In this gripping, previously untold story from World War II, Michael Smith examines how code breakers cracked Japan’s secret codes and won the war in the Pacific. He also takes the reader step by step through the process, explaining exactly how the code breakers went about their daunting taskmade even more difficult by the vast linguistic differences between Japanese and English.The Emperor’s … English.
The Emperor’s Codes moves across the world from Bletchley Park to Pearl Harbor, from Singapore to Colombo, and from Mombasa to Melbourne. It tells the stories of John Tiltman, the British soldier turned code breaker who made many of the early breaks in Japanese diplomatic and military codes; Commander Joe Rochedort, the leading expert on Japanese in U.S. naval intelligence; Eric Nave, the Australian sailor who pioneered breakthroughs in deciphering Japanese naval codes; and Oshima Hiroshi, the hard-drinking Japanese ambassador to Berlin whose candid, often verbose reports to Tokyo of his conversations with Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis were a major source of intelligence in the war against Germany. Without the dedication demonstrated by these relatively unsung heroes, the outcome of World War II might have been very different.
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I enjoyed this book because I did some code work in service, but someone without the experience will probably be bored or lost.
I did enjoy parts of this book. But, he got into too much technical detail about the codes, and not enough about the people who broke the codes. It’s also from a British perspective, and not much about the American involvement. My late father-in-law was one of the American code breakers. He would never talk about it, other than he was sequestered on a South Pacific island working on the codes. I had hoped that it had more information on what he did.
Also, he has one chapter entitled about the shooting down of Yamamoto. But, he gives very little information about that. Most of the chapter deals with other events.
I just expected more.
I say that the book was haunting because I can not fathom how anyone could make sense of encoded messages never mind that they were in a totally foreign language (Japanese),
More to the war that wasn’t common knowledge
Much effort was made to impress the idea that England didn’t need American help deciding axis signals. Too strident for me. If they didn’t want our help we should have stayed neutral.
You won’t fully understand the Pacific Theater and Allied decision making there until you read this.
This book gave me new insight into the impact of British code breaking activities. It was sufficiently detailed to let me understand the scope of these activities without delving into higher mathematics. I was really impressed by the way the book described the evolution of the incredible world-wide organization that was built to manage code breaking. The book also provided me with a new perspective on the way in which code breaking activities impacted the relationship between Britain and the US.
Long and drawn out. Didn’t finish.
Interesting and informative but just doesn’t “grab” me and make me want to finish it. Somewhat biased point of view of code breaking in WWII