Magic Midway?
January 2nd, 2009 From
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>Date: Fri, 12 Sep 1997 21:11:31 -0400 (EDT)
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>To: mahan@microwrks.com
>From: rickt@cris.com (Eric Bergerud)
>Subject: Re: Magic Midway?
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>
> >Just to check if I can use a heading in the description of the Battle of
>Midway:
> >had Magic anything do with the defense of the atoll? More to the point, was
> >Magic part of the decryption of the Japanese radio traffic?
> >
> >Tim
> >
>It depends on how sticky for details are the visitors to your web site. Over
>the years, the term “Magic” has become a generic term used by everyday
>historians and writers to describe the Allied (mostly American)
>cryptographic war against Japan. At the time, however, the participants made
>a very strong distinctions between “Magic” which was the successful effort
>to break the Japanese diplomatic cypher using a cipher machine we called
>Purple (similar to many ways to the famous Enigma machine at Benchley Park)
>and Ultra, the widespread, ever changing every to decrypt Japanese military
>codes. (To make things more confusing, the findings of the two are often
>mixed together under the term “Ultra.”) At the time of Pearl Harbor the US
>had lost the ability to read any of the new verion of the main IJN Code
>JN-25. Allied cryptographers were working furiously to crack JN25 starting
>Dec 8. The major effort was directed in Pearl Harbor by a team under
>Commander Joseph Rochefort, one of the most brilliant practioners of the
>murky craft of code breaking in military history. JN-25 was never broken in
>the same way that Magic cracked the diplomatic code (neither was EVER exact)
>and the Japanese Army code proved a tougher nut. In any case Rochetfort’s
>group was able to give Nimitiz a very good picture of the Japanese move
>toward Midway which proved of great value to the Americans. From a technical
>point of view US code breaking activities were every bit as sophisticated as
>the more famous British effort against Germany. Funny, neither the US nor
>Great Britain are not world famous for their people’s love and skill with
>foreign languages.
>Eric Bergerud, 531 Kains Ave, Albany CA 94706, 510-525-0930