The Emperor's Codes; The Breaking of Japan's Secret Ciphers

xii, [6], 323, [3] pages. Map. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Michael Smith is a number one bestselling author and award winning journalist. He left school at 15 to join the British Army and after service with the Royal Artillery became a member of the army's Intelligence Corps monitoring terrorist and Soviet Bloc communications. Smith studied Arabic before working for three years in the Middle-East collecting intelligence on terrorists operating in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. He also took part in Britain's secret war against communist rebels in Oman, as part of a small unit providing intelligence for the SAS. Smith then spent four years in Europe, becoming a German interpreter and producing reports on the activities of the East German armed forces. He left the BBC in 1990 to become a newspaper journalist. He wrote on eastern Europe for the Financial Times and the Sunday Times before joining the Daily Telegraph, where he was Defence Correspondent. Derived from a Kirkus review: An account of American and British operations that broke Japanese codes during WWII. 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. British journalist Smith includes a fascinating step-by-step explanation of codebreaking. Because of their difficult language and sense of intellectual superiority, the Japanese assumed their codes were unbreakable. The codebreakers themselves were a collection of academics, geniuses, and eccentrics assisted by an army of clerks. The author interviewed survivors and pored over old records to tell one of the greatest stories of the century. First U. S. Edition [stated]. First printing [stated].