Michael Smith's, The Emperor's Codes was reviewed in the Literary Review last week by David Stafford. Such a great review deserves to be republished here, it's a great read, and indeed, the review tells its own story...
THE CODEBREAKERS OF Bletchley Park have become the stuff of legend, a stirring tale of the triumph of British brains over Nazi brawn likely to warm the heart of even the most indifferent patriot. For there, positioned halfway between the ivory towers of Oxford and Cambridge, and a mere hour's train ride from London, a hotch-potch assemblage of pencil-wielding eccentrics and absent-minded academics outwitted the might of the Third Reich, broke its codes, and shortened the Second World War by as much as two years. If the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, Britain's victory in 1945 was sealed in the prefabricated huts hastily erected in the grounds of a Victorian mansion. So delightfully amateurish was it all, so goes the chuckle, that the head of MI6 even had to dip into his own pockets to pay for the building. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper, up to a point. There's truth in the legend, but also a lot of tosh. The recently published official history of MI6, for example, neatly dispatches the myth of its chief personally paying for Bletchley Park by revealing that the funds actually came from its own straitened coffers. Numerous academic monographs have shown that by the end of the war there was little amateurishness in either the operations or the organisation of the codebreakers' world. War is a ruthless driver of modernisation. So vital was the work of the Bletchley Park boffins that bumblers who obstructed change were roughly pushed aside.
There is another side, too, of the codebreakers' story that tends to be overlooked. This is the breaking of Japanese codes that forms the subject of Michael Smith's engrossing book, first published in 2000 but reissued now by Dialogue. Part of the explanation for this neglect lies in the fact that much of their work took place in scattered imperial outposts such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Colombo, Mombasa and Brisbane rather than in Britain itself, and piecing together a coherent narrative from such geographically dispersed places is difficult. It's also the case that the official files on the Japanese codes were amongst the last to be released. More important, however, is that the triumph over Japanese codes has generally been attributed to the Americans. Indeed, in 1940 a high-powered team of United States army codebreakers defeated the vital Japanese 'Purple' (diplomatic) cypher, and from then on a vital stream of 'Magic' intelligence flowed to the Allies. Perhaps its best pay-off came not where it might have been expected — in the Pacific — but in Europe. Hiroshi Oshima, the Japanese military attaché in Berlin, frequently met with top Nazi leaders and passed on what he had learned to his masters in Tokyo. Duly read at Bletchley Park, his messages included crucial information about German defences in Normandy as well as significant insights into German strategic intentions.
Yet long before the breaking of 'Purple', British code-breakers working at the Far East Combined Bureau (FECB) in Hong Kong had begun to penetrate the secrets of Japanese naval codes, and were using machines to do so. In 1939, the British codebreaking genius John Tiltman, an infantry officer who had won the Military Cross in the trenches of the First World War, made the first vital break into JN25, the main Japanese naval code. Another outstanding protagonist in the story was Eric Nave, an Australian naval officer and Japanese linguist who was lent to the British in the 1920s. Sadly, his reputation was later tarnished when the co-author of his 1991 memoirs Betrayal at Pearl Harbor, James Rusbridger, distorted the text to make it conform to Rusbridger’s own now discredited conspiracy theories.
Unfortunately, after Japan's onslaught on British possessions in the region, the FECB was forced to move to a succession of safer locations and its work was seriously disrupted. Gradually, and inevitably, the Americans took over the lead in attacking the emperor's codes. As Smith graphically shows, however, the campaign was always a combined effort that brought together British, American, Australian and Dutch codebreakers. The Japanese were extremely skilled in guarding their secrets. So, too, were the US naval codebreakers, and at times bitter inter-allied turf wars caused serious crises. But in the end, the needs of war knocked heads sensibly together.
Smith provides plenty of technical information, including three appendices, to satisfy even the most ardent lover of cryptography. But less numerate readers are far from short-changed. Some of the book's most fascinating reading lies in the personal testimonies of the many veterans that Smith has interviewed, 'Anything', confesses one, 'was better than learning to march and salute.' While some were frontline codebreakers, others formed part of the massive army of intercept operators and translators whose work made the whole operation both possible and useful. Suddenly shipped overseas to far-tiling outposts in Asia, they found themselves working intensely with others in close encounters, leaving indelible memories that now spring fresh from the page. Many were Wrens. One, quoted extensively by Smith, recalls an off-duty life in Colombo where glamorous boyfriends, invariably junior naval officers, would take them to dinner dances where the lights were low, the food was gorgeous, and their dresses were garlanded with fresh flowers. 'It was heady stuff for girls of our age,' she recalls, 'and there was usually the knowledge that the boyfriend would be leaving for India or Burma soon, perhaps never to return.'
Michael Smith is to be thanked for reminding us so vividly of the human side of what, indeed, was a legendary achievement.
The Emperor's Codes is available now, priced £9.99.