His brother self had been busy coordinating the airlift of troops and supplies to the northern Sakhalin bridgehead. He had a Marine battalion on defense there, and was bringing in additional air mobile troops with supporting heavy weapons by air, mostly flying during heavy overcast days to minimize the threat of enemy air interception.
“The Japanese are bringing in reinforcements from Hokkaido,” said Tyrenkov.
“As we expected.”
“It isn’t much, just one more additional regiment.”
“That should not prove difficult to overcome, but I’ll want a full division in Northern Sakhalin before we make our push. And don’t forget that we have to seize Lazarev on the mainland, and the mouth of the Amur River. That waterway is our route inland in the north. In the south, I’m still pinning my hopes on the planning for the Chikhacheva Bay operation. Once we push as far south as Aleksandrovsk, the time will be ripe for that. It will be quite easy to move west into Primorskiy Province from there, and then we can follow the Amur River for the real offensive push to Khabarovsk. I want to try and get there by July, and clear all of Sakhalin Island as well. Then we plan the Vladivostok operation. For now, I must turn my attention to breaking the back of the Japanese Navy, which should be accomplished in due course.”
Karpov was very pleased with himself, a smug confidence being the outward cloak his darkened soul wore each day. His muse seemed very well reasoned, very logical and precise. But he was very wrong, at least about the battle of Midway. And he would soon find out that the artful stratagem of surprise could be used against him as well.
Chapter 18
Another man was thinking about Midway, sitting in a cellar deep beneath the administration room at Pearl Harbor. The building above had been gutted by fire, but the cellar housing Station HYPO had survived. In the last three months the rubble had been cleared, new construction started, and it was nearly complete. Yet all the while, the station, a branch of OP-20-G Naval Intelligence section in Washington DC, had continued to operate. Their mission was signals intelligence and decryption, and they had some very talented minds there, including one Lieutenant Commander Joseph Rochefort, who had joined the Navy while still in high school in 1918. A man with a complex mind, much like Alan Turing, Rochefort delighted in solving crossword puzzles, or analyzing the possibilities of card games, particularly bridge. It was the kind of mind that was tailor made for code breaking, and that is what Rochefort did.
Station HYPO, sometimes called Fleet Radio Unit Pacific (FRUPAC), had a sister station labeled FRUMEL in Melbourne, and together they had been listening… listening…. All the real decryption work was piling up at those two sites now, as Hong Kong was gone, along with Batavia, and Corregidor. They took the burden, and worked hard, and had some real success in breaking the Japanese JN-25B naval code. Now it was telling them some very dangerous things.
Orders were afoot, signals traffic up all across the bands, and ships were on the move. This made for late hours and long shifts at HYPO, but slowly, a rather ominous picture was being painted by the signals traffic. Lieutenant Commander Jasper Holmes had been very methodical, working from the assumption that something was up for the Central Pacific. The Americans had learned that the movement and deployment of the Japanese carriers was the first thing to look for, and they had clearly identified a carrier with a name ending in “kaku” ordered to Truk. Only two ships had that suffix, and they were both in the same Carrier Division, Number 5, Japan’s newest and most modern carriers.
Holmes came up to Rochefort’s desk, the green eye shades the men used to protect their eyes from the endless overhead fluorescent lighting now perched high on his forehead. He had caught a few hours sleep on a cot by the wall, then was up early to see if anything new had come in. He was very pleasantly surprised. Rochefort was sitting behind a wall of stacked file folders and reports, half way through a cup of coffee. A veil of pipe smoke always seemed to surround his desk, like fog hugging the ragged shore of some isolated Pacific island.
“If Div Five has moved to Truk,” said Rochefort, “what makes you think they’re heading for the Central Pacific?”
“Truk is the center of the wheel,” said Holmes. “From there they could head south into the Solomons, or southwest towards the Coral Sea. There are good objectives there. We know they want Port Moresby. That’s why Fletcher has Saratoga and Yorktown off Fiji right now, ready to move west into the Coral Sea. They could save him the trouble and also head right for Fiji from Truk, and that has a lot of folks worried. So I decided to play a little game.”
“A game?”
“Right. We know the call names of several objectives, so I put out some traffic on the radio last week, just an innocuous little laundry list of maintenance trouble, and I sent it in the clear. I had the report say they had trouble with the water condenser on Midway, and needed lubricating oil for a crane at Suva Bay—two nice fat objectives the Japs might be eyeing now. And guess what. We picked up a message just yesterday. The Japs took my bait, hook, line, and sinker!” His smile drove the weariness from the lines of his face.
“What do you mean?”
“A.F. sir, that was one of the call signs attached to an objective point. We picked up a message repeating that A.F. had trouble with its water condenser. I decoded it myself. So A.F. has to be Midway, and by elimination, we figured out what Fiji must be. No action there, but everything else seems to be pointing to Midway. We even picked up movement order for fleet unit 8 O K.I. We know what that is sir, because the Japs always pair sister ships, and 9 O K.I. was clearly ordered to Kwajalein right after the attack on Pearl. That was Kaga, the ship Halsey busted up in that first engagement. So 8 O K.I. has to be the Akagi, and they want it ready for a move to support the operations for A.F—for Midway.” He folded his arms, a smug look of satisfaction on his face.
“Midway,” said Rochefort. “Why the Central Pacific?”
“Unfinished business,” said Holmes. “If they can knock off Midway, then we lose that important watch on all that turf out there.”
“Or maybe something else,” said Rochefort. “Know thine enemy, Holmes. We know Yamamoto has been wanting to lock horns with our carriers for some time. That’s his guiding principle—seek out a decisive engagement. That’s why he hit us at Pearl.”
“Right. Well I think they’re going to sortie into the central Pacific, and take a pot shot at Midway. They know Halsey has been nipping at the Marianas, and that stunt Doolittle pulled off must have reddened quite a few faces in the navy over there. If they had Midway, they could put seaplanes there and we would have never been able to pull that raid off. It’s a big blind spot for them out there, and possession of Midway solves that problem nicely.”
“How sure are you about this?”
“Well, we’ve also got Nagumo’s call sign—that was 8 E YU, before they changed it to 8 YU NA. We have sixteen readings where that call sign is paired with the 8 O K.I. for the Akagi. So that has to be the flagship for this operation, and they’re moving it to Truk to link up with Carrier Division 5. That’ll give them at least three big flattops ready to move in five days. And there’s more, we’ve got the handle for one of their fleet replenishment ships, Kyukuto Maru. It’s the flagship for the tanker fleet. It’s got orders to proceed to support this operation A.F. too.”