Great history:
“On page 8 is a brief story that has become somewhat of a legend about the defenders of Wake Island. When Hawaii radioed the garrison asking what they needed after defeating the initial assault by the Japanese invasion fleet on 11 December, the response was “Send us more Japs!”
“Send us” and “more Japs” was added to the beginning and end of the message, but that was only to confuse Japanese code breakers. “None of us was that much of a damn fool,” James Devereux (commanding officer of the 1st Defense Battalion) said after the war, “We already had more Japs than we could handle.”
I just received a new book dealing with our code breaking before, during and after Pearl Harbor.
The title is: Magic! The untold story of US intelligence and the Evacuation of Japanese residents from the West Coast during WWII, by Donald D. Lowman.
Before Pearl Harbor, we apparently had a long list of Japanese terrorists and the ones spying on us from Hawaii to up and down our west coast to even Arizona.
This was done via Magic, our top secret code breaking of the Japanese embassy code and later their army and navy codes.
The book arrived from Amazon just before dinner last night.
After dinner, I read 70+ plus pages and finally put it away at about 9 pm.
President Roosevelt knew of this decoded list and the decoding that was going on before and after Pearl Harbor.
They avoided targeting the spies and potential terrorists in America and not arresting the identified dangerous people by evacuating every Japanese on the west coast and including the part of Arizona on the Mexican border.
We were still cracking their codes right before and after we dropped our two atomic bombs.
At this time I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Code Cracking and how this impacted our war with Japan before and after Pearl Harbor.
I understand that we got a lot of back door information about the Germans when monitoring the Japanese embassy transmissions.