Fifty years ago--and more than a year before Pearl Harbor--Americans scored one of their most brilliant victories of World War II.
The commander was a Russian immigrant and sometime geneticist named William Frederick Friedman. The nature of the battle might be suggested by Friedman's intense interest once in the 50,000-word novel "Gadsby," which Ernest Vincent Wrigh wrote without using the letter "e." Friedman's troops were a motley assemblage of academics, math wizards and puzzle freaks. With a left-handed assist from William Shakespeare.
Together, after 18 baffling months of dead-end days and floor-walking nights that temporarily collapsed Friedman into a mental ward, they broke the Japanese diplomatic code.
Their collective genius did not foil, of course, the sneak Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States actively into the war. Crossed and sometimes disconnected wires in American intelligence enabled that. But code breaking by Friedman, et al., laid the groundwork for the pivotal victory of the U.S. fleet at Midway in June, 1942. Indeed, code breaking was an essential ingredient of the Allies' ultimate triumph.
Let us begin the tale with John Quincy Adams. As secretary of state in 1817-1825 he hired the first U.S. code clerk. Code breaking and/or making was not a pressing concern at the State Department for years, not even when Herbert O. Yardley, 24, signed on as a $17.50-a-week code clerk in 1913.
Yardley had been an indifferent student back in Indiana but had a flair for math. Today he would be a computer hacker. Back then he was a Morse code hacker. And, at State, bored. So bored he began cracking incoming code traffic. He deciphered a message to President Woodrow Wilson from his top aide, Col. Edward M. House, in but two hours. He joined Army intelligence in World War I as a lieutenant and cryptographer.
The Army had another such lieutenant, Friedman. He had been born near Odessa, Russia, in 1891, was brought to America by his postal worker father to escape anti-Jewish rioting and eventually graduated from Cornell University as a geneticist.
As Friedman was settling into a postgraduate career of fruit flies and Mendelian imperatives, a letter arrived at Cornell. It came from George Fabyan, a wealthy cotton broker and world-class eccentric who was looking for a "would-be-er, not an as-is-er" geneticist to help improve the flora and fauna on the farm at his Riverbank Laboratories outside Chicago.
