Like Candy From A Baby

Posted on February 25, 2021February 26, 2021 by W. S. Topp

They couldn’t quite kill it.

Oh, they tried. For forty years they looted it, wrecked it, and vandalized it. They even beheaded it. But somehow, the Anchor-Hocking Glass Company survived. The century-old manufacturer still makes high-quality glass products in their rusting old glassworks in Lancaster, Ohio. But though it escaped destruction, Anchor today is a pale reflection of its former self, and it no longer supports the middle-class aspirations of its workers or the community itself.

Anchor’s story is not unique. What happened to Anchor – and Lancaster – happened to a thousand companies and cities across America’s industrial heartland when a toxic wave of unconstrained greed, unintended consequences, selfishness, and corporate malfeasance swept away a century of corporate diligence and good citizenship.

“The new American economy had come to town like an unwelcome stranger,” wrote journalist Brian Alexander, “leaving Lancaster broken.”

Alexander chronicled the life and near-death of Anchor-Hocking and the city of Lancaster in his 2017 book: Glass House – The 1 Percent Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town. He traced the damage to Anchor and the corresponding decline of Lancaster as the company and city staggered through a nationwide maelstrom of wrenching economic and social change.

A Sense of Community

For decades Anchor-Hocking was the largest employer and the most important corporate citizen of Lancaster, a tidy manufacturing town of 30,000 residents, located thirty miles from Columbus. Five thousand Lancaster residents worked for Anchor, including unskilled laborers, experienced craftsmen, supervisors, managers, engineers, and executives. Other industries called Lancaster home, but Anchor-Hocking – a nationally-recognized brand – was the pride of Lancaster.

The decades after World War II were a golden age for Anchor and American manufacturers in general. Pent up demand for consumer products and the lack of foreign competition boosted sales and revenue. There was money to go around and labor relations were cordial. By the late 1960’s, Anchor-Hocking was the world’s leading manufacturer of glass tableware and the second-largest maker of glass containers.

The city supported Anchor, and Anchor supported the city. Generations of workers found stable, good-paying jobs with the company. Those that stayed until retirement – and there were many – received a company-funded pension and health insurance. Anchor’s taxes supported the city and schools, while employees and their spouses were active in the community’s life. The business culture of the time fostered a sense of community. Anchor’s senior executives all lived in Lancaster, and they were committed to the city.

Cheap Stuff

In the 1970’s, though, the first signs of trouble appeared. Energy costs rose alarmingly, hurting American manufacturers. Food and beverage producers turned to plastic as a cheaper alternative to glass containers. Pressure from foreign manufacturers grew in the glass industry, as French, Polish, and Turkish companies began importing cheap glass into the U.S.

Anchor responded with traditional business practices – greater efficiency, higher quality, better marketing – and sales remained strong. While challenges remained, the company was well-positioned to continue as a profitable enterprise for years to come.

For years, American manufacturers had valued the quality of their products and their importance in their communities. By the 1980’s, however, the American business environment was changing. Anchor and thousands of other American manufacturing firms found themselves threatened by a devastating combination of foreign competition, relentless pressure to reduce costs, and sudden attacks by corporate raiders.

The consolidation of the retail sector into fewer, much larger companies reduced competition. Nationwide retailers began pressing manufacturers like Anchor-Hocking to reduce the price of their products. As the focus of retailers and consumers shifted to low-cost products, the pressure on American manufacturers to reduce costs grew.

“Americans wanted cheap stuff,” wrote Alexander. “And the harder they shopped for the cheapest stuff, the more they helped drive down the wages of people who made stuff. And the lower those wages dropped, the more a desire for cheap morphed into the self-fulfilling necessity of cheap.”

The growing demand for low, low prices inevitably drove American jobs overseas. No matter how efficient and cost-conscious Anchor-Hocking might be, no matter how low they drove the wages of their own workers, there would always be people somewhere else who could do the work for less.

“The knowledge of craftsmen was lost in order to make a product a little bit cheaper,” wrote Alexander. There was no room in the new business culture for concern about the workers that used to make the products that built the manufacturing companies in the first place, or for the communities where they lived.

A Duty

Pressure to cut costs didn’t come only from consumers. By the 1980’s, American business leaders had widely embraced “shareholder capitalism” – the idea that corporations existed solely to maximize shareholder profit. Previously, most corporate executives had practiced “stakeholder capitalism,” through which companies attempted to optimize the well-being of customers, employees, shareholders, and the nation.

Most prominently endorsed by economist Milton Friedman, ‘shareholder capitalism’ became Republican party orthodoxy in the 1980’s.

In a 1970 essay for the New York Times, Friedman rejected the idea that corporations had any responsibility to workers, their communities, or the nation. “There is one and only one social responsibility of business,” he wrote. “To use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception fraud.”

Alexander wrote, “The Friedman doctrine told every executive, financier and shareholder not only that it was okay to make a profit, but that making as much profit as possible, without regard to some broader social responsibility, was a duty.”

If a company could increase profits by shifting work overseas, by closing plants, by firing workers, by reducing the remaining workers’ pay or benefits, by halting research and development, by deferring maintenance, by forgoing needed upgrades, by neglecting safety, by using a lower grade of raw materials, by refusing to implement pollution control measures, or by declining to support community organizations, it had an actual duty to do so, according to Friedman.

“For generations, through both periods of harmony and episodes of friction, workers and management understood that their interests were aligned,” wrote Alexander. “Now they weren’t.”

Friedman served as a member of President Reagan’s Economic Policy Board, and his views were adopted by the federal government.

The government also supported the growing numbers of acquisitions, mergers, and corporate takeovers being conducted by large companies and private equity firms. It was a series of takeovers and purchases that crippled Anchor-Hocking and Lancaster.

It Was Being Killed

The first attempt to take over Anchor-Hocking was made by Carl Icahn, one of America’s most prominent corporate raiders and a firm believer in the Friedman doctrine. Icahn believed that American corporations had become inefficient and lax in their ability to provide dividends and profits to investors.

Icahn and other ‘raiders’ of the era gained control of companies through stealthy stock purchases using borrowed money, then used their ownership stake to obtain seats on corporate boards and impose savage “reforms” to maximize the short-term value of the company’s stock. Once the value of the company had been inflated at the expense of the firm’s long-term stability, raiders would sell their shares, pocketing large profits.

Icahn’s attempt to gain a seat on Anchor Hocking’s board ultimately failed. The company bought him off by repurchasing his stock at a premium – an attempt at self-preservation called, fittingly, greenmail. Icahn scored a $3 million profit and Anchor-Hocking escaped his clutches. But that was $3 million that the company could not use to pay workers, improve products, or update equipment.

“It was,” said one of Icahn’s analysts, “like taking candy from a baby.”

Worse, Icahn’s attack signaled to other raiders that Anchor-Hocking was a viable target. While Anchor was able to fend off Icahn, they could not protect themselves from follow-on attacks by ownership groups that hoped only to boost the value of the company and sell it, pocketing the profits.

Over the next thirty years, a succession of absentee owners would sell off portions of Anchor-Hocking, drive the company into bankruptcy, slash employment in Lancaster from 5,000 to 1,000, move the corporate headquarters with its hundreds of well-paid executive jobs out of the city, reduce pay for workers, stop contributions to the workers’ 401K accounts, drastically raise health insurance premiums paid by workers, drop health insurance for retirees, defer critical maintenance, and destroy the company’s relationship with Lancaster. Yet each change in ownership resulted in additional profits for investors.

“Anchor Hocking wasn’t dying a natural death,” wrote Alexander. “It was being killed.”

As out-of-town ownership stripped the company of assets, fired workers, and drained the company’s coffers, city officials responded by offering incentives to the company – in effect, bribes – to stay open in Lancaster. City officials offered a series of tax abatements that reduced funding for public schools, the city, and the county. They also gave the owners a 55 percent tax credit and $100,000 to train fifty new workers, after the company had shut down its own apprenticeship program that had been providing skilled laborers for decades

The decline of Anchor was devastating for Lancaster. The city seemed to lose confidence in its future – the citizens seemed to pull back. In 1988 a school property levy was defeated. In 1989, the school board tried to pass a small income tax increase to fund schools. That failed, too, so did road improvement taxes and bond levies. Drug use rose, then skyrocketed.

It was a scenario replayed in thousands of American cities.

Catastrophic for America

The impact of ‘shareholder capitalism’ has been catastrophic for America, said Peter Georgescu, former chairman of Young and Rubicon, a global marketing and communications company. Profits have soared at the expense of worker pay, he wrote in his 2017 book, Capitalists Arise!

Wealth of the median American family is lower today than two decades ago while life expectancy has actually fallen, he wrote. While real wages have been flat for decades, American productivity has increased by 80 percent. Before the 1970’s wages and productivity had always risen in tandem, as workers shared in the rewards of greater productivity. Now, however, most gains from productivity flow to shareholders, not workers.

As distant ownership of countless American manufacturers broke labor contracts and reneged on long-standing promises regarding pensions, health care, benefits, and the future of the company, workers and the communities around them lost faith and trust in the companies, wrote Steven Pearlstein in his 2018 book, Can American Capitalism Survive? Disheartened workers became less productive, less efficient, and less innovative.

A growing number of business leaders, like Georgescu, are calling for a return to stakeholder capitalism and a rejection of the shareholder-profits-above-all philosophy of Friedman and others. In 2019, nearly 200 senior American business executives, including the leaders of Apple and JPMorgan, signed a statement pledging to shift their business focus from maximizing shareholder value to providing value to all stakeholders, including investors, workers, customers, and suppliers.

But investors are resistant, and the future of American capitalism is unclear.

Ribbons of Glass

For millions of American workers who have lost their jobs, and thousands of American cities that have been hollowed out by greed, any reversion to a more socially-responsible form of capitalism will be too little, too late.

The collapse of American manufacturing wasn’t caused by local politicians, or the national media, or by a failure of work ethic among young workers, wrote Alexander. “It came from a thirty-five-year program of exploitation and value destruction in the service of ‘returns.’ America had fetishized cash until it became synonymous with virtue.”

What’s remarkable about Anchor-Hocking is that it somehow still survives. Despite decades of neglect, asset-stripping, and corporate malfeasance, ribbons of molten glass still flow from furnaces where the temperatures reach 2700 degrees F; glassmakers still run massive stamping machines in the 120-degree heat of the factory; and the company still produces tumblers, bowls, pitchers, and other glassware for customers across the nation. More than 1,000 workers still have jobs at Anchor-Hocking, though their wages are low and benefits are limited.

And Lancaster? While the city’s industrial base has been decimated, more and more residents are commuting to jobs in the Columbus area. Much of the work that remains in the city is low-wage, and city efforts to attract new industries have largely failed, but the population is stable and the city’s transition to a bedroom community has protected it from the worst ravages of de-industrialization.

February 25, 2021

For more information, see also:

Alexander, Brian; Glass House: The 1 Percent Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town; St. Martin’s Press, NY; 2017.

Georgescu, Peters and Dorsey, David: Capitalists Arise; Berrett-Koehler Publishers; Oakland, CA; 20217.

Pearlstein, Steven; Can American Capitalism Survive: St. Martin’s Press, NY; 2018.

Retrieved 2.22.2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/business-roundtable-ceos-corporations.html

Retrieved 8.17.2019

https://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/news/2016/09/23/photos-inside-the-steamy-cavernous-anchor-hocking.html

Retrieved 2.25.2021

“I Think I Can Get You Through”

Posted on February 18, 2021February 18, 2021 by W. S. Topp

“You won’t get thirty miles,” said the young naval officer. “Those destroyers out there are thicker than flies. They’ve been patrolling all day and all night for weeks.”

Lieutenant Commander John Morrill didn’t care what the officer from the USS Tanager (AM-5) thought. He was leaving and the sailors gathered around him could join him or they could stay. It was May 6, 1942. Earlier that day, U.S. Army General Jonathon Wainwright had surrendered Corregidor to the Japanese, ending five months of stubborn but increasingly hopeless resistance.

Now, Morrill, commanding officer of the USS Quail (AM-15), was standing in the stern of a 36-foot diesel-powered boat idling in Manila Bay, asking the remnants of his crew if they wanted to come along with him in the open boat as he made his way through the Japanese cordon to Mindanao, 600 miles away.

Damned Fast if We Are Going

Though white flags had been raised over Corregidor’s battered topside barracks and over the island forts that dotted the bay, Japanese artillery was still blasting American positions and the sound of machine gun and small arms fire drifted across the water. LCDR Morrill had received no direct orders to surrender himself or his crew, and he wasn’t inclined to wait for any. Even before the Japanese had landed on Corregidor, communications between American units had been spotty at best, and with Quail now sunk in the bay – scuttled by Morrill and his crew a few hours ago – Morrill had no way to communicate with anyone else.

Having completed his last mission, Morrill had gathered the remnants of his crew in two small boats off Caballo Island, two miles from Corregidor. In the evening darkness he told them of his plan and invited them to join him.

“You all know that the situation is,” he said. “On a logical basis your chances of remaining alive are probably better staying here, and some of our officers feel that escape is impossible.” Already the Japanese were tightening the noose of search planes, destroyers, patrol boats, and barges that had surrounded Manila Bay since December.

But five months of brutal warfare against the Japanese had convinced the Quail crewmen that they were unlikely to experience humane treatment if captured. If there was a chance to avoid surrender, most were eager to take it.

“I think I can get you through,” said Morrill. But, he added, “We’ve got to get out of here damned fast if we are going.”

Abandoned to Their Fate

Morrill and his crew had watched ruefully when the Asiatic fleet’s major surface ships had been ordered out of Manila Bay as war became increasingly likely. On December 7, all three of the fleet’s cruisers and nine of thirteen destroyers were well south of Manila. The fleet’s 29 submarines had remained in Manila, along with the tender USS Canopus, to defend against the expected invasion, but they achieved no significant successes against the actual landings and by the end of December all of the submarines were gone as well. Canopus remained to support the PT boats, minesweepers, and gunboats that were left, until April 9 when the steadfast old tender was scuttled by her crew in Mariveles Bay on Bataan as Japanese forces advanced to the tip of the embattled peninsula.

By then the PT boats were gone, too, having left on the night of March 11 to carry General Douglas MacArthur, his family, and his key staff south to Mindanao.

As the Japanese battered American and Filipino defenses on Bataan, more than 2,500 U.S. Navy sailors and officers had been left to their fate on Bataan and Corregidor, including the crews of the tender Canopus, the salvage vessel Pigeon, six minesweepers, five gunboats, and two tugs; the members of Patrol Wing Ten whose aircraft had all been destroyed; and hundreds of support personnel from the base at Cavite.

A handful of Navy personnel had been evacuated, including the cryptanalysts assigned to the radio intelligence unit at Cavite, but as the allied defenses crumbled, nearly everyone else found themselves drafted to support army or marine units as gunners, communicators, runners, or infantry. More than 500 sailors from various units along with a handful of Marines and Filipino troops were organized into a naval battalion by Commander Frank Bridget and despite their almost total lack of training fought credibly on Bataan.

An aerial view of Corregidor Island, Philippines.
*photo: U.S. Department of Defense*

The Last Missions

The minesweepers, though, had retained their crews, as the 188-foot ships were still able to provide useful service to the troops ashore. Armed with a pair of three-inch guns and a handful of machine guns, the little ships provided gunfire support to troops on Bataan, patrolled against Japanese landing attempts along the coast, and provided anti-aircraft support wherever they happened to be. They also transported troops and supplies as needed and maintained the mine field that stretched across the mouth of Manila Bay.

Once Bataan fell, the sweepers had just one more critical job: opening a second channel through the minefield so that boats from Corregidor could exit the bay to rendezvous with US submarines that might arrive on resupply or evacuation missions. The original swept channel was too close to Bataan, now that Japanese artillery could be placed anywhere on the peninsula.

During the next few weeks, the crews of the three surviving minesweepers worked each night to clear the channel. Eventually, more than a third of Quail’s crew were drafted to serve ashore as gunners, taking several of the ship’s machine guns with them. As Japanese bombing and shelling of Corregidor intensified, and the entire bay fell within range of Japanese guns, the remaining crew of the minesweeper moved ashore during daylight hours, returning to the ship at dark to continue work on the minefield.

The final submarine mission was completed on May 3, when the USS Spearfish evacuated six Navy officers, six Army officers, eleven Army nurses, one Navy nurse, and the wife of a Navy officer. As the submarine was departing, the Japanese unleashed a massive artillery barrage that signaled the beginning of their final assault on Corregidor. The initial Japanese landing took place on May 5.

On the night of May 5, Morrill, the ship’s three other officers, 24 crewmen, and an additional officer from the sunken Tanager, made their way back out to the Quail to man the ship’s remaining guns. The rest of the minesweeper’s crew was ordered to man defensive positions on Corregidor. The next morning, May 6, as Japanese troops advanced on Corregidor, Morrill and his men were ordered to leave Quail on the ship’s boats and head to Fort Hughes, a coastal artillery battery on Caballo Island, two miles south of Corregidor, where the sailors would man anti-aircraft guns.

They were there that afternoon when General Wainwright surrendered Corregidor.

U.S. troops surrendering to Japanese soldiers at Corregidor Island, Philippines, May 1942.
*Photo: NARA*

Stay or Go?

At first, no orders to surrender were sent to Fort Hughes. Instead, Morrill was ordered to take a party out to the anchored and abandoned Quail, which, despite unrelenting Japanese air attacks, was somehow still afloat, and scuttle the ship.

Morrill and five men made the trip in a small boat, braving Japanese dive bombers, artillery, and machine gun fire. After boarding Quail, breaking open valves to flood the ship, and setting demolition charges in the magazine, they hurried off. As they doubted that they could make it back to Caballo’s dock against the Japanese planes and artillery, they took refuge on the wreck of the Ranger, a Navy tug which had been abandoned by her crew and was beached in shallow water near the island.

While they waited for darkness aboard the Ranger, they grabbed anything they thought they could use on a voyage south, including charts, binoculars, a sextant, navigating instruments, rifles, food, water, lubricating oil, cigarettes, dynamite, and four drums of diesel fuel. Finally, the sun set and they made their way to their anchored 36-foot diesel-powered whaleboat – an open boat used as a workboat – which Morrill planned to use for their escape.

As they stowed their supplies aboard the diesel boat, the other boat went back to Caballo and returned with around twenty members of Quail’s crew and the officer from Tanager. When Morrill offered them the choice of heading south in the diesel boat or returning to Caballo and captivity, several opted for Caballo.

For some, the months of constant tension, short rations, disease, death, the knowledge that they had been abandoned, and the shock of Corregidor’s sudden capitulation had been too much. They were exhausted, mentally, physically, and spiritually. Though it had been apparent for months that no reinforcements were coming to the Philippines, the finality of their predicament and the uncertainty of their fate still shocked many of the Americans.

“I want to go,” one petty officer told Morrill, “but I just haven’t got the heart to make any more effort. I placed all of my faith in the Rock not surrendering, and now that it has, it just seems that the bottom has fallen out of everything.”

Altogether, sixteen members of Quail’s crew joined Morrill in the diesel boat and made ready to go. Fully loaded, the boat had just six inches of freeboard, so once they were clear of Manila Bay, they would need to toss out some of their gear. They expected the boat to average four nautical miles per hour when underway.

But first they needed to get out of Manila Bay. And before they could do that, they needed to return to the Caballo dock and pick up one final crewman who had earlier begged to be included.

That done, the 36’ boat, crammed with eighteen navy men, with its gunwales just six inches above the waves, got underway. Ahead lay many hundreds of miles of shoal water, unknown currents, unseen reefs, pounding surf, and thousands of islands – many occupied by the Japanese – all heavily patrolled by Japanese ships, boats, and aircraft.

More Patrol Boats Than We Could Count

Their plan was to travel by night and hide each day in small coves along lightly populated sections of the coast. They thought that villagers – when encountered – would likely be friendly, but they also knew that there were Japanese sympathizers on the islands and that Japanese troops were already posted throughout the archipelago. Further, they knew that their presence would be extremely dangerous for any Filipinos in the area if the Japanese found out that they had been there. So, their goal was to minimize any contact with locals and to avoid Japanese troops at all cost, though they also knew that they would need to obtain food, water, and fuel at times to complete their journey.

As they motored out of Manila Bay, they had just a few hours of darkness until the moon rose and visibility would increase. They hoped to make as much distance as they could before they had to stop and hide.

But the officer from the Tanager – who had declined to join them – had been correct. Japanese destroyers and patrol boats were everywhere. In the first several hours they encountered four enemy destroyers and, in Morrill’s words, “more patrol boats than we could count.”

They knew, though, that in the dark they were almost impossible to see from any distance. Sitting low in the water, with no deck structure at all, from hundreds of yards away their boat would appear to be a log as long as everyone aboard kept down and they showed no lights at all. They also hoped that if they ever were spotted, they might be mistaken for a Filipino fishing craft.

As the moon rose, they pulled into a small cove on the Luzon coast and quickly began cutting branches and small trees to conceal their boat. Later, when dawn arrived, they were shocked to find out that they had barely made five miles against the current. They could actually see Corregidor in the distance.

They got a bigger shock a few minutes later when a Japanese search plane flew directly over them at a height of 500 feet. But the Japanese pilot apparently never saw them and no Japanese boats or patrols approached.

During that first day, hidden in the trees and rocks near their camouflaged boat, they saw numerous Japanese warships and patrol boats pass by. In the morning they saw a column of sixteen patrol boats heading for Manila Bay. In the afternoon they saw the same column heading the other way with their decks now crammed with American prisoners – as many as 2,400 they estimated.

As darkness fell, they uncovered the boat and prepared to get underway. But they stopped abruptly when a Japanese destroyer entered the cove heading straight toward them. Fortunately, the warship was looking for a place to anchor for the night, not for a boatload of American sailors. Intent on anchoring securely in the unfamiliar waters, the Japanese crew never spotted the Americans, just 500 yards away.

Safe for the moment, the Americans were trapped where they lay. They spent an uncomfortable night staring at the Japanese ship, clutching their weapons, and listening for sounds of anyone approaching. In the morning the Japanese left, but there was no way the Americans could get underway in the daylight. They spent a second day hidden in the cove. That night, as they again prepared to leave, another Japanese destroyer – or perhaps the same one – approached their hiding place. But this time the ship pulled into a neighboring cove to anchor. Holding their breath, the Americans slowly edged their way out of the cove and into the darkened channel.

And so it went.

Across the Pacific if We Had to

For 31 days they made their way south, jumping from island to island through the Philippines and the East Indies, avoiding Japanese patrols, steering clear of heavily populated islands, but receiving generous help and courageous support from countless friendly villagers, rich and poor, that they met on the way.

Over and over again, as they made their way through the Philippines, they were offered food, water, shelter, and information about Japanese activity. Early in their voyage they were told that Mindanao was occupied by the Japanese. Okay, they figured, then they would just have to continue on to Australia. It was 1,400 miles farther south, but they were determined to avoid falling into the hands of the Japanese. If they had learned that Darwin was in Japanese hands, Morrill later wrote, “We wouldn’t give ourselves up. We would seize a boat bigger than ours, one that could go across the Pacific if we had to.”

They didn’t end up crossing the Pacific, but they did cross more than 1,000 miles of roiling open water between the Philippines, Indonesia and Australia. Their undecked, flat-bottomed, and overloaded boat, never intended to survive ocean storms, struggled through heaving seas while the crew bailed continuously for hours, but they pushed through.

During their voyage they evaded countless Japanese patrol vessels, weathered several serious storms, and rebuilt the engine of their boat – finishing the task, as Morrill wryly noted, “with no pieces left over.” Their engineer even carved a bearing from driftwood to repair the boat’s stern tube.

Finally, on June 3, they sighted the coast of Australia. On June 6 they skirted the anti-submarine net and motored into the harbor at Darwin. They had completed a voyage of nearly 2,200 miles in a 36’ open boat through the Japanese-occupied Philippines and East Indies, and escaped what would have been an astonishingly brutal captivity.

Crew members of *USS Quail* (AM-15) at Darwin, following their escape from Corregidor, 1942
*photo: US Navy*

Not the Only Ones

Morrill and his crew were not the only Americans to avoid capture by the Japanese in the Philippines. Many hundreds of Americans managed to evade Japanese troops for at least a time, while a smaller number – probably fewer than one hundred – joined groups of Filipino and American guerillas. These intrepid men spent the years of the Japanese occupation providing intelligence to American forces in Australia and, especially later in the war, mounting attacks against Japanese forces. But the Japanese were brutal and relentless occupiers, and many American and Filipino guerillas were caught and killed.

There is even an account of two American Army officers named Damon Gause and William Osborne who avoided capture and eventually made their way out of the islands in a decrepit 22-foot fishing boat and were picked up by an Australian Navy ship.

The U.S. Army reported that 25,580 American soldiers were captured in the Philippines between Dec 7, 1941 and May 10, 1942 and 10,650 died in captivity. The U.S. Marine Corps reported that 1,487 members of the 4^th Marines were captured on Corregidor and 474 died in captivity. More than 33,000 Filipino soldiers were also captured at Bataan and Corregidor.

Of the 70 crewmen known to be aboard the USS Quail in October, 1941, 52 were captured by the Japanese. Like all of the other American prisoners, they endured a hellish three years of forced labor, starvation rations, primitive medical care, repeated beatings, and executions. Sixteen died in captivity.

Morrill and 15 of the 17 men who accompanied him survived the war. Upon arrival in Darwin, thirteen men were allowed a few weeks rest and then were assigned to various ships or units in the Southwest Pacific. Several were on ships that were later sunk, and one man – Chief Quartermaster Philip Binkley – was aboard the destroyer USS Jarvis when she disappeared with all hands after being torpedoed during the U.S. landing at Guadalcanal in August, 1942. The remaining five, including Morrill, were transferred to commands in the United States. Morrill was awarded the Navy Cross for his actions in scuttling the Quail while the five men who assisted him received Silver Stars.

Morrill returned to combat during the invasion of Palau in 1944 as commodore of a flotilla of large landing craft (LCI’s). He retired as a Rear Admiral in 1955.

February 18, 2021

Sources:

Morrill, John and Martin, Pete; South from Corregidor; Simon and Schuster, NY; 1943.

Waldron, Ben D. and Burneson, Emily; Corregidor: From Paradise to Hell; Pine Hill Press; Freeman, South Dakota; 1988.

Williams, Greg; The Last Days of the United States Asiatic Fleet; McFarland and Company; Jefferson, NC; 2018.

McGowan, Sam; “Guerrilla War on Luzon During World War II”; Warfare History Center website; https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/2015/08/12/guerrilla-war-on-luzon-during-world-war-ii/ Retrieved 2.10.2010.

Miller, J. Michael; “From Shanghai to Corregidor – Marines in the Defense of the Philippines”; Marine Corps University website; https://www.usmcu.edu/Portals/218/From%20Shanghai%20to%20Corregidor-Marines%20in%20the%20Defense%20of%20the%20Philippines%20PCN%2019000314000.pdf?ver=2018-10-30-095002-760 Retrieved 2.12.2021.

Speak Out packet; American ex-Prisoners of War website; http://www.axpow.org/medsearch/speakouta.pdf Retrieved 2.11.2021.

Office of the Provost Marshal General Report, November 19, 1945; American Prisoners of War
in the Philippines; Center for Research Allied POWS Under the Japanese website; http://www.mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/philippines/pows_in_pi-OPMG_report.html#INTRO Retrieved 2.10.2021.

A version of this article was posted on the MilitaryHistoryNow website: https://militaryhistorynow.com/2021/02/17/escape-from-corregidor-meet-the-americans-who-refused-to-surrender-when-the-philippines-fell/

No Loan for You

Posted on February 17, 2021February 17, 2021 by W. S. Topp

Enshrined in the National Housing Act (NHA) of 1934, redlining – the practice of denying loans to property owners within designated districts – fueled a deadly cycle of disinvestment, decay, depopulation, and decline in urban neighborhoods across the nation. The effects of redlining and other forms of institutionalized racism have been deep-seated and persistent and have continued despite the practice being outlawed by the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

Enacted in the depths of the Depression, the NHA was intended to stimulate housing construction to create jobs and improve the nation’s housing stock. But the benefits were intended for white Americans only, and the law encouraged lenders to deny loans to black, Hispanic, Asian, and foreign-born Americans.

Lenders weren’t required to evaluate loan applications based on the financial resources of individual applicants. Instead, federal officials rated city neighborhoods in a subjective and manifestly unfair manner, assigning each district one of four ratings: Best, Still Desirable, Definitely Declining, or Hazardous. Loan applications from areas rated ‘hazardous’ were automatically denied, regardless of the particular circumstances of the applicant or the condition of the property.

To help lenders, the government prepared color-coded maps of each of 239 American cities, showing the boundaries of each type of district. Zones rated ‘hazardous’ were outlined in red – hence the term ‘redlining’ – and no loans would be issued in those neighborhoods.

The ratings were based on a number of district-wide attributes, including the general condition, age, or state of repair of buildings as well as demographic data including population, class or occupation of residents, percentage of foreign-born residents, percentage of black, Hispanic, or Asian residents, and trends in economic or racial makeup of the population. A neighborhood with a growing black population, or a neighborhood that seemed likely to experience an increase in black residents, was said to be experiencing “Negro Infiltration.” That would ensure a hazardous rating and would virtually guarantee that no loans would be approved for purchase or upkeep of properties in the district.

The goal was to preserve property values and safeguard federal investments, as the government was guaranteeing the loans, said Brandon Crooks, co-founder of a New York City design studio that works at reversing the effects of redlining. Crooks was a panelist on a Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland virtual forum on redlining this week. Racism was literally baked into federal housing policies from the beginning, said Crooks.

Many neighborhoods that were rated hazardous were, in fact, stable, with occupied housing, thriving commercial districts, and strong local institutions. Yet they found themselves cut off from financing for repairs or mortgages. The results were catastrophic. Property values plummeted, neighborhoods declined, white flight accelerated, and housing segregation became entrenched.

Property owners in neighborhoods not redlined quickly understood that to preserve the value of their own properties they needed to keep black, Asian, and Hispanic residents out of their neighborhoods. Racial discrimination was already widespread in America – precisely the reason that integrated neighborhoods were redlined – but the explicit linkage of integration and declining property values ignited a cycle of rigid segregation that denied homeownership to millions of black Americans.

The closing of America’s housing market to black Americans – regardless of their level of education, employment status, and financial resources – has been a major contributor to the staggering gap in wealth between white and black Americans. In 2016, the net worth of a typical white family in America was $171,000 while the typical wealth for black families was $17,150.

That huge disparity cannot be attributed solely to redlining – 240 years of slavery, 150 years of housing and job discrimination, and 100 years of Jim Crow segregation all contributed. But since the Great Depression, homeownership has been the primary way that middle class American families have accumulated wealth. And that path was closed to black Americans for decades.

In 2019, 73.3 percent of white households owned their homes — compared to 42.1 percent of Black households, 47.5 percent of Hispanic households, and 57.7 percent of Asian or Pacific islander households that owned theirs.

In addition to the racial wealth gap, redlining has contributed to a host of ills that continue to afflict black Americans disproportionately, including worse health outcomes, predatory lending practices, higher rates of evictions, housing segregation, and problematic policing practices.

“Redlining was the original sin that so many of these impacts stem from,” said Jeniece Jones, executive director of Cincinnati’s Housing Opportunity Made Equal (HOME) organization.

The persistence of the wealth gap, despite many years of effort to close it, is a strong argument for some form of reparation payments for black Americans, said Cleveland State University professor Ronnie Dunn. “Reparations are the only way we will address the long-term harm of racially exclusionary and discriminatory practices,” he said.

February 17, 2021

For more information:

Examining the Black-white wealth gap

How 1930s discrimination shaped inequality in today’s cities

https://www.ally.com/do-it-right/home/what-is-redlining-how-does-it-impact-communities-today/

https://usafacts.org/articles/homeownership-rates-by-race/

The Party of Lincoln

Posted on February 14, 2021February 14, 2021 by W. S. Topp

What a proud day for Republicans.

Oh, we’re not referring to that impeachment thing.

Impeachment is a political process with political consequences and it should not be confused with an attempt to hold someone accountable for potentially criminal actions. The fact that dozens of senators – people who have clawed their way to the top of the political pyramid – voted to protect their personal political futures as opposed to, say, protecting American democracy, should not surprise anyone.

It will be up to the rest of us in the coming years to convince them that their political calculations were wrong. If they were wrong.

So, what else happened this week to warm the hearts of Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and other thoughtful, truth-seeking Republicans?

How about an international commission of public health and medical experts releasing a report that concludes that Donald Trump’s presidency “jeopardized the health of the world and its people.”

This week, the Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era published a chilling report that describes the devastating impacts of four years of Trump – and forty years of Republican policies – on the health and well-being of Americans and American democracy.

The Lancet Commission is an international group of American, British, and Canadian commissioners from a variety of disciplines, including public health, law, economics, politics, epidemiology, and medicine. The commission has been studying the impact of the Trump administration’s policies on public health and American society since 2017.

The report notes that Republican-favored policies enacted since the 1970’s have resulted in:

Greater inequality
An actual decline in US life expectancy
Mass incarceration characterized by stark racial inequities
An epidemic of drug overdose deaths among working-class people driven by efforts of drug firms to maximize profits through promotion of unconstrained use of opioids
Implementation of market-oriented health policies that shifted medical resources towards higher-income people while burdening middle class Americans with unaffordable out-of-pocket costs
The use of public money to stimulate the corporate takeover of vital health resources
Funding cuts that have led to a 20 percent reduction in the front-line public health workforce

But while Republican policies have been degrading American health in measurable ways for decades, the commission found that Trump’s presidency was especially destructive.

Trump, they wrote, “exploited low and middle-income white people’s anger over their deteriorating life prospects to mobilize racial animus and xenophobia and enlist their support for policies that benefit high-income people and corporations and threaten health.”

“His signature legislative achievement, a trillion-dollar tax cut for corporations and high-income individuals, opened a budget hole that he used to justify cutting food subsidies and health care. His appeals to racism, nativism, and religious bigotry have emboldened white nationalists and vigilantes, and encouraged police violence and, at the end of his term in office, insurrection.”

In the conclusion of their report, they wrote:

“During the Trump era the USA was led by a president whose disdain for science and manipulation of hatred jeopardize the health of the world and its people. President Trump’s denunciations of the status quo ante and promises to return the USA to greatness, camouflaged policies that enriched people who were already very wealthy and gave corporations license to degrade the environment for financial gain.“

“He halted progress in almost every domain (table 4), undermined care for low-income people and the middle class, weakened pandemic preparedness; withheld food and shelter from those in need, and persecuted those who were vulnerable and oppressed.”

Well, they’re just doctors and lawyers and public health experts from multiple countries, so what do they know? We should find out what Sean Hannity thinks.

And to top off the week, yesterday evening – after the Senate declined to convict Trump of insurrection – the Washington Post published a searing commentary by columnist Greg Sargent, in which he called out the Republican Party’s “ongoing and intensifying radicalization.”

Sargent quoted a frighteningly-prescient 2012 essay co-authored by Norman J. Ornstein of the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute and Thomas E. Mann of the liberal-leaning Brookings Institute which called the Republican Party an “insurgent outlier in American politics.”

Now that Republicans have openly embraced actual insurgency, this essay, though nine years old, seems tragically relevant.

Ornstein and Mann rejected the both-sides-do-it argument and concluded that the source of the most bitter partisanship in current American politics is the Republican Party. “We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years,” they wrote, “and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.”

The party, they wrote, is “ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Ornstein and Mann quoted Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican staffer who wrote, “The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.”

The party of Lincoln, I am sure.

The Lancet Commission’s report is 49 pages of data, charts, analysis, and footnotes, so you probably won’t see it mentioned on Fox News. But every American should read it. There is a link below.

The Washington Post essays, sadly, are behind the newspaper’s pay wall (I think), so if you don’t have a subscription you might not be able to see them. Still, here are the links.

February 14, 2021

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32545-9/fulltext

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/lancet-commission-examines-trumps-covid-response/story?id=75826837

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/13/massive-gop-betrayal-our-democracy-requires-forceful-democratic-response/

Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem. – The Washington Post

Political Calculus

Posted on February 12, 2021February 12, 2021 by W. S. Topp

When Republican senators make their decision at the conclusion of Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, it is not Trump’s future that they will be deciding, said two former Republican operatives.

Instead, senators will be deciding the future of the Republican party itself, said Sarah Longwell, former Republican strategist and leader of an anti-Trump organization. Longwell and Tim Miller – former Republican campaign advisor – spoke Friday at a Cleveland City Club virtual forum titled “The Republican Reckoning: The Future of the Party Post-Trump.”

“This week, Republican senators will determine their party’s future,” said Longwell. “If senators acquit Trump, he will remain the leader of the party for the foreseeable future.”

Yet, if Trump is convicted – an outcome that seems ever-more unlikely – it is not at all certain that the Republican party can move in a new direction, said Longwell. There is no obvious leader for the party if Trump loses his place.

At this point, however, the choice is not up to Republican senators, said Miller. Regardless of the outcome of the impeachment trial, “the voters have chosen Donald Trump for them.”

Miller and Longwell are co-founders of Republican Voters Against Trump, a coalition of Republicans, former Republicans, conservatives, and former Trump voters who did not support Donald Trump in the 2020 election.

While Trump’s character defects render him unfit for the presidency, said Longwell, his committed supporters now comprise as much as thirty percent of Republican voters. The problem for non-Trump Republicans – the traditional business wing of the party – is how to dissociate themselves from Trump while holding on to his voters, especially the ten million or so voters who had not been Republican voters previously.

“These voters are not true Republicans,” said Longwell. “They are low-propensity voters – voters who never voted before.”

Republican leaders fear the loss of those voters, especially now since Trump’s character and performance have driven away more moderate Republicans. There is no real risk to disappointing moderate Republicans, said Miller, because for the most part they are already gone – the moderates that remain are committed Republicans – these are the voters that rejected Trump but still voted for Republican candidates in down-ballot races.

The political risk of confronting Trump – voting to convict him – is far higher than the political risk of acquitting him. “That’s the political calculus,” said Miller.

Republican leaders believe that the loss of moderate voters is harmful, but not fatal, said Miller. They believe that with the structural advantage the electoral college provides and with the advantages they have seized through aggressive gerrymandering, they can continue to win elections as a minority party.

Which is why Republican state legislators this year have already introduced more than 100 bills aimed at restricting voting. That’s the one thing that unites the party, said Miller. “Both wings oppose Democrat efforts to expand voting rights.”

But the traditional wing of the party is less committed to voter suppression than is the Trump wing, said Longwell. “The Trump wing of the party is anti-democratic. They object to free and fair elections. They truly want less voting. They are threat to our democracy.”

It is not just moderate Republican voters who are abandoning the party. Centrist office-holders like Senators Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Robert Portman of Ohio are declining to run for re-election. They are leaving, said Longwell, “because they don’t know how to exist as traditional Republicans when all the voters want is for them to fully support Trump.”

Meanwhile, the Trump wing has gained control of virtually every state Republican party organization. Right now, said Miller, “all fifty state Republican parties are run by crazy people.”

While Trump is the unchallenged leader of the party’s nationalist/populist wing, he did not pull the party away from traditional Republican values like fiscal restraint and international cooperation.

The road to Trump, said Miller, began with Pat Buchanan during the Reagan administration. By 1992, Buchanan was strong enough to challenge an incumbent president – George H. W. Bush – for the party’s nomination. Buchanan lost, but he won nearly 24 percent of the vote. Neo-Nazi David Duke also challenged Bush, but Duke received only about one percent of the votes. Still, the candidacies of the two right-wing challengers and the popularity of Buchanan’s favored issues of economic nationalism, sealing the border, and isolationism marked the start of the Republican party’s shift away from traditional concerns.

Later the Tea Party movement and the popularity of Sarah Palin would provide further evidence of widening divisions within the party. By 2016, the nationalist/populist wing which had coalesced around Trump represented a third of the party.

During this time the establishment wing of the party failed to address the growing popularity of nationalism/populism through a combination of conscious decisions and mistakes, said Miller.

Now, the party is in a bind of its own making.

Whether Trump’s influence wans now or later, the party has no obvious successor. Longwell believes that Nikki Haley, who has been generally supportive of Trump but who has broken with him on some issues might be able to lead a reunified party,

But Miller believes the party can only be led by a person who has not been associated with Trump or the Never-Trump movement.

February 13, 2021

“We Have to Do Better”

Posted on February 6, 2021February 6, 2021 by W. S. Topp

Unchecked urban sprawl is weakening Greater Cleveland, causing disinvestment and abandonment of inner-city neighborhoods and threatening the character of rural communities in the surrounding counties, said a panel of local government officials Wednesday.

“Greater Cleveland’s population stopped growing in 1970,” said Northern Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA) Chief Executive Grace Gallucci. “But we have continued to develop formerly open land, build new infrastructure, and expand the footprint of our community with dire consequences for environmental sustainability, economic efficiency, and racial equity.”

Gallucci spoke as a panelist on a Cleveland City Club virtual forum titled “Sprawl Versus Smart Growth: Building an Equitable and Thriving Region.” Joining Gallucci on the panel were Maple Heights Mayor Annette Blackwell and Solon Mayor Eddy Krause.

Since 1970, when the population of the five-county Greater Cleveland metropolitan area peaked at 2.3 million, the region’s population has declined by more than 5 percent. But during the same period the amount of developed land has increased by 20 percent. As a result, fewer Greater Clevelanders are now paying to build and maintain significantly more neighborhoods, roads, bridges, schools, commercial buildings, fire stations, and other costly services. A less efficient use of dwindling resources could scarcely be imagined.

Worse, unchecked sprawl is inexorably hollowing out the core of the urban area, causing large-scale disinvestment and abandonment and contributing to higher levels of poverty, crime, racial segregation, and economic inequality. In a region with no population growth, every house or business constructed on undeveloped land on the region’s periphery means one more vacant housing unit or commercial building in the center of the city.

None of this is news, of course.

Greater Cleveland has been expanding outward for more than one hundred years. The first ‘streetcar suburbs’ in Cuyahoga County – East Cleveland, Cleveland Heights, and Lakewood – were developed in the first two decades of the twentieth century in areas immediately adjacent to the City of Cleveland. Through the 1920’s, a second ring of transit-dependent suburbs formed, including Maple Heights, Rocky River, Garfield Heights, Shaker Heights, and Euclid. Today we refer to these communities as ‘inner ring suburbs,’ and they are struggling with declining population, job losses, and increasing poverty as economic growth moves farther away from the central city.

*Developed areas of Cuyahoga County in 1948 when the population was 1.38 million and in 2002 when the population was 1.37 million*.

During the 1930’s and 1940’s, the depression and World War II slowed growth in suburban areas, but once the war was over the combination of pent-up demand for new housing and federal transportation and housing policies led to the rapid development of a ring of auto-centric suburbs beyond the earlier suburbs, including Parma, Bay Village, Lyndhurst, and Fairview Park. Growth of these suburbs was widely celebrated, and the steady flow of job-seekers into the region maintained population growth.

By the 1960’s though, Greater Cleveland and other urban areas across the Great Lakes region saw their economies savaged by massive losses of manufacturing jobs which led to a reduction of in-migration and an end to decades of population growth. Yet construction of new homes and businesses continued in an outer ring of suburbs, including Westlake, Solon, Strongsville, North Royalton, North Olmsted, and Brecksville. Today, development has shifted into surrounding counties, where it continues. The result is that our region is now comprised of a declining core of poor – and getting poorer – communities surrounded by a ring of threatened suburbs surrounded by a ring of stable communities surrounded by a final ring of ongoing development.

While sprawl has been historically driven by the desire of residents and businesses to move away from the urban core for open space, larger homes, less expensive land; to escape pollution, crime, and poverty; and to avoid racial integration; government policies have played an outsized role.

As late as the 1960’s, said Gallucci, regional planners believed that Greater Cleveland’s population – which had been growing steadily for 150 years – would continue to grow and the region would gain a million new residents by 2010. Highway projects and other forms of public infrastructure were designed to accommodate this larger population. But the unexpected loss of manufacturing jobs reduced in-migration to the region and halted population growth. Yet the drivers of sprawl remained in place.

As a result, sprawl has continued to bleed residents, jobs, and money from Cleveland and its inner ring suburbs and transfer entire neighborhoods and associated economic activity to outer suburbs and surrounding counties, even as the devastating consequences are well-understood.

“Continuing our pattern of ever-expanding sprawl will increase disinvestment and abandonment in neighborhoods in the center of the region,” said Gallucci, “exacerbating racial and economic segregation and inequality – making all of our problems worse and undercutting our efforts to redevelop the city.”

The distressing reality is that with a stagnant population, every new home or commercial building constructed in the outer reaches of Greater Cleveland means an abandoned home or structure in the urban core and a corresponding loss of economic activity and tax revenues.

Growth in one part of the region should not result in disinvestment in other parts, Gallucci said. What we need is smart growth. Rather than continually developing open land on the region’s periphery, we should find ways to encourage redevelopment in areas where infrastructure already exists.

But that has been a message that communities on the periphery of the region have been happy to ignore. Instead, suburbs across Greater Cleveland have engaged in decades of self-defeating efforts to poach businesses and residents from each other – fighting over economic scraps rather than working together as fellow members of an integrated economic unit that is facing serious challenges from other regions throughout the nation and the world.

It is past time for that region-wide infighting to stop, said Solon mayor Eddy Krause. Located on Cuyahoga County’s southeastern edge, Solon has emerged as one of the big winners in the sprawl sweepstakes. The city is now home to the second largest concentration of jobs in the region, trailing only downtown Cleveland. But Krause realizes that his suburb’s continued success depends on finding a way to share Solon’s good fortune with the city and its inner ring suburbs.

“Our competition isn’t each other,” he said. “Our competition is Dublin, Ohio; Indianapolis; Pittsburgh; Austin, Texas.”

Greater Cleveland communities need to work together, he said.

That’s an attitude that Maple Heights mayor Annette Blackwell welcomes. Her city has been sledgehammered by sprawl-induced disinvestment. Once a tidy middle-class suburb, Maple Heights has suffered enormously from the closure of local businesses, declining population, dwindling property values and rising poverty.

Blackwell agrees that cities across the region need to work together, and she believes it is happening more and more. “But that wasn’t always the case,” she pointed out. “I didn’t feel that way six years ago. There is still work to do.”

Sprawl is not just a threat to areas in the urban core, said Gallucci. Rural communities on the outskirts of the region and farmers have expressed concern that development will destroy productive agricultural land, reduce wildlife habitat, cause flooding, and permanently alter the character of smaller communities.

“We have to do better,” said Blackwell. “We are forced to do better.”

February 6, 2021

Photo credit: Angie Schmitt, Streetsblog USA

“We Had Earned Our Pay”

Posted on February 4, 2021September 4, 2021 by W. S. Topp

When the Japanese Navy’s powerful aircraft carrier striking force approached Midway Atoll on the morning of June 4, 1942, three U.S. Navy carriers were already waiting. The American fleet’s presence that morning was no accident. The role of Navy codebreakers in intercepting and reading Japanese messages, which enabled Pacific Fleet commander Chester Nimitz to surprise the Japanese at Midway, is well-known.

Though details of U.S. communications intelligence during World War II remained classified for many years, the work of codebreakers in uncovering Japanese plans at Midway was initially hinted at in a newspaper article by reporter Stanley Johnston within days of the battle. While hundreds – and by war’s end, many thousands – of military and civilian personnel participated in America’s radio intelligence effort, a mere handful performed the extraordinary intellectual feat of manually deciphering the enemy’s coded messages. Although decoding machines were in use throughout the war, the navy’s critical codebreaking work in the first months of 1942 was performed almost entirely by hand.

USS Hornet air group on the morning of June 4, 1942

No Machine Could do This

Throughout the Pacific War, the Japanese Imperial Navy used a series of manual book-based codes for operational message traffic. While Japanese diplomats used a machine-derived code – the famous ‘Purple’ machines – the navy, with many thousands of units sending radio messages, preferred their manual system.

Japanese Navy radio messages were transmitted using a modified version of Morse code. Messages that were intercepted by the allies were recorded as a series of digits, and it was up to codebreakers to turn the rows and rows of numbers into words and phrases. There was no machine that could do this. Though rudimentary tabulating machines might help detect patterns in the seemingly random digits, it was up to individual cryptanalysts to deduce the meaning of each enciphered word by studying thousands of messages, finding sequences of numbers that appeared in previous messages, recognizing patterns in the structure and formatting of the messages, and using their knowledge of Japanese naval procedures, strategy, and the Japanese language itself to make educated guesses.

The work required painstaking concentration, faultless attention to minute details, the ability to recognize nearly invisible patterns, careful review of thousands of messages, meticulous recording of message details, outstanding memory, and unbreakable concentration. Historian David Khan, in his 1996 book The Codebreakers, wrote, “This work was the most excruciating, exasperating, agonizing mental process known to man.”

Progress was incremental. Each tiny success in uncovering the meaning of a code group – as the numbers that represented words or phrases were called – was carefully recorded and shared with other cryptanalysts as they struggled to read other messages. It was a slog. There was no cinematic moment where a flash of inspiration suddenly revealed the hidden secrets of a particular message. The daily experience of cryptanalysts was frustration and a gloomy sense of failure.

Ultimately, though, their efforts paid off. U.S. Navy successes at Coral Sea and Midway in early 1942 – a time when the Imperial Japanese Navy outclassed the U.S. Pacific Fleet in numbers of ships, training, tactics, and combat experience – were made possible by information gained through American radio intelligence, comprised of codebreaking, traffic analysis, direction finding, and intelligence analysis.

Felonious Beginning

That the U.S. Navy’s pre-war radio intelligence effort – in typical American fashion, undermanned, underequipped, under-resourced, and underappreciated – should have evolved into an organization that would change the direction of the Pacific War was something of a miracle.

The United States was one of several nations that conducted communications intelligence activities during World War I – the first war in which radio was widely used. Before the war, America had no organization that could intercept another nation’s radio signals. In 1917, as the U.S. entered the conflict, the U.S. Army established America’s first code-breaking office. The Navy did not follow suit, relying on the British Royal Navy for code-breaking support. During the final days of the war, however, the Navy set aside $100,000 in a secret Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) account to fund future code-breaking efforts.

It wasn’t the Navy or even the Army that scored America’s first big code-breaking victory. Instead, it was the U.S. Cipher Bureau, established in 1919 by the State and War Departments and capably headed by cryptologist Hebert O. Yardley. After a year’s effort, the Bureau broke Japan’s primary diplomatic code, giving the U.S. a priceless advantage during the 1921-1922 naval disarmament talks.

Although the Navy benefitted greatly from the Bureau’s success, the service was in no special hurry to develop their own code-breaking capability, especially since there were quicker ways to penetrate an adversary’s communications. By 1920 the secret ONI fund had financed a series of break-ins at the Japanese consulate in New York City. Later, in 1923, a similar operation struck codebreaking gold when Navy agents managed to steal a Japanese code book from the luggage of a visiting Japanese naval officer. The Navy responded by establishing a small code-breaking section to exploit the find and mount additional attacks on foreign codes and ciphers.

From that felonious beginning, the Navy’s code-breaking capability slowly grew. During the 1920’s and 30’s, many of the people who would later lead the Navy’s wartime effort entered the field. Notable among them were the indomitable Agnes Meyer Driscoll – who trained most of the Navy’s key wartime cryptanalysts during the interwar period – and the brilliant Joseph J. Rochefort – who would lead the organization that uncovered Japanese plans at Midway.

During this period, under the leadership of Laurence F. Safford and Rochefort, the Navy developed a network of radio intercept stations, devised methods of deciphering intercepted messages, and built a small staff of trained cryptanalysts and linguists. Depression-era spending limits and the fact that intercepting another nation’s radio communications was actually illegal during those years constrained the Navy’s efforts. Still, by the mid 1930’s the Navy had created the largest cryptological branch within the American military.

Building the Foundation

Under Safford and Rochefort, the Navy developed a three-pronged cryptologic program comprised of direction finding, traffic analysis, and cryptanalysis, or code-breaking. The program was managed from Navy headquarters in Washington DC and included radio intelligence stations at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines. Promising young officers were sent to Japan on three-year assignments to learn Japanese language, customs, and culture. This knowledge would be invaluable later as these officers attempted to glean Japanese intentions from the fragmentary information available through radio intelligence.

As cryptanalysis was not considered career-enhancing in the service, the Navy had some difficulty attracting and keeping talented officers in the field. While Rochefort spent most of the 1930’s studying Japanese and learning cryptanalysis, making him one of the most, if not the most, qualified cryptanalysts in the U.S. military, the service, made sure he remained a well-rounded officer by periodically taking him away from communications intelligence work and assigning him to sea duty. This was the pattern for other cryptanalysts, as well.

Still, during the 1920’s and 1930’s, the Navy succeeded in building a foundation that would support a vastly expanded and spectacularly successful communications intelligence effort during the Pacific War. That expansion began in earnest in the late 1930’s, as war with Japan became ever more likely, and accelerated after the Germans invaded Poland in 1939.

By the time the December, 1941 Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor ignited war between the United States and Japan, the Navy’s communications intelligence infrastructure in the Pacific included listening stations at Guam, the Philippines, Oahu, and Washington state; a network of high-frequency direction-finding stations at numerous sites throughout the region; and radio intelligence centers at Pearl Harbor and Cavite in the Philippines. A third radio intelligence center at Washington DC directed radio intelligence activities in the Pacific while a British radio intelligence group in Singapore shared information with the Americans.

During this period, the three stations – Cavite, Pearl Harbor, and Washington DC – worked well together. Later, personality clashes and a struggle for supremacy within the Navy would hinder cooperation and result in Rochefort spending a year in command of a self-propelled floating drydock, but in the months between Pearl Harbor and Midway, cooperation was excellent.

It Wasn’t All Codebreaking

The Cavite unit, located in Manila, had grown to nearly 70 officers and men by the end of 1941. At Pearl Harbor, Rochefort led an organization that included 100 officers and enlisted men. Nearly all were assigned to direction-finding and traffic analysis, with only a handful available for codebreaking work.

As the United States and Japan edged closer to war in 1940 and 1941, the Navy relied primarily on radio direction finding and traffic analysis to monitor Japan’s war preparations.

Traffic analysis was the core of radio intelligence and it involved learning everything possible about an intercepted message without actually decoding it. By analyzing the identities of senders and receivers, the volume of radio activity, command relationships between senders and receivers, traffic patterns that matched previous operations, types of units being messaged, and other information, traffic analysts could uncover significant details of an adversary’s operations.

Sensitive direction-finding (DF) antennas located throughout the Pacific could receive radio signals from extremely long distances and identify the precise bearing of, or direction to, the radio transmitter. If a signal was received at two or more DF sites, technicians could plot the bearings from the sites and accurately locate the transmitter.

Though valuable, traffic analysis and direction finding could not match the potential of codebreaking, which promised to reveal far more information about Japanese activities and intentions.

Red, Blue, and Purple

Thanks to the theft of a Japanese code book in 1923, by the mid-1930’s the Navy had already made considerable progress against the Japanese Red Code – so named because the Navy bound copies of the purloined codebook in red.

When the Japanese replaced the Red Code with a similar code – the Blue Code – the Americans were able to use their knowledge of the earlier code’s structure to break into the Blue Code. By 1939, the Americans had penetrated the Blue Code and several minor codes used for weather messages, shipping information, and harbormaster operations.

In late 1940, a cooperative effort by US Navy and Army codebreakers also succeeded in solving the primary Japanese diplomatic code. Unlike the manual Red and Blue codes, the diplomatic code – known as Purple – was a machine code, in that messages comprised of code groups were further enciphered by an electro-mechanical coding machine. Somehow, American cryptanalysts, despite never having seen the original machine, managed to deduce the operation of the coding machine through mathematical analysis of intercepted messages and build a working copy of the device that could strip away the encipherment of the code groups. Once the encipherment was removed, the Americans could attack the code groups manually using standard cryptanalysis techniques.

An Assembly-Line Process

So, how did manual code-breaking really work? How did collaboration, pattern recognition, record-keeping, trial and error, and perseverance lead to victory at Midway?

Beginning in June, 1939, Japan was using a new naval operations code, which the Americans called JN-25. Though based on the earlier Red and Blue Codes, JN-25 was more complex, providing three distinct layers of protection.

First, each word or numeral in the message was replaced by a five-digit number, called a code group. There were more than 33,000 individual code groups, each representing a word, phrase, letter, or number. Earlier codes had used four-character code groups.

Second, the code groups, were further enciphered, or superenciphered, by adding random numbers to each group. These numbers were called ‘additives’ and 30,000 of them were provided in a separate book. The additive values were added to the code groups, changing the numbers and disguising the underlying code groups. The message drafter randomly selected a starting point in the additive book and then used the additives in sequence. A different additive value was applied to each code group.

Finally, the message contained the starting point in the additive book where the sequence of additives began, so the message recipient knew where to find the string of additives. The receiver of the message subtracted the additives to reveal the underlying code groups, and then looked up the code groups in the code book to uncover the message content.

The task for the Navy’s radio intelligence team was to intercept the message, convert the Morse code to numbers, remove the additives to reveal the code groups, and figure out what the code groups meant. It was an assembly-line process where intercepted messages were catalogued, assessed, evaluated, and deciphered in turn by radiomen at the intercept stations and DF sites, and cryptanalysts, translators, linguists, data processing assistants, and intelligence analysts at the radio intelligencer centers.

Intercepted messages were first examined for information that could be used in traffic analysis, including the message sender, recipients, call signs used, length of the message, time of day it was sent, circuit used, message format, radio direction-finding information and other external cues. After traffic analysis, the intercepts were sorted, duplicated, and provided to cryptanalysts who had the seemingly impossible task of identifying the additives, stripping them off to reveal the code groups, and deciphering the underlying code groups.

I.S. Navy Radio Intelligence unit at Hawaii (Station Hypo)

The Staring Process

Because details of America’s codebreaking effort remained classified for decades after the war, few published sources have discussed the actions cryptanalysts took to decipher the additives and code groups. But even in the few accounts that are available, codebreakers struggled to describe the process, although they all agree that it was grueling.

Rochefort said he would begin with “the staring process.”

“You look at all the messages that you have,” he said. “You line them up in various ways; you write them one below the other; you write them in various forms and you stare at them. Pretty soon you’d notice a pattern; you’d notice a definite pattern between these messages. That is the first clue.”

Some codebreakers would uncover additives by making up potential additives and subtracting them from a column of enciphered numbers pulled from messages. If the results were divisible by three – as all code groups were, as a check the Japanese used to guard against coding or transmission errors – then the codebreaker would know that they had discovered an additive.

Codebreakers arranged new messages on large sheets filled with numbers pulled from earlier messages to look for patterns. If they found a repeated sequence, they would pull the earlier messages and examine them for information that could help uncover the new message.

Sometimes codebreakers would make educated guesses about the meaning of words or phrases and replace code groups with those guesses – a process called ‘cribbing.’

Having searchable records of thousands of earlier messages was critical to the process. So was the careful preparation of charts, graphs, and tables to identify repeated sequences or patterns. But in the end, it sometimes came down to a flash of insight where the codebreaker suddenly saw what they had been looking for.

That insight, of course, would mean that a single additive, or – if additives had already been stripped off – a single code group might be identified. But there were more than 30,000 additives and more than 33,000 code groups, so reading a single word was usually a very small step forward. Plus, the Japanese periodically replaced their code groups and additive books with updated versions, sending American codebreakers back to square one.

Still, the American cryptanalysts carried on. Codebreakers at all of the radio intelligence centers worked together to create and share lists of the additives and code groups they had identified. Any flash of brilliance or inspiration occurred as part of a large-scale cooperative process.

“Codes are broken not by solitary individuals,” wrote Liza Mundy in her 2017 bestselling book Code Girls, “but by groups of people trading pieces of things they have learned and noticed and collected; little glittering bits of numbers and other useful items they have stored up in their heads like magpies, things they remember while looking over one another’s shoulders, pointing out patterns that that turn out to be the key that unlocks the code.”

As more and more additives and code groups were identified, that knowledge helped uncover additional additives and code groups. The work was cumulative, and it was greatly assisted by painstaking maintenance of voluminous files of intercepted messages, identified additives, and deciphered code groups. The use of electro-mechanical sorting machines – rudimentary data processing devices – including punchers, sorters, and tabulators, also helped speed up the process. When additives were stripped from an intercepted message, the uncovered code groups were hand-punched on I.B.M cards, recorded, and the cards were hand-sorted. The meaning of deciphered code groups was also stored.

Decrypted messages were recorded by hand on index cards, with key information underlined. Multiple copies of the cards were made and the copies filed by in separate batches according to the underlined information. Later, when cryptanalysts were working a message, they might recall a similar message and they would have a way to find it.

The greater the number of messages intercepted and worked, the more information became available, and the easier the task became. But the idea that at some point these codes were “broken,” and the Americans could read entire messages is false.

One Word Out of Five

The Japanese introduced the original version of their JN-25 operational code in June of 1939. As the version was significantly more complex than the code it replaced, it took the Americans more than a year to decrypt any significant information, but by November 1940 they were beginning to produce intelligible text from JN-25 intercepts. In December of 1940, however, the Japanese introduced a revised version (JN-25a), which set U.S. cryptanalysts back again. The Americans were not able to read anything in the revised code until late 1941.

By December, 1941, American cryptanalysts could read less than 10 percent of the Japanese code groups. Messages that did not contain any of the recovered code groups would remain a total blank. So, in the critical months before Pearl Harbor, Navy radio intelligence was restricted to traffic analysis and direction finding. On December 4, 1941, as the Japanese carrier striking force bore down on the Hawaiian Islands, the Japanese introduced another revised version of JN-25.

Following the Pearl Harbor attack, the U.S. Navy reorganized its codebreaking operations, and assigned Rochefort’s Pearl Harbor unit to lead the JN-25b effort. Before that, Rochefort’s station had been assigned to different Japanese codes, while stations in Washington DC and the Philippines worked on JN-25. At that point, Washington DC and the Philippines had made only minor inroads into JN-25, and though they had determined the structure of the code and uncovered several thousand code groups, they were not yet able to read Japanese intercepts.

Shocked by the scale and speed of Japanese victories in the first weeks of the war, Rochefort and his unit, assisted by Washington and Cavite, redoubled their efforts against JN-25. By April 1942 – a month before the Battle of the Coral Sea and two months before the Battle of Midway – Rochefort’s cryptanalysts were able to read approximately one fifth of the code groups in the JN-25b code.

It was enough.

By combining information gained through traffic analysis, direction-finding, fragments of decrypted message traffic, and their understanding of Japanese language, military culture, capabilities and strategic intentions, the Americans were able to identify critical details of Japan’s Port Moresby operation and, more importantly, discover the existence of a larger operation being planned that would eventually be revealed as an invasion of Midway.

Traffic analysis and direction finding helped identify and locate units that were preparing for the operation, while cryptanalysis uncovered tantalizing shards of movement orders, requests for supplies, casualty reports, and other operational messages. Linguists and intelligence analysts pored over the partial decrypts, connecting the dots and filling in as many blanks as they could. Rochefort, especially, was adept at deriving Japanese intentions from the fragmentary clues available.

Pacific Fleet Intelligence chief Edwin Layton later wrote that “Rochefort’s sixth sense in assembling seemingly unrelated information in partially decrypted enemy messages and turning the puzzle into an accurate picture of enemy intentions” was the key to the American success at the Battle of the Coral Sea.

The battle also boosted Pacific Fleet Commander Chester Nimitz’s trust in radio intelligence.

The Next Big Thing

Even as the Coral Sea fight was raging, Rochefort was pushing his unit to uncover details of the next big operation. By the middle of May they were solving as many as forty percent of JN-25 code groups. Since the groups that were solved tended to be the code groups used most frequently, cryptanalysts were able to determine the meaning of – or at least, make a reasonably informed guess at the meaning of – a high percentage of intercepted messages.

Of course, only a fraction of Japanese radio traffic was intercepted. The number of messages being transmitted was far too high at that stage of the war for the Americans to intercept enough to provide a complete picture of Japanese plans. During the month before Midway, when the Americans were desperate to uncover additional details of Japanese plans, Navy radiomen intercepted no more than 60 percent of Japanese traffic and cryptanalysts decoded parts of just 40 percent of the messages copied.

Through the month of May, Rochefort’s team slowly discerned the outline of the Japanese Midway operation. Indications flowed to the intelligence analysts in seemingly unremarkable bits.

The volume of message traffic was extremely high, and traffic analysis placed key Japanese fleet units in home waters. Partially decrypted messages described the merging of several Japanese carrier groups into a single striking force. Other messages arranged refueling rendezvous, ordered destroyers to meet up with a carrier striking force, curtailed shipyard periods, mentioned a landing force and an occupation force, and requested charts for the Aleutians and the area around Midway.

Each scrap of information filled in another piece of the enormous puzzle that Rochefort and his team were struggling over. No message was completely understood. But words or phrases from many hundreds of messages, information from traffic analysis, and knowledge of previous Japanese operations were laboriously knitted together to create a recognizable picture of Japanese intentions.

By mid-May Rochefort could say with certainty that the Japanese Navy’s mighty Second Fleet was assembling an invasion force at Saipan. Meanwhile, at least four large carriers – the Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu – were to rendezvous in Japan’s Inland Sea, then head toward an unknown destination after 21 May.

Based on the use of a geographic designator that they knew had been used in previous message traffic to identify Midway, the Americans were virtually certain that the intended target was Midway. Nimitz and Admiral King in Washington agreed. While there was always a chance that some of the information that codebreakers had deduced was transmitted as part of a Japanese deception campaign, Nimitz would act based on Rochefort’s assessment.

Okay, But When?

But so far, Rochefort had not been able to uncover the planned dates of the Japanese attack. Without knowing when the Japanese force intended to strike Midway, Nimitz would be unable to place his three carriers in the proper position.

So, during the last week of May, Rochefort’s team began a meticulous review of all messages that had been intercepted in the period 19-20 May. While these messages had already been decoded, portions remained unbroken. Somewhere in the still-coded fragments was the date and time of the attack.

On 25 May, the Americans discovered a partially decrypted message that included the code groups for ‘Midway’ and ‘attack’ and also included a time-date group that had been separately enciphered in a highly complex and rarely used process that Navy cryptanalysts had not been able to solve.

Miraculously, two of Rochefort’s cryptanalysts, Joseph Finnegan and Wesley Wright, working through the night, were able to deduce the structure of the table that the Japanese had used to encipher the date/time group. The date of the planned strike at Midway was 4 June, while the Aleutians would be struck on 3 June.

This was the key. The U.S. Navy would be able to place its available striking power – the undamaged carriers Enterprise and Hornet and the damaged but still operational Yorktown – northwest of Midway, in position to launch a surprise air attack against Yamamoto’s carriers as soon as they could be located.

By the evening of June 4, American carrier airstrikes had destroyed all four of the Japanese carriers. The American victory would not have been possible without the contributions of the radio intelligence organizations.

Rochefort, in one of the great understatements of the war, explained simply, “We felt that we had earned our pay.”

February 4, 2021

Image credit: Painting: The Famous Four Minutes by R. G. Smith

Sources:

Layton, Edward; And I Was There; William Morrow and Company; NY; 1985.

Carlson, Elliot; Joe Rochefort’s War; Naval Institute Press; Annapolis, MD; 2011.

Mundy, Liza; Code Girls; Hachette Books; NY, Boston; 2017.

Kahn, David; The Codebreakers; Scribner; NY; 1967.

Prados, John; Combined Fleet Decoded; Random House; NY; 1995.

Haufler, Hervie; Codebreakers’ Victory: How the Allied Cryptographers Won World War II; Open Road Integrated Media, NY, 2003.

National Security Agency Central Security Service; Pearl Harbor Review: JN-25; National Security Agency Central Security Service > About Us > Cryptologic Heritage > Center for Cryptologic History > Pearl Harbor Review > JN-25 (nsa.gov); Retrieved 5.22.2020.

Rutherford, Heather: Codebreakers: From the Civil War to Midway to Virtual Reality; Chips, The Department of the Navy’s Information Technology Magazine; October-December 2014; https://www.doncio.navy.mil/Chips/ArticleDetails.aspx?ID=5628 Retrieved 5.22.2020.

Station Hypo Started Reading Japanese JN-25b; Blog post, StationHypo.com; https://stationhypo.com/2016/03/05/march-5-1942-station-hypo-started-reading-japanese-jn-25/#more-421 Retrieved 5.22.2020.

This article is also posted on the Military History Now website. https://militaryhistorynow.com/2021/02/03/u-s-navy-codebreakers-americas-cryptanalysis-coup-at-the-battle-of-midway-was-20-years-in-the-making/

Walter S.Topp

Monthly Archives: February 2021