The emperor's codes : the breaking of Japan's secret ciphers /

The Allied efforts that led to the breaking of Germany's Enigma code have been well publicized. Less well known but equally critical to the war effort was the combined British-American success at breaking the various Japanese codes. Smith, a journalist who has worked for the London Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph, writes a real-life thriller that unfolds like a classic spy story. The heroes here are not dashing secret agents; instead, they are seemingly fanatically dedicated and patient plodders who pore over the myriad possibilities involved in code breaking. Smith shows how the failure to fully understand Japanese cable traffic led to the disaster at Pearl Harbor. He proceeds to illustrate the manner in which Allied cooperation in code breaking led to future successes in the Pacific, including the critical Battle of Midway. This is an engrossing and exciting recounting of an obscure but important facet of World War II. --Jay Freeman

During World War II, British and American cryptographers labored in tight security at Bletchley Park and elsewhere, poring over thousands of intercepted Japanese and German military messages. This fascinating story has been told and retold over the past 15 years as more new information emerges. Smith, a British journalist and author of Station X: Decoding Nazi Secrets, has now expanded on the subject with this well-written account of how the Americans with a great deal of help from British codebreakers cracked the Japanese codes. Smith portrays the sometimes bitter competition between American naval and British military personnel and insists that the British deserve a greater share of the credit than the Americans have been willing to grant. All in all, it makes a great story and one of importance, since many historians believe that through their codebreaking efforts the Allies were able to shorten the war by as much as two years. Libraries should add Smith's book to other recent works, including Stephen Budiansky's Battle of Wits (LJ 9/15/00) and Leo Marks's Between Silk and Cyanide (LJ 4/15/99). Recommended for most collections. Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

An account of American and British operations that broke Japanese codes during WWII. Japan and Germany did not lose the war because of the Allied advantage in numbers and material-all the big turning-point battles occurred early on, when the Allies were outnumbered. It was stupidity that defeated the Axis, and nothing illustrates this better than the story of codebreaking. In 1943, when fighters shot down a transport carrying Admiral Yamamoto, it was publicized as a lucky accident-but, in fact, details of his flight had been broadcast by the Japanese and intercepted. Inferior American forces could not have won the key naval battle of Midway without knowledge of enemy positions given by Japanese transmissions: American submarines devastated Japanese shipping because we knew their routes and positions. Even Pearl Harbor came as a shock not through poor codebreaking, but because US intelligence concentrated on reading the Japanese diplomatic (rather than military) code. We knew their diplomats negotiating in Washington were not serious and that Japan was about to launch a war, but the details were elsewhere. British journalist Smith (Station X, not reviewed) includes a fascinating step-by-step explanation of codebreaking, but most readers will probably not be able to follow beyond the first steps. Because of their difficult language and sense of intellectual superiority, the Japanese assumed their codes were unbreakable-but they were merely difficult. The codebreakers themselves were a collection of academics, geniuses, and eccentrics assisted by a vast army of clerks (including many women). There were also plenty of small-minded bureaucrats and arrogant (mostly American) officials unwilling to share information, so progress was often unnecessarily slow. A fine contribution to the genre: The author has done his homework well, interviewing survivors and poring over old records to tell the story of one of the greatest capers of the century.