A Canadian opens up about her secret wartime work, eavesdropping on Japan | Hacker News Reader

A Canadian opens up about her secret wartime work, eavesdropping on Japan

cbc.ca

114 pointswglb36 comments

Summary: The subject (of the article) was a very routine SIGINT sergeant in WWII. She worked in Canada, listening on the radio to (Imperial) Japanese military signals. She wrote those down on paper, then (in effect) mailed the paper to the next stage of the SIGINT pipeline. The signals were encrypted (by the Japanese) - so she had no way to tell whether one said "Our big attack with force X against location Y will happen at time Z", or "Our garrison on Useless Island is still bored."

While on paper this was all super-secret, and such dull work was very important to the war effort...the Japanese knew that the allies had loads of SIGINT radio operators like her, doing jobs just like hers. And nothing she knew would have been of much value to them.

For me, all the CBC article's hype about super-duper secrecy just messes up what could have been a much better human interest story.

My roommate took a class in college about WW2 which required that you find and interview a veteran (this was the mid 90s) and tell their story of the war.

Some of the better past works were shared with the class. The one that fascinates me was the story of a lighthouse keeper detailed to a remote lighthouse off of Newfoundland. It put in perspective the global impact of the war.

That job would seriously scare me. Slip on an icy catwalk, and freeze to death with a broken leg. Screw up with the light, and a troopship with thousands of soldiers on board runs aground in a storm. Do everything perfectly, and a U-Boat could still land some Nazi commandos on the tiny island...with "do whatever is necessary to secure the lightkeeper's cooperation" orders.

> Do everything perfectly, and a U-Boat could still land some Nazi commandos on the tiny island

Reminds me a bit of the coastwatchers (but warmer)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastwatchers https://www.nzhistory.govt.nz/page/nz-coastwatchers-executed...

It's Veterans day tomorrow so they've gotta publish content that's not about the pointless sweat & blood modern veterans spent in Afghanistan. As a vet myself, I'm not too into this year's commemoration.

The Japanese poured pointless sweat & blood into WW2. So much it destroyed the military dictatorship and turned the country practically pacifist for a few decades.

Sometimes losing a war is actually winning. That's the positive message about WW2: it cured the losers of glorifying war. Maybe Afghanistan can do the same?

I'm not a pacifist in this manner, I think the current state of the world doesn't allow for NATO and aligned democratic countries to give up on military supremacy. Still, I'm perplexed and annoyed about Afghanistan.

> it cured the losers of glorifying war. Maybe Afghanistan can do the same?

Afghanistan hasn't glorified any wars. Did you forget that the US invaded Afghanistan, not the other way around?

Generally those who leave with refugees clinging desperately to their aircraft are the losers.

You can certainly argue the afghani's won against both the russians and the united states tactically, that being said you wouldn't argue that afghanistan is doing better than russia or the united states as a consequence of "winning" said wars.

I think you may have misinterpreted this (subtle) comment. They likely meant to imply that the US lost the war (context: in the US, “Afghanistan” and “Vietnam” are essentially synonymous with the wars in those countries, sadly).

"Afghanistan hasn't glorified any wars"

? They glorify their wars, particularly suicide bombers, often children, often coerced into the act, who helped them to victory.

Among other things.

> So much it destroyed the military dictatorship and turned the country practically pacifist for a few decades.

So I'm not really familiar with the intricacies of, well, any period of Japanese history, but my understanding was that the US military kept a very strong presence in Japan for many years after the allied victory, and both directly and indirectly had its fingers in Japanese politics.

I'm eager to hear the take of someone more familiar with the history. I know the US forced Japan to abandon/greatly downsize its military after the victory (not unusual) but due to the Korean War had to accelerate a plan to protect Japan, which ultimately resulted in the "Japanese Self-Defense Forces", that seems like it could be as much a result of pacifism as internal politics and US pressure against creating anything resembling an army.

There's a fairly common argument that Germany and Japan are actually quite unlike in this regard; that Germany truly confronted its history of militarism and came out the other side a more mature polity, while Japan's percieved pacifism is actually closer to some kind of trauma-amnesia where the same lessons haven't really been learned.

Part of that is explicitly historical: look at the rapid rehabilitation of arch-conservatives in American efforts to confront the USSR in Asia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Course

Japan never had a real Nuremburg moment, essentially.

The "national psyche" side of things is fuzzier. I don't really trust myself to write on it, so have another ref. Sorry this reference is an archived version of a now-offline blog reposting an out-of-print newspaper's literary analysis of an obscure TV show (familiarity not required), but it's what comes to mind when I try to recall English-lang sources on this sort of thing:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210820145247/https://sittingon...

Right, Japan is still sooo unable to admit to what it did that even today, it's happy to initiate trade wars with Korea over refusing to recognize and pay reparations to the victims of their war crimes. And it would really benefit from a strong and friendly relationship with Korea. It's really weird, childish and baffling.

edit: aikinai is entirely correct that Japan did apologize, and made compensation in a treaty, and that it isn't as black or white as my comment above made it sound. In fact, my comment wasn't very good or useful. Still the situation between the two countries baffles me, and I don't understand why recent PMs continue to visit the Yasukuni Shrine, and maintain such an ambivalent stance... anyhow, an unfortunate situation.

Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa: "What we should not forget about relationship between our nation and your nation is a fact that there was a certain period in the thousands of years of our company when we were the victimizer and you were the victim. I would like to once again express a heartfelt remorse and apology for the unbearable suffering and sorrow that you experienced during this period because of our nation's act." Recently the issue of the so-called 'wartime comfort women' is being brought up. I think that incidents like this are seriously heartbreaking, and I am truly sorry”. [0] Just one quote I grabbed from a long list of apologies listed on Wikipedia.

Also, Japan has paid reparations, multiple times with Korea agreeing each time it settled the matter. “Under the agreement, Korea received $300 million from Japan, as full and final settlement for claims between states, claims between one state and the individuals of the other, and claims among the individuals of the states, including those specified in Article IV (a) of the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty. Private companies were also considered individuals for the purposes of the agreement.” [1]

There are certainly nationalists in Japan who didn’t want to apologize or pay reparations, but most of the population does recognize it and feel remorse, and the government has also officially apologized and paid.

At this point, there’s nothing Japan can do since stoking hatred of Japan is a political golden goose in Korea and no amount of apologies or reparations will ever be enough until Korean sentiment shifts and it doesn’t score so many political points at home.

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

[1] https://thediplomat.com/2020/10/the-japan-korea-dispute-over...

I agree that it's a lot more nuanced than my comment made it out to be. However, I've observed that criticism of Japan has increased more dramatically in recent time, and (not particularly nationalistic) people who used to have a positive outlook toward Japan have often changed their position to a more critical one. I think it's not unprovoked, given that PMs continue to visit Yasukuni Shrine and there seems to be a resurgence in nationalistic sentiment in Japan, which finds its echo in Korea. On Korea's Supreme Court judgement, I can only assume that they did their homework with regard to the constitutionality of their decision. I wouldn't dare assuming that they were malign in intention. If they were, that'd be sad.

I do think that both parties would greatly benefit from getting over with it, but I'm a slightly biased external observer in all this, so YMMV.

Nit: in Canada we observe Remembrance Day tomorrow. Deeply sorry. I know it’s not really important to the big picture, but I find getting the details right important for the point of why we remember.

It's not a nitpick, it's a fundamental difference between the countries.

What's different?

Two different countries who joined the war at very different times and experienced it differently (but of course, very much the same in many horrible ways). We have different names for the holiday and observe it slightly differently (like the kinds of poems or battles we recall)

Like so much about the U.S. and Canada, it resembles each other but we find the distinctions to be important.

We remember the sacrifices made by those to ensure our freedom. We don't celebrate the warrior soldier, in so much as we grieve their passing, and sacrifices of all who have lost to ensure this amazing country.

Ahh, the state media has to try to save face!

I emphasize with vets. Many of them spent years working hard in Afghanistan and risking their lives... only to see the Afghans they trained turn against them and surrender immediately when it was clear they had to stand on their own.

A good book that describes the information provided to allied leaders via the intercepts and decryption of the Japanese diplomatic Purple codes is given in the book "Marching Orders" by Bruce Lee. ISBN 0-517-57576-0 (c.1995) Lee had access to 1000's of the daily decryption and analysis summary reports (called Magic Summaries,) and provided to the president, Marshall and others. He provides an almost day-by-day chronology showing what the leaders knew and how that knowledge shaped their decisions about the conduct of the war. [edit: the axis decrypts were called Ultra. Allied leaders had access to reports on both.]

In case you're wondering where the 'Magic Summaries' comes from:

https://reference.jrank.org/japanese/MAGIC_Intercepts.html

Kahn in The Codebreakers also gives a dramatic story about this.

The British stations for that were called Y-Stations, feeding data to Bletchley Park, "Station X".

I think it's surprising that even after the years of service, she didn't fully disclose the nature of her job to her husband.

Canadians don't pay attention to anything from CBC now that Hockey Night In Canada is on cable sports. It's pure government propaganda. I wouldn't expect a lot of substance.

Completely predictable comment turnout.

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