrificial charge by soldiers emboldened by sake and beer. In planning this last attack, the Japanese commanders ordered all wounded men unable to walk and bear arms to be shot; the others hobbled into battle carrying sticks and stones because there were not enough rifles to go around. Two American divisions were all but wiped out before the hysterical charge could be stopped. Many of Saipan's civilians joined the troops and their commanders in committing suicide. Admiral Nagumo, hero of Pearl Harbor, now demoted to the command of a land-based sailor contingent, was one who died there by his own hand.