Winter of the World

She spent most of Sunday in bed with a hangover.

On Monday evening she got a phone call. ‘I’m Hank Bartlett,’ said a young American voice. ‘Friend of Charlie Farquharson, at Duxford. He talked to me about you, and I found your number in his book.’

Her heart stopped. ‘Why are you calling me?’

‘Bad news, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Charlie died today, shot down over Abbeville.’

‘No!’

‘It was his first mission in his new Spitfire.’

‘He talked about that,’ she said dazedly.

‘I thought you might like to know.’

‘Thank you, yes,’ she whispered.

‘He just thought you were the bee’s knees.’

‘Did he?’

‘You should have heard him go on about how great you are.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Then she could no longer speak, and she hung up the phone.

(ii)

Chuck Dewar looked over the shoulder of Lieutenant Bob Strong, one of the cryptanalysts. Some of them were chaotic but Strong was the tidy kind, and he had nothing on his desk but a single sheet of paper on which he had written:

YO—LO—KU—TA—WA—NA

‘I can’t get it,’ Strong said in frustration. ‘If the decrypt is right, it says they have struck yolokutawana. But it doesn’t mean anything. There’s no such word.’

Chuck stared at the six Japanese syllables. He felt sure they ought to mean something to him, even though he knew only a smattering of the language. But he could not figure it out, and he got on with his work.

The atmosphere in the Old Administration Building was grim.

For weeks after the raid, Chuck and Eddie saw bloated bodies from sunk ships floating on the oily surface of Pearl Harbor. At the same time, the intelligence they were handling reported more devastating attacks by the Japanese. Only three days after Pearl Harbor, Japanese planes hit the American base at Luzon in the Philippines and destroyed the Pacific Fleet’s entire stock of torpedoes. The same day in the South China Sea they sank two British battleships, the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, leaving the British helpless in the Far East.

They seemed unstoppable. Bad news just kept coming. In the first few months of the New Year Japan defeated US forces in the Philippines and beat the British in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Rangoon, the capital of Burma.

Many of the place names were unfamiliar even to seamen such as Chuck and Eddie. To the American public they sounded like distant planets in a science-fiction yarn: Guam, Wake, Bataan. But everyone knew the meaning of retreat, submit and surrender.

Chuck felt bewildered. Could Japan really beat America? He could hardly believe it.

By May, the Japanese had what they wanted: an empire that gave them rubber, tin, and – most important of all – oil. Information leaking out indicated that they were ruling their empire with a brutality that would have made Stalin blush.

But there was a fly in their ointment, and it was the US Navy. The thought made Chuck proud. The Japanese had hoped to destroy Pearl Harbor completely, and gain control of the Pacific Ocean; but they had failed. American aircraft carriers and heavy cruisers were still afloat. Intelligence suggested the Japanese commanders were infuriated that the Americans refused to lie down and die. After their losses at Pearl Harbor the Americans were outnumbered and outgunned, but they did not flee and hide. Instead they launched hit-and-run raids on Japanese ships, doing minor damage but boosting American morale and giving the Japanese the unshakable feeling that they had not yet won. Then, on 25 April, planes launched from a carrier bombed the centre of Tokyo, inflicting a terrible wound on the pride of the Japanese military. The celebrations in Hawaii were ecstatic. Chuck and Eddie got drunk that night.

But there was a showdown coming. Every man Chuck spoke to in the Old Administration Building said the Japanese would launch a major attack early in the summer to tempt American ships to come out in force for a final battle. The Japanese hoped the superior strength of their navy would be decisive, and the American Pacific Fleet would be wiped out. The only way the Americans could win was to be better prepared and have better intelligence, to move faster and be smarter.

During those months, Station HYPO worked day and night to crack JN-25b, the new code of the Imperial Japanese Navy. By May they had made progress.

The US Navy had wireless intercept stations all around the Pacific Rim, from Seattle to Australia. There, men known as the On The Roof Gang sat with headsets and radio receivers listening to Japanese radio traffic. They scanned the airwaves and wrote what they heard on message pads.

The signals were in Morse Code, but the dots and dashes of naval signals translated into five-digit number groups, each representing a letter, word or phrase in a code book. The apparently random numbers were relayed by secure cable to teleprinters in the basement of the Old Administration Building. Then the difficult part began: cracking the code.