​Joe Rochefort  won WWII.
OK, that is a bit of hyperbole, but if any one man deserves that tag line, he is it.  He actually fought two wars: one against the Japanese and one against the Navy. He won both, but  beating the Navy would have to wait until after his death.  He lead the Hypo (a code word) sigint (signals intelligence) group from a basement in Honolulu.  His team cracked the code just enough to allow Rochefort to predict with uncanny accuracy the time and place of the attack on Midway.  The Japanese lost four fleet (meaning big) carriers (Kaga, Hiryu, Soryu, and Akagi) to the American's  one (Yorktown).   If the Americans had lost that battle, resources otherwise marked for Europe would have been routed to the Pacific. The war might have been extended by many months. One could even imagine the US dropping the A-Bomb on its originally planned target, Berlin.

Joe Rochefort was a Navy man through and through. He wanted, more than anything, a sea command. He never really got one. Instead, as mentioned, he was assigned to sigint.  He has spend some years in Japan learning the language and that, combined with his decoding experience and quick mind made him a good fit.

There have been big two movies about Midway. The early one staring Charleton Heston is tolerable, but the latest one is much better historically. If you have seen the latter, you already know a good  bit of the story.

The new group started off badly. Sigint was not up to speed and they missed the attack on Pearl Harbor entirely, and so did everyone else, but the error would haunt Rochefort. Midway was sigint's revenge. The group was struggling with JN25(c), the Japanese code system. They were able to  break the code and win the day, but not without drama.

Joe had one albatross which he could not shake… he was a "maverick". A maverick was an officer who has had come up through the ranks but was not a graduate of Annapolis. Many, if not most, Navy officers were snobs and bigots in that respect.  Three officers stand out in this regard. Wegner and the Redmans Sr. and Jr.. They wrote derogatory reports about Rochefort through Navy back-channels. Nimitz would discover this late in the game and he was furious.      

Early on , before much of the Japanese  message traffic could be decoded, what little  data they had  came from Traffic Analysis (TA) of ship movements. This did not yield much and Pearl Harbor was the result.

It was interesting to read about the "IBM machines" that proved to be very helpful. The machines were essentially programmable punch card sorters.  Sorting was one of the early targets of computing.

When the hammer fell on Honolulu, the Americans could intercept  radio traffic but they could not tell what direction it was coming from. They could only say that the source was either at one bearing, or that bearing +180 degrees. In other words, their equipment was primitive even for the time, and it lacked direction finding capabilities.

Six aircraft carriers attacked Pearly Harbor. Luckily, the US aircraft carriers were at sea. Equally lucky was that the Japanese did not hit Pearl's huge stockpile of oil.

After Pearl, the Navy went on a witch hunt and largely blamed Admiral Kimmel.  He would face years of criticism before taking his own life. Nimitz took over the Pacific Theater. Rochefort did not escape criticism from the likes of the Redmans.

The good news for Rochefort was the increasing presence of sigint in war.

The next major battle of the Pacific war was Coral Sea. The battle was a draw, but the Japanese were, for the first time, halted.  The next engagement would be Midway where the Japanese would face defeat for the first time.

Rochefort and his team had identified Midway as the next target. The JIN's (Japanese Imperial Navy)  code for Midway was AF. Washington (the Redmans again) disagreed. Famously, the US suckered the Japanese into tipping their hand on AF. They sent a message "in the clear" that Midway's fresh water condenser was broken. The Japanese noted that AFs water condenser was down. This was Rochefort's second error… he made Washington look stupid. But he was right. The Americans used Rochefort's uncanny predictions to sink all four of the Midway bound carriers. Nimitz famously remarked that Rochefort was only off by five minutes, five miles and five degrees. The rat bastard Redmans later tried to argue that the only reason Rochefort succeeded was because of work that they had previously done. That was BS but they kept at it. When Rochefort was put up for the Distinguished Service Medal (DSM), they nixed it, arguing in part that he did nothing himself, only his people did! By that logic, no officer would ever receive a medal.

Rochefort was also able to provide key information relating to the next major contest: Guadalcanal. 

Rochefort would die before he was finally awarded the DSM (the highest military honor the US gives) by Ronald Reagan.

This book was a long read, but I never lost interest. It is the story of a naval battle that would rank up there with Jutland and Trafalgar. 
    

I was surprised when my friend Dave Harper, quite accidently and coincidentally, suggested I read this book. I had just completed my model of the Erebus' sister ship HMS Terror, a fact that Dave did not know. It also surprised me that the book was written by  Monty Python alum Michael Palin. Palin is well known as a globe trotter and as it turns out, he is very much interested in the  days of English exploration.

The Terror and the Erebus were "bombs". A bomb ship was a warship that used mortars rather than cannon. Mortars demand a strong and sturdy platform to fire from, which in turn demands a reinforced deck and substructure. They served in war, but when the wars ended, their design features made them good at arctic exploration.  In other words they were, with some additional modifications, good ice-breakers.  The Terror was about 10 years older than the Erebus. Erebus was a Greek god similar to Satan. They were primarily sailing ships, but both had a small (25 hp) steam engine and a propeller  that could move them at about 4 knots. I could find no instance in the book where they were ever used.  Modern icebreaker engines deliver 40,000 hp.

The Erebus and Terror teamed up, with the newer Erebus in charge, to find both the North and South  Magnetic Poles. They succeeded in the former quest and failed in the latter.  They were at sea for 4 years, and narrowly avoided being caught in the ice at both ends of the Earth.  

They went  further south than any previous voyage.  Many years later, Shackleton would break their record.

In May 1845, the Franklin Expedition set out, with the same two bombs, to try and navigate the Northwest Passage.  John Franklin and his two crews would never see England again. The story of the Franklin Expedition is mostly speculation. A lot of money and rewards were spent to find them. They actually survived on the ice for about three miserable years.

The wrecks of the Erebus and the Terror were found in 2014 and 2016. Some bodies were found and analyzed. They all had elevated lead levels. What role lead had in the loss is hard to say. These men were tough as nails. It is not surprising that several of them tried to jump ship.

This is a fairly long book. It you are interested in the days of sail, or the politics of exploration and scientific discovery, it is an interesting read. 

The image below is my model of the Terror. The Erebus would have looked very similar.
    

I have read several books about Stalingrad. This is definitely one of them.
The Battle of Stalingrad was contingent on the  Russians winning Battle of Moscow. It was a close thing. Had the Germans been better prepared for cold weather conditions, they could have taken Moscow.

The battle for Stalingrad began in July 1942 and ended in February 1943.
Stalingrad was surrounded to the west and supplied from the other side of the Volga to the east. The fighting was bitter. 

Hitler wanted the Caucasus mountains for oil and Stalingrad for its name… mostly.


As the Battle of Stalingrad progressed, the German army found itself hungry for the 650 tonnes of supplies per day it needed to fight.  They were supplied by a single railroad line that became a pivotal target for the Russians.  

By October, the Russians had control of the air. In November, 250,000 Germans were trapped in a pocket  around downtown Stalingrad. The Germans called it the Kessel (Caldron in English). This was the turning point of the entire war.

The Russians decided to starve the Kessel. The German Luftwaffe tried to supply the Kessel from the air. The Russians shot down many supply sorties. The Germans starved to the tune of one dying every 7 seconds. The Germans were butchering 300 horses a day.

Hitler was a much better tactician than Stalin, but both managed to make some very big errors. The difference was that Stalin could afford them.

Von Paulus, the German head of the sixth army trapped in the Kessel, surrendered in February 1943. He had just been promoted to Field Marshal. Hitler thought the new rank would force him and his men to fight to the death.