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Japanese messages were written using 45,000 five-digit numbers representing phrases and words. The cryptographers had to figure out what the numbers said without the aid of computers. "In order to read the messages, we had to recover the meaning of each one of those code groups. The main story of our work was recovering code group meanings one-by-painful-one," Showers said. At the time of the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, they understood a small fraction of the messages. By May 1942, they could make educated guesses. A key breakthrough came when they determined Japan was using the letters "AF" to refer to Midway. Showers said Cmdr. Joseph Rochefort, the team's leader, and Nimitz were confident the letters referred to the atoll. But Adm. Ernest King, the Navy's top commander, wanted to be sure before he allowed Nimitz to send the precious few U.S. aircraft carriers out to battle. So Nimitz had the patrol base at Midway send a message to Oahu saying the island's distillation plant was down, and it urgently needed fresh water. Soon after, both an intelligence team in Australia and Rochefort's unit picked up a Japanese message saying "AF" had a water shortage. Showers was an ensign in the office, having just joined the Navy. He analyzed code deciphered by cryptographers, plotted ships on maps of the Pacific, and filed information.
Now 92 and living in Arlington, Va., the Iowa City, Iowa native went on to a career in intelligence. He served on Nimitz's staff on Guam toward the end of the war, and returned later to Pearl Harbor for stints leading the Pacific Fleet's intelligence effort. After the Navy, he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. Showers said commanders weren't always as open to using intelligence to plan their course of attack the way Nimitz was. Some were suspicious of it. But Midway changed that. "It used to be a lot of people thought intelligence was something mysterious and they didn't believe in it and they didn't have to pay attention to it. Admiral Nimitz was fortunately what we call intelligence-friendly," Showers said.
[Associated
Press;
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