18 Oct 2020

The Hazards of Cryptology

by | posted in: Codebreakers, William Friedman | 0

David Kahn called it the Yardley Symptom, the compulsion of the cryptologist to chip away at the puzzle throughout his waking moments. He turns the letters over in his mind even as he fries his morning egg, scrubs his evening dishes.

Joe Rochefort called it the “the staring process,” his unscientific-sounding method for codebreaking. Look at the symbols. Line them up in various ways. Write them out in various forms. Stare at them. “Pretty soon you’d notice a pattern.”

Elizebeth Smith Friedman called it “the thrill of your life,” the moment a cipher falls apart in your hands, revealing its secrets. “The skeleton of words leap out, and make you jump.”

I just spent an hour and forty-five minutes, over three different sittings, decrypting a simple substitution cipher. I confess, it did not stay with me during the two hiatuses. Not once, as I showered or snacked or drove the car, did I consider a new possibility for that pair of double-letters or those four different three-letter words. Nor, when at the computer, did I stare stop and stare deeply, though I did examine the patterns, over and over, trying this letter and that in a vain attempt to gain a foothold. When I did eventually crack the wall, the bricks fell quickly. I can’t say it was the thrill of my life, but it was satisfying, not in the way that puts a smile on your face and a skip in your step, but rather that allows you to breathe easier and release the built-up tension in your muscles. My desperation to read Mark Twain’s quip had grown acute, my frustration approaching all-consuming.

NEVER PUT OFF TILL TOMORROW WHAT MAY BE DONE DAY AFTER TOMORROW AS WELL.

I had inferred the double-l’s early on, but there were so many possibilities: -all, -ill, -oll, and -ell. The contraction “till” eluded me. I “knew” (though I was never really sure of anything) that “off” had to start with a vowel. I tried “odd” and “egg.” I must have tried “off” (Didn’t I?), but I never ruled it in as almost surely the best answer. The “o” gave two -o-o–o- words, which, let’s be honest, didn’t look promising. But it was the puzzle piece that first fell to my “stare.” Once I saw “tomorrow” amid those o’s, there was nothing else to do but plug in letter by letter until the message was complete. This took less than sixty seconds.

A mono-alphabetic substitution cipher (MASC) is the simplest cipher to solve. Cryptographers can layer on another substitution (or more?) to make poly-alphabetic encryptions. Fractionating is a particularly devilish way of transposing the letters of numbers in a cipher. When the symbols are shifted to different positions in one or more ways, they produce a transposition cipher. Layer on a second shift, and you get a double transposition cipher. Use an electromechanical machine with rotors that scramble the symbols multiple times in random, non-repeating ways, and you get a cipher that was, in the 1920s, quite possibly unbreakable.

Early in the decade, William Friedman solved the single-rotor Hebern cipher machine single-handedly in six weeks. In the 1930s, it took Friedman’s team of SIS cryptographers (Signal Intelligence Service) several years to crack the Japanese Type A Cipher Machine, code-named Red.  Ditto the upgraded Type B machine, Purple. Elizebeth Friedman’s biographer described the process as “akin to building a watch if you have never seen a watch before, simply by listening to an audio recording of the ticking and clicking of its gears.” Neither the Nazis or the Japanese Imperials cracked Friedman and Rowlett‘s four-rotor SIGABA machine before the end of the war.

The staring, the lining up and relining up, the round-the-clock mental demands for professional cryptographers don’t last an hour-and-three-quarters over two days. The frustration, the thwarting, the not-knowing persist day-in and day-out–sixteen- to twenty-hour days–for months and even years. The pressure builds.

Joe Rochefort said, “If you desire to be a real great cryptanalyst, being a little bit nuts helps.”

William Friedman seconded him, saying it was “not necessary” for a cryptanalyst to be insane, “but it helps.”

This highly cerebral profession took a surprising large physical and mental toll on its earliest practitioners. After cracking the Japanese diplomatic code and deciphering what he claimed were more than five thousand messages before and during the Washington arms control conference of 1921-22, Herbert Yardley was “exhausted to the point of breakdown.” His doctor ordered him to Arizona for several weeks to recoup. Later in the decade, Rochefort developed ulcers from the stress, a condition he lived with for the rest of his life. William Friedman, likely predisposed to mental illness, suffered depression to the point of hospitalization. Elizebeth Friedman chain-smoked and had difficulty keeping her weight.

Notwithstanding the occupational hazards, both Friedmans turned to cryptology in their play. They wrote ciphers to their children and friends. They held cipher parties, the way some hold Super Bowl parties today–with the guests interacting with puzzles and cryptograms rather than with an over-hyped athletic contest on a screen. It would have been fun to be a guest at one of these, with neither the extreme difficulty nor the life-altering stakes approaching those of Friedman’s work–work the Friedmans could not help bringing home in their minds yet could never discuss with each other.

If that is not a recipe for mental stress, I don’t know what is.

Sources:

Carlson, Elliot. Joe Rocheforte’s War: The Odyssey of the Codebreaker Who Outwitted Yamamoto at Midway. Annapolis, Naval Institute Press, 2011.

Fagone, Jason. The Woman Who Smashed Codes: a True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America’s Enemies. New York: Harper Collins, 2017.

Kahn, David. The Reader of Gentlemen’s Mail: Herbert O. Yardley and the Birth of American Codebreaking. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

“Reminiscences of Captain Joseph J. Rochefort. U. S. Navy (Retired).” Annapolis: U. S. Naval Institute, 1983. Series of tape-recorded interviews in 1969, Redondo Beach, CA, by Commander Etta-Belle Kitchen

Yardley, Herbert O. The American Black Chamber. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrrill Company, 1931.

8 Oct 2020

Black Sheep of the Family

by | posted in: Eddie Rickenbacker, Middle Grade Nonfiction | 0

 ** The first chapter from the newly released book, The Many Lives of Eddie Rickenbacker **

When he was about twelve years old, Eddie Rickenbacker tried to “fly” a bike off a barn roof. Not so far away, the Wright Brothers were developing what would become the world’s first self-powered aircraft. Eddie’s flying machine was a little more primitive.

He found an old bike and removed the tires so the metal rims would speed down the corrugated metal roof. “Steel against steel,” he said. To the handlebars, he tied a large umbrella, the kind that street peddlers use to mount on their wagons. Eddie didn’t know what would happen when he landed, but he and his partner, Sam Wareham, dumped a pile of sand below the eaves to break their fall, just in case. Sam would go second, but he never got his chance. The umbrella popped, Eddie crashed, and the bike was a total loss. Thanks to the sand pile, Eddie was just shaken up.

What kind of a kid rides an umbrella-bike off a twenty-five-foot roof?

One with a lot to prove, certainly. A boy grasping at greatness even at the risk of failure. The kid on the barn roof was more than a little reckless, but also smart enough to take precautions, just in case. He was, above all, unafraid of “learning the hard way,” no matter the pain. (And what could be more painful than a crash-landing from twenty-five feet?) That was the kind of boy Eddie Rickenbacker was. Those were the traits that shaped the kind of man he became.

Eddie Rickenbacker’s disastrous first flight ended in a crash-landing, but it did not stop him from becoming a giant in the field of aviation when he grew up. That first flight might have killed him, but it was just one of dozens of crack-ups, near misses, and brushes with death that marked his long and productive life. It would be a life so full and so
often saved from disaster, one could be forgiven for thinking it was many, many more than just one.

 

Lizzie Basler Richenbacher

Edward Rickenbacker was born October 8, 1890, in Columbus, Ohio, the third of eight children of William and Lizzie Rickenbacher. Mary and Bill came before Eddie, who was followed by Emma, Luise (dead before her third birthday), Louis, Dewey, and Albert. His parents started their lives as Wilhelm Rickenbacher and Liesl Basler in the German-speaking region of northwest Switzerland. Each, separately, emigrated to America for opportunity. Liesl sought independence from a large, confining family. Wilhelm dreamed of starting his own construction business. Each chose Columbus because of its large German-speaking population. To better fit into their adopted country, they Americanized their first names to William and Lizzie.

(Years later, during the war with Germany, Eddie changed the spelling of his last name. He swapped the “h” for a second “k” to make it appear less German. For clarity, this book will use the spelling Rickenbacker later adopted, even when writing about his earlier years.)

1334 E. Livingston Ave.

In Columbus, Lizzie and William met, married, and built a family together in their own home, two miles southeast of downtown. “The little house on Livingston Avenue,” as Eddie called it, was the end of the line at that time, the outer limits of the city. No pavement covered the street. No gas or running water reached the inside of its walls—certainly no electricity did. The Rickenbacker home was surrounded by empty lots and scattered houses which gave way, on the south and east, to farmland all the way to the horizon and beyond.

Alas, William’s American Dream kept slipping from his grasp. More than once, he tried to start his own business, but each time it failed. In and out of a handful of brewery and building jobs, he remained a wage laborer. Lizzie took in laundry to add to their income, but hard times were the Rickenbackers’ “constant companions,” as Lizzie put it. They made do with little and grew or raised what they could not buy with money. The children all chipped in. They hoed and weeded the garden, harvested its potatoes, cabbages, and turnips. They picked grapes from the vines, gathered eggs from the chickens in the “barn.” Eddie looked after the goats, staking them in empty lots to graze.

He learned to hustle for other things the family needed, or he wanted. Sometimes that meant stealing. There was an especially good walnut tree on a farm down Alum Creek. He and his big brother, Bill, would go down with a sack and, like squirrels, stock up for winter. Once Eddie fell from a high branch and was “knocked senseless . . . for about
an hour.” Other times, the brothers scrounged coal dropped along the tracks or swiped it from coal cars. Twice Eddie was almost run over by a switching car but was rescued at the last second by Bill.

More often, hustling meant working as many odd jobs as he could find: setting up pins at the local bowling alley; delivering papers for the Columbus Dispatch; hauling jugs of water and beer to farm workers; collecting rags, bones, and scrap metal to sell to the junkman. Eddie insisted he didn’t mind the work. He called it “a privilege.”

East Main Street School

School was mostly not a privilege. Classmates mocked his German accent, calling him “Dutchy” or “Kraut.” One year, they ridiculed his mismatched shoes: brown and rounded on one foot, yellow and pointed on the other. “As far as my studies were concerned,” Eddie said, “I had no trouble with them. The only difficulty I had was because of the mischief I got into.” He said he got into a lot of fights and played hooky whenever he could get away with it (and even when he couldn’t). He was “sort of the leader”11 of the Horsehead Gang, which took its name from the sign on the local horse track, called the Driving Park, down the street. The gang built a tree house of scavenged lumber where they hung out and smoked cigarettes, undisturbed by adults. One time, the gang went up and down Miller Avenue breaking streetlamps, like common hoodlums. William gave Eddie a severe thrashing when the police showed up at the door. Another time, they took rides on a loading cart down the tracks at the local gravel pit. The cart ran over Eddie’s leg and gave him a serious gash.

Mr. and Mrs. Rickenbacker worried about Eddie’s misbehavior. “You’ll wind up in reformatory and be a jailbird,” they warned. William beat him, in frustration. Lizzie wept, in desperation.

Young Eddie began to think of himself as “the black sheep of the family,” but he was not only that. He had a sensitive side, too. He was, he said, “crazy about painting watercolors,” and “particularly fond of flowers and scenery and animals.” He developed a crush on a girl in Sunday school and painted pictures for her. He was “sweet on” his third-grade teacher, Miss Alexander, too. In the spring, he brought her flowers picked from neighbors’ gardens on the way to school: tulips, lilacs, and peonies, each kind as it came into season. In time, Miss Alexander grew suspicious, and the neighbors began to complain. Eddie received two thrashings for his thievery, one at school and one
at home.

Eddie showed a creative side, too, and a budding interest in speed. He and his friends designed “push-mobiles”16 out of discarded boards and baby carriage wheels. They laid out a large dirt track and held races. And, of course, he designed an umbrella-bike to “fly” off a barn roof. It didn’t work the way he planned, but at least it showed he was thinking.

William Rickenbacher

Unknown to young Eddie, trouble was brewing in his world—trouble more serious than any he and his friends could think up. After years of trying to become his own boss, William remained a common laborer, working for wages. He wasn’t getting ahead, and he wasn’t pulling his family out of poverty. Frustration and resentment built up
inside him.

On a hot July day, while taking a lunch break with the sidewalk-laying crew, William lost his cool. An unemployed man strolled by, asking for a handout, and William was insulted. “If I had any dinner to share with any person I would share it with my children,” he growled. Words escalated into threats, threats into actions. The other man took up a heavy tool—in self-defense, he later said—and bashed William across the head. Later that day, Eddie learned his father was in a coma in the hospital. William clung to life for a month before ultimately giving up his struggle.

The parental support William had provided, along with his income, however modest, vanished with his unexpected death. The night after the funeral, Eddie woke to hear his mother quietly sobbing. Walking downstairs, he saw her seated at the kitchen table, head in her hands. The sight was enough to banish whatever mischief still existed in
his thirteen-year-old self. “Mama,” he promised, “I’ll never make you cry again.”

The next day Eddie dropped out of school and went to work. His days of troublemaking were over. It was time to become a man.

 

24 Sep 2020

Of Biography and Heroes

by | posted in: WWII: Pacific Theater | 0

I wrote a tenth grade English research paper on Douglas MacArthur. For whatever reason–most likely the limitations of my sources (source!) or the limitations of my reading of same–I focused primarily on his actions in Korea. I remember writing about MacArthur’s brilliant flanking invasion at Inchon, his meeting with Truman at Wake Island, the crossing of the Yalu River by the Chinese Red Army. In my telling, MacArthur could do no wrong. Truman was small-minded for firing him.

My teacher saw it differently. In her written comments on the paper, my teacher took Truman’s side. I remember this even more strongly than Inchon, Wake Island, or the Yalu River. I was a little put out. I wasn’t convinced by her (admittedly brief) argument, yet she had made me less sure of my own. Even at the time, I sensed her remarks were out of place. It wasn’t her job to debate me on politics.

Today, of course, as a middle-ager and a confirmed realist, I need no convincing. MacArthur’s actions strike me as self-serving and insubordinate. It was Truman who showed moral courage to stand up to him and face the public relations backlash.

I also know more of the complete MacArthur story with the benefit of the book MacArthur at War, which examines the general’s role in the Pacific during WWII, the part of his story I had neglected in my first encounter with him. The author, Walter Borneman, identifies a deep irony in the mythologizing of MacArthur at Bataan and Corregidor. Even as the commanding general achieved hero status among the American public in the early months of 1942, no one was more to blame for the desperate plight of his troops. The disconnect is glaring.

In 1935, MacArthur was posted to the Philippines for the fourth time. It was not a promotion. He had been appointed Army Chief of Staff in 1930. But in a Roosevelt administration, his days were numbered. Manila offered a cushion for MacArthur’s fall. He would be a big fish in the Philippine pond. But his somewhat ceremonial position became more essential in mid-1941, when Japan expanded south through Indo-China and Roosevelt responded with economic sanctions. With war now an inevitability, MacArthur was named Commanding General of the United States Armed Forces, Far East, or USAFFE.

The military’s War Plan Orange, worked out and revised over the preceding three-and-a-half decades, was coming off the shelf. (Orange stood for Japan. But with a multi-front war in the offing, Orange plans augmented into Rainbow, the latest iteration of which was Rainbow 5.) War Plan Orange had anticipated the loss of the Philippines, only to be recovered after a concerted and lengthy island-hopping campaign. MacArthur didn’t really accept the plan, telling his naval counterpart, Admiral Hart, that he was “not going to follow or be in any way bound by whatever war plans had been evolved, agreed upon and approved.” [67] Insubordination, apparently, came naturally to MacArthur.

Borneman makes a strong case that MacArthur did not expect a Japanese offensive operation until the spring of 1942. The strength of his conviction, poorly supported by the evidence, had disastrous consequences. MacArthur and his officers were caught with their pants down, literally and figuratively. Borneman documents how, on the morning of December 8, MacArthur appeared paralyzed in the initial hours of December 8, locking himself in his office, restricting access of his commanders. Twice, Major General Brereton requested orders to counter-attack and was denied even the ability to meet with MacArthur. It took a full seven hours after the initial wake-up call for MacArthur to approve a counter-attack.

MacArthur’s semi-paralysis continued beyond that first day of the invasion. In the subsequent two weeks, MacArthur squandered precious time not gathering the food and supplies his troops would need to hold out on Bataan and Corregidor. When subordinates raised the issue, he suppressed the talk as defeatist. Furthermore, his order to “fight on the beaches,” [104] meeting the Japanese wherever they landed, required supply lines that were eventually lost along with the supplies themselves. MacArthur’s inaction and his ill-conceived defense cost the lives of hundreds of his men. Moreover, it ensured the ultimate defeat of USAFFE’s stand on Bataan and Corregidor.

Carlos Romulo judged MacArthur in an entirely different light. A Philippine journalist who exiled to Corregidor with USAFFE, Romulo became MacArthur’s aide-de-camp, as well as the voice of the Voice of Freedom, a radio broadcast from the Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor to the occupied citizens of Manila and the provinces. To Romulo, MacArthur was wily and “outwitted Homma [his Japanese counterpart] at every turn.” [Romulo 55] His account of each step of the campaign, from fighting on the beaches to withdrawing from Manila, is the polar opposite of Borneman’s. His portrayal is hagiographic: “There is gallantry but no swagger to MacArthur.” “Courage was in every muscle of his lean body. He had a manner of one  born to triumph.” [Romulo 208, 215]

Before Romulo could publish his account, the myth of Douglas MacArthur was forged and burnished by Time-Life, Inc. Clare Booth Luce wrote an admiring feature for Life magazine which hit the newsstands, as it happened, on precisely December 8, 1941. Her husband and media mogul Henry Luce, put MacArthur on the cover of Time three weeks later. Over the next three months, MacArthur continued to dominate these influential magazines’ pages–magazines with a paid circulation of over sixteen million a week.

Americans were still reeling from the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Wehrmacht‘s depredations across Europe and its attacks against American shipping in the North Atlantic were deeply troubling. But, in early 1942, MacArthur’s men on Bataan were the only Americans active in the field, the only ones shooting back at a hated enemy (even if most of the men under his command were in fact Filipino). As the gravity of the situation on Bataan grew clear, MacArthur and his men took on the role of plucky American underdogs, like Jim Bowie and the Texans at the Alamo.

Borneman corrects the misperception that USAFFE was outnumbered. MacArthur had 80,000 men at the start of the campaign. Homma carried out his offensive with hardly more than a single division of 25,000 men oon Bataan proper. (In fairness, many of MacArthur’s troops were green as spring willows, almost wholly untrained. But who was responsible for strengthening Philippine domestic defenses for five years and USAFFE forces for five months? MacArthur.) In the end, the larger number of defenders may have been a liability. They required more food and supplies to support–food and supplies that MacArthur failed to secure in the three weeks before their retreat to Bataan.

Even as MacArthur’s stature grew among Americans back home, it shrank among his men in the foxholes. Romulo explained his boss’s lack of regular visits to Bataan unconvincingly: “Our USAFFE lateral was the end of communications, the nerve center of the Battle of the Philippines.” His presence on Corregidor was allegedly too vital. The one time MacArthur did visit, Romulo describes a jovial banter with his foot soldiers. “Hello, fellow! Keep it up!” he says to one. “Nice going, soldier!” he says to another. “No wonder his men adore MacArthur,” gushes Romulo.” [Romulo 148] Not once did he glance at the skies or at the threatening trees.”–by which he means the general showed his indifference to danger.

Borneman provides a different view. Soldiers were resentful, as evidenced by this ditty ditty that made the rounds (sung to the tune of “Battle Hymn of the Republic”):

Dugout Doug lies a-shaking on the Rock
Safe from all the bombers and from any sudden shock
Dugout Doug is eating of the best food on Bataan
And his troops go starving on.

Officers could be resentful, too. After surviving the Bataan Death March, one Brigadier General wrote in his diary from the POW Camp O’Donnell: “A foul trick of deception has been played on a large group of Americans by a Commander in Chief and small staff who are now eating steak and eggs in Australia. God damn them!”

Apparently, MacArthur resisted early efforts to get him to flee Corregidor. Still, when ordered directly by his Commander in Chief, MacArthur was not insubordinate. After escaping to Australia, he spent most of the rest of the war determined to liberate those he had abandoned. To his credit, he demonstrated an ability to learn new tricks and share credit with subordinates. “We never could have moved out of Australia if General Kenney hadn’t taken the air away from the Jap,” MacArthur admitted after the war. [280] During the war, he made an unprecedented confession to Eddie Rickenbacker: “I probably did the American Air Forces more harm than any man living when…chief of staff.” He added, “I am doing everything I can to make amends for that great mistake.” [Lewis 444] This was a rare show of humility from MacArthur, yet the evidence suggests he did nothing to address the concerns Rickenbacker risked his life to pass along from Washington. He did not let up on his “personal publicity campaign,” according to Borneman. Neither did he “stop complaining about the Joint Chiefs,” nor “stop waging war against the United States Navy.” [257] Orders from superiors remained suggestions MacArthur took under consideration.

Even as Borneman shows MacArthur’s growing generosity in sharing credit, he documents the commander’s continuing egoistic inclinations. After badgering his commander, Major General Eichelberger, to take Buna with all haste, MacArthur had the gall to report in his post-battle communique, “There was no necessity to hurry the attack.” Worse, he declared operations to be complete well before they actually were. The capture of Buna “can now be regarded as accomplished,” MacArthur reported on January 8, 1943. Eichelberger, who was on the ground in the most hellish conditions, would not have agreed. Far from being a mopping-up operation, he said, the next two weeks saw a “completely savage, expensive battle.” [258-260] This would not be the last time MacArthur declared premature victory, giving himself a domestic public relations coup along with a PR failure among his own men.

A year later, MacArthur made a similar claim in Manila. Bloody, desperate fighting continued a full month after he declared, “[The enemy’s] complete destruction is imminent.” [467] During that month, almost all of the old city of was destroyed. Perhaps two hundred thousand Filipinos were killed. The fight for the provinces continued through the end of the war. MacArthur’s determination to be the liberator of all the Philippines had consequences, Borneman points out. Not only did it contradict broader war strategy as laid down by the Joint Chiefs, it may have cost lives. “Far from expediting the fall of Japan, as MacArthur had long maintained they would, Philippine operations were in fact delaying it.” [450, 482]

MacArthur was not a team player. His actions in Korea followed the same pattern he had already established in the Pacific War. In other words, in middle age I agree with my tenth grade teacher, Mrs. Timperlake (who must have been substantially younger than I am now). MacArthur was arguably a hot-head, an egoist, and a danger to his country.

But what does this experience tell me about my role as a writer for young people? Am I spitting in the wind when I attempt to pen a balanced picture of my biographical subject? Will my young readers–younger than I was when I took on the life of Douglas MacArthur–ignore my attempts to share his human foibles, just as I overlooked MacArthur’s patent flaws. Do young readers need heroes so badly they see only what they want to see–bravery, boldness, righteousness. The ability to hold opposing ideas in mind simultaneously is rare in adults. Am I vainly expecting children to do it?

I didn’t like the man Rickenbacker became on a first reading of his biography. Yet I found a way to make him likeable for myself first of all and thus, in the end, for my reader. Could I write a biography of MacArthur for children? My gut says no, and yet there is much that is positive, even admirable in the old soldier who wouldn’t die but faded away. Enough to keep him in the “hero” category, with enough faults to keep him human and interesting. On second thought, maybe so.

But does the publishing world want a biography on this politically incorrect figure? The answer to that question is almost certainly, no.

Sources:

Borneman, Walter R. MacArthur at War: World War II in the Pacific. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2016.

Lewis, W. David. Eddie Rickenbacker: an American hero in the twentieth century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

Romulo, Carlos. I Saw the Fall of the Philippines. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1943.

Images: Wikipedia