Hacker News Reader

Comment by teractiveodular | Hacker News Reader

The Japanese tried to crack the code by torturing a poor guy called Joe Kieyoomia who was Navajo, but not a code-talker or even aware of the existence of the program, but they didn't get far. Amazingly, he survived the concentration camp, the Bataan death march and getting nuked in Nagasaki, returning to the US and living until 77.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Kieyoomia

View on HN

That's kind of interesting because the limited understanding I had based off an interview I watched was the code talkers were not actually using Navajo as some form of steganography. Even a direct translation to Japanese by an expert in both languages would give you a seemingly meaningless sentence. I specifically remember the guy saying "potato" was used to refer to hand grenades for example.

That's why encrypted messages still use code words and code phrases. Although the US did crack the Japanese encryption, the use of code words stymied them. The inference that Midway was the target of the Japanese attack was guesswork on what the code word for Midway was.

Code words and phrases can be cracked once one gets enough context.

> was guesswork on what the code word for Midway

More specifically, it was active counter intelligence where the US sent a false report of a water issue on Midway broadcast in the clear that they then picked up the Japanese report of the issue. They used that to discern which codeword Japan used for Midway.

You're right, but it was still scant information with which to bet the fleet on. The Japanese might have suspected that their code was broken, and so used disinformation to mislead the US Navy.

Hell, it's what I would have done whether I thought the code was broken or not.

The Germans had plenty of evidence that Enigma was broken. The High Command refused to believe it. I would have used the broken Enigma to send the Allies into a trap.

The way to play the code breaking game is to assume the enemy has broken it, and act accordingly to your own advantage.

Even if you know one of your widely-used codes or cyphers has been broken, I don't think it is that easy to make use of that fact, except perhaps briefly and in a limited way.

To conceal the fact that you know that it is broken, you would need to maintain use of that code at similar levels as before, without approximately doubling the signal traffic by sending the real communication under a new code. Furthermore, the fake traffic under the original code must be realistic to the degree the enemy can verify it, as they can read it, and if a major code has been broken for a period of a few weeks or so, the enemy presumably has plenty of information to use in verifying new messages, at least for a while (the verification need not be explicitly performed, at first; if new messages seem to be inconsistent with what is already known, questions are likely to be raised.)

Compromised minor cyphers and codes are another matter, and that is exactly how the Midway ruse worked.

For Nazi Germany the "fake traffic" would not be needed for all the services. Key change happened at midnight Berlin time by all operators. The radio operators stayed up late into the night sending the personal correspondence of the various officers to their families. The codebreaking process used this huge volume of messages to feed into the "cribbing" process which aided in recovering the traffic. By the time they had extracted enough of the key to decrypt traffic, normal military communications had started

Thanks - I was unaware of that until now. It appears to be a major operational security lapse.

Correction: I wrote ‘without approximately doubling…’ where I meant ‘while approximately doubling…’ - and then one must take into account sidewndr46’s interesting point.

How do you keep your allies from believing your fake encoded messages and taking the same action that they would have taken, had you not suspected the code was broken?

I'm not sure what you mean.

It sounds like they are suggesting there is some sort of unusual 3rd order deception going on, but I don't know really.

It's like a known plaintext attack, but in the 1940s!

There was a lot of this. The Enigma cracking team would use things like weather reports and convoy sightings as known plaintext for their work. If you pick up a submarine transmitting near a convoy, it’s probably saying that it saw a convoy at such and such coordinates. The same key was reused for the other messages from that day so cracking one let you read them all.

If I was running it and transmitting coordinates, I'd give the U-Boot commanders one-time pads to obfuscate them, and then encrypt the entire message.

> The same key was reused for the other messages from that day so cracking one let you read them all.

I know. The Germans were simply idiots in their hubris about Enigma. The evidence it was cracked was overwhelming, but Doenitz just dismissed it all. Rommel was also defeated by decoded Enigma messages, and he dismissed all evidence of its subversion.

I wonder how hard it would have been to provision each submarine with enough one-time pad to cover all secure communication for their entire patrol. I don’t know how much radio traffic there was, but it seems like that would not have been a major burden.

Hand them a newspaper. Plenty of text there to use as a pad. The code breakers would need to know both the newspaper used, and the algorithm used to select letters from the paper in order to crack it. Or use a magazine to provide the algorithm.

Every U-Boot mission gets another newspaper. Every U-Boot has a different newspaper. There weren't that many U-Boots, so this would be manageable.

Even decoding one U-Boot's transmissions would not compromise the others.

The U-Boats have plenty of other operational failures. Whenever U-Boats would be potentially damaged by the Allies, they'd put a notice in at one of the British listening stations. When the U-boat came into port, it'd radio in advance that it was damaged and might need special provisions (couldn't steer well, etc.) or even a tug to make it into the harbor. This all happened in German on the HF radio, which propagates really well. At least to Britain and possibly all the way to the mainland US.

The Allies basically got free reports of exact damage they inflicted on subs this way. On the other hand if a report didn't show up in a few days, they probably sunk it.

The weird thing is that it's possible the Enigma could have been used during WWII for communications. With the right number of rotors, the right choice of keys, and the right key rotation schedule it is possible.

Of course when you believe you are in the most advanced nation in the US, what is the incentive to improve?

That's exactly why they didn't get anywhere. Per the Reddit thread below, Joe was able to understand phrases like "red soil ahead", but that was not enough to work out the meaning.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/flagvh/how_c...

It is interesting then because it shows how laughably ineffective the actions of the Japanese were in World War II. All they needed to do was have Joe do transliteration, then pass the results to intelligence analysts. It would have yielded something, albeit likely limited

It's worth noting just how extreme the levels of crime against humanity committed by the Japanese were.

The Germans (and Swiss...) for the most part imprisoned / shot PoWs.

The Japanese used PoWs for chemical and biological weapon testing and vivisection, and they would find the most depraved ways to draw out mass torture of PoWs.

For example, they would do things like put US soldiers into baskets so small PoWs could not move at all inside them, load them into unventilated railroad boxcars with no water, then load them into ships, sail out to sea, and drop them overboard into shark-infested waters.

Then there's the Nanjing Massacre where in a matter of days Japanese soldiers slaughtered something like 300,000 Chinese civilians at a rate of around 7,000 civilians a day. That was just one of the more than a dozen massacres. It's widely believed that Japan slaughtered more civilians than the Germans.

The sheer level of depravity is astounding. And what's especially disturbing are the lengths conservatives in the Japanese government have gone to over the last several decades to rewrite history and erase these atrocities, while pushing harder and harder against the restrictions on their armed forces.

Also worth noting that along with Operation Paperclip, where the US recruited Nazis to bootstrap their space program, the US also recruited Japanese war criminals to continue their experimentation in torture and chemical and biological warfare, which led to (among other things) MKULTRA.

Seriously.

And in Bluebird and Artichoke the US directly continued that work, and not in some kind of "generic spirit" way, but in literal extensions of existing programs using people gathered via Paperclip. And in Korea the US used bioweapons developed by the Japanese during a retreat in late 1952.

The Japanese were indeed horrible during the war. The take that the Germans and the US treatment of "expendable" humans during and after these wars was somehow more justified or less horrific is a uniquely horrible and ahistorical take.

I'm sorry "the Swiss" had PoW as a neutral party?

Also - the Soviet PoWs in the camps would like to have a word with you.

Mostly pilots of planes that ended up in Switzerland. Without GPS or mid-air refueling that did happen a lot. Swiss neutrality meant shooting at any military that entered their territory, no matter which side they were on, and taking anyone who surrendered captive.

Anything else could be seen as helping one side or the other, which wouldn't be very neutral. Not that they were always above helping them in non-military ways

I seem to remember that navigation systems existed during WWII for both taking bearings and computing your actual location, albeit in a wide margin of error. The British apparently jammed some well enough that Nazi pilots just landed somewhere in the Northern part of the UK

Dead reckoning while flying is hard even today. If you are flying under IMC (instrument meteorological conditions, pilot slang for "bad weather/can't see shit"), you generally have to trust that your meters and instruments are working. Without GPS (or ground based triangulation methods), you generally have to guess where you are. It's very easy to accidentally end up in a small country like Switzerland.

If anyone's looking to build a startup in aviation, try building an alternative to pitot tubes. It's pretty much the last remaining vacuum instrument that hasn't been replaced by a solid state/MEMS alternative. And vacuum instruments are about as reliable as Windows Vista.

> pitot tubes

For example, the tragedy of Air France Flight 447.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

> dead reckoning

LORAN was invented in WW2 and was seen then as one of the big advancements of the war.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0ObdTU9k7o

Same in Ireland.

But those sneaky British pilots kept "escaping" from the Curragh where they were interned.

That’s interned people - not PoW.

And I doubt they shot them.

Do you have a source on shooting the pilots?

This is the first time I’m hearing this as a Swiss.

I don't think they "shot the PoW", and I don't even know if they emprisoned them. Feels very weird how the original comment put it (why link the Swiss to the Germans like this?).

But I know that German planes ended up in the Swiss airspace. The Swiss told them to land (like "we will now escort you and you will land on our soil, and if you don't comply we shoot you down"). They refused and got shot down.

But it's very different from shooting a pilot that would be in a state of PoW.

Not to take away from the depravity of Japanese violence in WWII, but 300,000/7,000≈43. The rate was either higher, or “a matter of days” is probably the wrong term.

The massacre took place over about 6 weeks, so the latter.

from a warfare perspective, this is really bad strategy. it strikes fear into your enemies, but it's massively outweighed by making your enemies fight to the absolute last to not be captured

It's pretty classic in-group / out-group conditioning. In fact, incentivizing your enemies to also commit their own atrocities incentivizes your own to fight to the absolute last. The depravity and feedback loop is intentional for these kinds of extremely ideologically motivation groups.

The idea was that the Japanese soldiers would see the atrocious that they were doing, realize that the Americans would want revenge, so the Japanese better fight to the death, since that's better than what the Americans would do to them in captivity. It ends up that the Americans weren't too in to revenge, so the captured Japanese were surprised.

The idea was that the Japanese considered themselves superior and everyone else was inferior, sub-human, and needed to be punished for defying them.

They dropped 2 nuclear bombs on, mostly on innocent civilians, seems like pretty good revenge to me.

And even before that, burned > 500 square miles of Japanese urban areas to ash.

Granted, by the last weeks of the war, the USAAF was dropping leaflets warning they'd be back with incendiaries in a few days, a masterstroke in psychological warfare.

Hot take, but Japanese civilians (all civilians, not just men) were to fight American soldiers if they invaded Japan. We'll never know what would have happened if America invaded, but Japan certainly was not making civilian evacuation plans. So maybe innocent-ish civilians?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kokumin_Giyutai.jpg

Japanese soldiers fought to the death because they knew that their families would be punished if they didn't.

In Japanese culture at the time the sins of the father are inherited by the sons and daughters. If you surrendered you would be dooming your entire family to a life of poverty and shame. To most decent people that would be worse than death.

Many wars would be cut short if the winning side offered amnesty. I suspect that Germany would have surrendered a year earlier if the Allies had offered some version of amnesty rather than unconditional surrender.

The Nazis fought to the bitter end because they knew that unconditional surrender meant there would be hell to pay. And there was.

You run the risk of the old regime continuing in some form and a repeat in a decade of the same war. Germany surrender in The Great War and the world was back at it again 15 years later.

This played a big part in the attitude of do it right this time.

Perhaps you're right, but it did come with a very large cost in lives on both sides.

None of the leaders of Germany in WWI were still in power by the time WWII started.

The exact opposite lesson was in fact learned by the Allies from WWI: instead of crippling Germany and the other Axis powers like the French did after WWI, they went with the Marshall plan, rebuilding their economies and making sure they have an actual future.

The Kaiser wasn't the problem after WWI, it was poverty that allowed the Nazis to rise to power.

>None of the leaders of Germany in WWI were still in power by the time WWII started.

This isn't really true. Hindenburg was instrumental in Hitler's rise to power. Ludendorff was the de facto dictator during WWI and proceeded to create the stab-in-the-back myth and to fight for the Nazis. There is absolutely lots of continuity between the WWI regime and the Nazis.

Hindenburg was a senile old man at the time. He thought he could control Hitler.

After Germany surrendered and the war in Europe was over, America began systematically dismantling West Germany's industrial capabilities. No aid was to be given save the absolute minimum needed to prevent starvation, all the work of rebuilding Germany was to be left to the Germans. The Red Cross was forbidden to visit allied camps of German POWs to provide food or aid. It was even forbidden for Americans to send packages of food to Germans.

Over the next two or three years these orders were one-by-one rescinded and reversed, mostly for national security reasons when the Soviet threat was acknowledged and Germany's role in countering that Soviet threat was understood. But even then, in the end only a small portion of the Marshall plan went to West Germany. Most of it went to the rest of western Europe.

18 countries got help from the Marshall plan, (West) Germany got 11% of it.

Britain and France got the bulk of it, and yet did not experience the economic revival that Germany did.

So many people died... yet, people are still voting for the AfD, and the idea of the Final Solution[0] is still somewhat alive under the Master Plan name[1]. I love Germany, but as a migrant living here, this is a "bit" uncomfortable. I lived here 15 years and paid more than a million in taxes, then suddenly a "Start Remigration Now" poster appears[2]. Not cool.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Potsdam_far-right_meeting...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Potsdam_far-right_meeting...

> and the idea of the Final Solution[0] is still somewhat alive under the Master Plan name[1].

Sorry, but that's utter bullshit. Also, I wonder how you feel about Turkey's plans to remigrate Syrian refugees back to Syria now that Assad has been deposed.

No that's just a fact. It's the same ideology, trying to be sold under "more acceptable" terms. The BS part is people trying to make it sound milder than what it is. It even wants to deport German citizens who they claim to not have integrated well. More details on similarities: https://www.socialeurope.eu/when-never-again-becomes-again-a...

I don't support any forced relocation of groups of people and find even very long prison sentences debatable. I'm also a big proponent of forcing Turkey to recognize the Armenian and other genocides. Nice try to poison the well though.

People build their lives somewhere, relocating them usually means many steps back. If you ever migrated into a complete new country with different values and language, you would understand.

> Sorry, but that's utter bullshit.

Have you missed the last ten years worth of radicalization in the AfD? They started out as what appeared to be a relatively normal fringe party under Lucke, and then over the years the far-right managed to shed ever more layers of the onion.

Particularly Höcke, a man who you can legally call a fascist, gives me the chills. And the party youth manages to be even more radical than him, enough to scare the adults into attempting to clean up shop before the youth organization gets banned.

> I wonder how you feel about Turkey's plans to remigrate Syrian refugees back to Syria now that Assad has been deposed.

Forcibly relocating entirely ethnic minorities? Yeah, that tracks.

israel is actually reimplementing this plan right now

>And there was

Hardly. A handful of very high ranking Nazis were tried and hanged. Many of them escaped via ratlines. Nearly all the mid-level officers and civil authorities escaped any sort of punishment or justice, and continued happily serving in the West German state.

A handful of very high ranking Nazis were tried and hanged.

This is a misconception. As a result of the "Nuremberg Trials" which concluded in 1946 and focused specifically on high-level defendants, 11 people were hanged. But there were numerous other trials, including what were called the "Nuremberg Military Tribunals" from 1946-1949, the Bergen-Belsen trials, and so on, as a result of which scores of people of decidedly lesser status were executed, easily some 200+.

Nearly all the mid-level officers and civil authorities escaped any sort of punishment or justice, and continued happily serving in the West German state.

This smells like a major numerical fudge as well.

> Hardly.

After Berlin fell, soldiers went through all the hospitals and checked every patient for the SS tattoo. Those with them got a bayonet.

SS members were hunted and killed throughout Germany after the fall. Some were hung upside down from lampposts and set on fire.

Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers died in POW camps after the war.

It was open season on German women after the surrender.

Germans underwent forced relocations out of Poland.

The killing did not stop at the surrender, it slowly faded over the next year.

Nearly all WW2 documentaries end with the suicide of Hitler, and maybe the Nuremburg trials. What else happened was savage and not well covered.

The Germans had a saying - enjoy the war, because after it will be hell.

Some reference material. I don't recommend reading any of them, they're very unpleasant reading. But it's important to document what happened.

"After the Reich", NacDonogh

"An Eye For An Eye", Sack

"Crimes and Mercies", Bacque

"Embracing Defeat", Dower

"Gruesome Harvest", Keeling

"Justice At Nuremburg", Conot

"Other Losses", Bacque

"The Nuremburg Trial", Tusa

"The Long Road Home", Shephard

Teenage german soldiers fought nail and tooth to the death in France in March 1945 for "honour". Suicide-bomber-level brain washing going on.

"Ascension Day Commandos" they were called, because of their willingness to die.

"I suspect that Germany would have surrendered a year earlier if the Allies had offered some version of amnesty rather than unconditional surrender."

That assumes that rational thinking (by, in this case, the German side) is involved. There wasn't any, at the very top.

An amnesty for what, mass murder, a policy of multiple genocides?

Also the Nazis claimed the German army was not losing WW1, but were betrayed by politicians. Perhaps WW2 would not have started if WW1 ended in unconditionally surrender?

Indeed. Modern warriors understand this concept. This is why Al-Julani of HTS (the group that has prevailed in Syria) has emphasized that he supports 'diversity' and that the Kurds and so on will be recognized. There were various forces at play in Syria and he'd be in a war with all of them if he was hardline right at the start. The constraints of peace apply to all, violent or not, and to win it's better to not be religious about your violence.

It was deeply ingrained by their internecine conflicts. When factions would fight in their internal wars, they would expect the losing side to commit suicide if they happened to be defeated and not dead by enemy hands. Their military class was not introspective enough to consider that implication of this, if applied to its logical end in a conflict with an out-group, would be the total extinction of their ethnic group.

> And what's especially disturbing are the lengths conservatives in the Japanese government have gone to over the last several decades to rewrite history and erase these atrocities, while pushing harder and harder against the restrictions on their armed forces.

This is still a hot issue in Japanese Buddhism and demonstrates the difference between the sects:

Consider Soto and Rinzai Zen, vs Jodo Shinshu. Leaders from both supported the war efforts and nationalism, but since Soto and Rinzai teachers are supposed to be enlightened, the Soto and Rinzai authorities have not been able to apologise for their support. On the other hand, since in Jodo Shinshu everyone, including the head of the school (monshu), is on the same spiritual level (there is no attainment in Jodo Shinshu), they were easily able to apologise for the acts and ideas of the WW2 monshu.

>> It's worth noting just how extreme the levels of crime against humanity committed by the Japanese were.

>> The Germans (and Swiss...) for the most part imprisoned / shot PoWs.

Not to take anything away from the Japanese, and the Soviets, who were also horrible to POWs, but I'm pretty sure that the WWII Germans are charter members of the Hall of Fame for crime against humanity. They just didn't do most of it specifically to POWs.

Western POWs. Eastern front was a whole other thing.

Fair enough!

(And if you want a good history of horror in broadly-speaking early-middle 20th century Eastern Europe, I suggest reading Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com