The Dungeon's Secret War
In the summer of 1941, the U.S. Navy's Combat Intelligence Unit set up operations in the basement of the 14th Naval District Administration Building at Pearl Harbor. This windowless, soundproofed space, secured by a single Marine guard, was nicknamed "The Dungeon". Here, a team officially known as Fleet Radio Unit Pacific (FRUPAC), or by its classified code name Station HYPO, waged a silent war of mathematics and linguistics. The unit's name, HYPO, came from the phonetic alphabet for the letter "H," representing Heʻeia, the location of a Hawaiian radio tower.
The team's leader was the Commander Joseph J. Rochefort. An expert in the Japanese language, Rochefort assembled a diverse group of analysts. His team included linguists, mathematicians, and, several musicians from the band of the sunken battleship USS California, selected for their sharp minds and skill in pattern recognition. Their target was the Japanese Imperial Navy's most secure operational code: JN-25. This was a superencrypted system, which used a codebook of around 30,000 five-digit groups that were then further altered using a second book of additives. To break it, analysts had to first strip away the additive layer to find the original code group, and only then could they begin to deduce the meaning of that group.
The "AF" Ruse
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the volume of Japanese naval radio traffic increased dramatically, giving the codebreakers more material to analyze. By March 1942, Rochefort's team had broken into JN-25 and could decipher parts of messages. They used IBM punch-card sorting machines to sift through immense quantities of intercepted data, identifying recurring patterns that slowly revealed the code's structure. That spring, intercepts began mentioning a offensive planned against a target designated "AF".
While intelligence officers in Washington D.C. believed the target was in the Aleutians, Rochefort and his team at HYPO were convinced "AF" was Midway Atoll. To confirm their hypothesis, they devised a simple but effective deception. They instructed the Midway garrison to send an unencrypted radio message reporting that their water distillation plant had failed. A few days later, Station HYPO intercepted an encrypted Japanese message stating that "AF is short on water". The trap had worked.
With the target confirmed, HYPO also determined the date of the planned attack—June 4th or 5th, 1942—and the full order of battle for the Japanese fleet. This intelligence allowed Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, to position his three aircraft carriers for a perfect ambush. The resulting Battle of Midway, from June 4-7, 1942, was a decisive American victory that saw the sinking of four Japanese aircraft carriers.