From: military-radio-guy Full-Name: Dennis R Starks To: military radio collectors#2 Fcc: Sent Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 07:45:30 Subject: Militar Collector Group Post, Dec.30/97 Message-ID: <19971230.074410.5039.3.military-radio-guy@juno.com> X-Status: Forwarded X-Mailer: Juno 1.38 Militar Collector Group Post, Dec.30/97 Index: Cracking the Japanese Purple Code; by Fred B. Wrixon GERMAN TUBES AVAIL; GEORGE H's NEEDS; HUMOR; ******************************************** Cracking the Japanese Purple Code; by Fred B. Wrixon The following is taken from the November 1997 issue of WORLD WAR II magazine. Several weeks ago I accidently sent a MIME encoded version of this excerpt to the list (I was sending it to my little brother as he wanted a copy to show our grandfather). Although I requested that this posting be ignored, some backchannel traffic expressing interest in this article has prompted me to repost it. This excerpt is my Holiday gift to those on the list. I have found this magazine to be a valuable resource for those who have an interest in World War II, and would urge list members to subscribe. As always, questions or comments are welcome. This will be my last excerpt for a good while as I have now finished my graduate work and am beginning the great job search. Happy Holidays to all!!! Edward Wittenberg ewitten507@aol.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Undercover American cryptanalysts successfully cracked the Japanese diplomatic code known as 'Purple.' By Fred B. Wrixon The efforts by U.S. cryptanalysts to break the Japanese codes between 1935 and 1939 especially the diplomatic code nicknamed "Purple" by the Americans, were called "Magic." Cracking the Japanese code was one of the crucial factors in the Allied victory in World War II. Once deciphered, the code provided the Allies with invaluable details on Japanese movements and attack plans. The coded messages were originally produced by a Japanese cipher machine called 97-shiki O-bun Injiki, or Alphabetical Typewriter 97. The name was based on the year of its invention, 1937, which was year 2597 according to Japan's ancient calendar. The 97 was better known as the Purple machine because the code it generated was called Purple by the Allies; the choice of that code name has yet to be fully explained. The Japanese had every reason to cover their dispatches with cryptic shields in 1937. They were deeply involved in a war with China, were forming alliances with bellicose Germany and Italy, and were rearming their Pacific island possessions in anticipation of a large-scale expansion. They had also been jolted by revelations that the United States had been reading their private telegrams for 16 years before the 97's creation. Americans first began reading Japanese messages during a naval disarmament conference in Washington, D.C., beginning in November 1921. During the meetings, diplomats from Japan and other nations conferred by cable with their overseas capitals. Those exchanges were not confidential, and they had been read, in a number of instances, by Herbert Yardley and his Cipher Bureau staff. Yardley was a World War I Army veteran of the Military Intelligence Division, MI-8. After the war, he began working for the newly formed Cipher Bureau, which was created in 1919 as a joint operation between the U.S. State and War departments. The bureau came to be known as the American Black Chamber, named after the European mail-interception rooms of earlier centuries. Yardley had the secret cooperation of cable companies in New York City, a key junction of world communications. The bureau's discoveries were sent to U.S. diplomats in Washington by a daily courier service. When he had first begun trying to break some sample Japanese communiques, Yardley had not found it easy. After months of painstaking study, however, he had awakened from a fitful sleep and realized that he finally understood a group of two-letter code words. Yardley and his bureau associates were then able to read many of Tokyo's messages, which discussed numbers and types of warships, how Japan would negotiate at the 1921 disarmament conference and what limits she would accept. That specialized knowledge was very helpful to U.S. negotiators. They used it to gain a clear advantage over Japan in the limits placed on ships and tonnage by the Five-Power Treaty, which also was signed by Great Britain, France and Italy in 1922. Throughout the 1920s, the United States and Japan warily observed each other's naval maneuvers and conducted audio surveillance with improving radio technologies. From the Philippines to Guam, Hawaii and Puget Sound in Washington state, the U.S. Navy had set up listening posts to monitor the airwaves for military and diplomatic communiques. The U.S. Army called their stations monitor posts. They included Fort Mills in the Philippine capital of Manila, Fort Shafter in Hawaii and the Presidio in San Francisco. The monitor posts and their operations did not meet with everyone's approval, however. By the late 1920s, domestic cable companies were becoming uncooperative. Also, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson cast airwave eavesdropping and deciphering activities in an unfavorable light. In 1929, Stimson stopped State Department funding for the Cipher Bureau, which then closed. About that action, Stimson later said, "Gentlemen do not read each others' mail....The way to make men trustworthy is to trust them." But when Stimson served as Secretary of War in the 1940s, he reversed that opinion and began to read decoded intercepts. With no steady employment to support his family in the Depression-dominated 1930s, Yardley made a desperate decision. In serialized Saturday Evening Post articles and a book, The American Black Chamber, he wrote a controversial expose of his code and cipher breaking. The book caused a sensation in Japan, which then followed the lead of other countries and adopted a new coding system using devices that provided multiple choices of alphabetical replacements. Mechanical shifts and electrical impulses greatly varied the alphanumerical substitutions for original letters. One such machine was built to cover two primary foreign office channels, one for world capitals and the other for the Far East. Some historians refer to it as the Angoolki Taint A, "Cipher Machine Type A." While there is some uncertainty about the machine's actual name, all agree that it was certainly technically advanced for the 1930s. Cipher Machine Type A was connected to electric typewriters for plain message input and for encrypted output. A wired disk called a rotor (some accounts say there were two) provided multiple alphabet substitutions. The rotor principle employed an insulated substance like rubber that was formed in a circle 2 to 4 inches in diameter. Around its circumference were electrical contacts linked randomly with wires that were connected to other contacts on the rotor's opposite face. The rotor was positioned between insulated plates implanted with contacts to match those on each disk's face. One plate was connected to the input typewriter keys representing plain letters, and the other plate was linked with the output cipher typewriter keys. Each touch of an input typewriter's key sent an electric current through the contacts on each face of the plates and rotor to the output cipher key. At one time in the machine's early years, a list of 240 indicators provided many choices for the rotor's starting position. The electric circuit routes were varied in two other ways. First, a device called a pinwheel with 41 pins, some movable, altered the rotor's rotations and thereby its contact points. Second, a plugboard with double-ended plugs was entered twice by the encrypting current - the first at the keyboard and rotor input and the second at the rotor exit and the output typewriter. This resulted in a form of inverse substitution with concealing letters. There are also some descriptions of a Cipher Machine Type A with a "half rotor" process. In this version, a rotor had a fixed shaft bearing 26 "slip rings," linked with the electrical contacts and slipped around the shaft, maintaining the electrical circuits when the rotor was moved. In the full- and half-rotor versions, a central purpose was to encipher separately a six-vowel and 20-consonant division of letters. These were the 26 letters of Romaji, a Roman alphabet. Though an awkward system, it was used by the Japanese for easier transmissions of their ideographic writing. The resulting ciphertext crossed the airwaves as groups of five letters preceded by sets of five digits. This system was a dauntingly complex challenge for the U.S. Army code-breaking team in 1936. The code-named it "Red" and used statistical and alphabetical charts, lexicons, stacks of graph paper and mostly pure brainpower to try to break the code. The team belonged to the Army Signal Corps' new Signal Intelligence Service (SIS), which worked in the Munitions Building in Washington, D.C. Led by famed cryptologist William F. Friedman, the team included among its more prominent members Frank Rowlett, Solomon Kullback, Abraham Sinkhov, Robert Femer, Genevieve Grotjan and Albert Small. From the letter and number pattern of the dispatches, the SIS staff discerned the six-and-20 division of vowels and consonants that identified the Romaji style. They also applied lessons reamed from U.S. Navy analysis of a Japanese navy machine that enciphered the syllables of kata kana, a type of Japanese code similar to Morse code. It was Rowlett who first lifted the Red code's cover. He put together some unusual aspects in a series of three transmissions. When he mentioned his ideas to Kullback the following morning, the two began to make headway. According to historian David Kahn, they had found parts of plain text that spelled "oyobi"ÄJapanese for "and." By early 1937, full decryptions were available to the resident and top policy-makers. Then in 1938 intercepted dispatches indicated that a new mechanism would supplant the Red code machine. The SIS learned in February 1939 that the new process was about to be activated for Tokyo and its embassy exchanges. The use of the Red system to make this announcement and others was a crucial mistake, since decipherable Red messages included phrases that were repeated in text sent by the new Alphabetical Typewriter 97. The first of those new dispatches was intercepted in March 1939. The 97 was developed by naval Captain Risaburo Ito. He had also helped design the Red code machine and, ironically, had translated Yardley's articles about his code- and cipher-breaking successes. Ito no doubt tried to make the new mechanism impenetrable. The 97 operators also used electric input and output typewriters. They applied a three-letter code for numerals and punctuation and had two code books, the Ko for basic instructions and the Otsu for special plugboard settings and switches. The plugs provided wiring variety like the Red system, but the switching arrangement was new, a special adaptation of telephone technology. Rotary-type phone equipment was arranged in banks of six-level, 25-point stepping switches (also known as uniselectors). Their main function was to direct incoming current from an input terminal to one of a series of output points. The outgoing terminals were usually in the form of a fan-shaped arc. The input-output current contacts were made by a device called a wiper. Each stepping unit was a switch with six levels, and each level had 25 steps. Every level operated independently, though the connecting wipers all had coordinate movements. Thus input current was sent a choice of 25 potential output points by stepping the wiper on that level to the point of the output terminal. With each wipers having multiple "arms," the process could repeat itself if the switch was a rotary type. When a wiper arm left terminal 25, another arm moved to the first terminal on that level. Such automatic systems for linkages between phone lines were a standard process by the 1930s. Ito and his associates made them a primary cryptographic aspect of the 97 by having the switch banks replace the rotor system. Instead of the rotor and pinwheel movements, message input impulses were substituted (enciphered) as the uniselectors, and wipers sent the current among the multiple outlet terminals. Added complexity came from retaining the plugboard aspect and some of the six-vowel, 20-consonant arrangements. Later U.S. analysis found that the groups of six were not always vowels. The plugs were again double-ended (or inverted), and that brought the current through the board twice. The plugs were also assigned vowel and consonant positions. A vowel impulse entered the input terminal and was sent to one of the 25 output points. Then each of the levels of the switch had six output wires linked the plugboard's inverted vowel positions that were themselves purposely rearranged or permuted. The consonant letters had other routing varieties too, with different numbers of switches affecting the input-output patterns and the plugboard order. The SIS team compared Red and 97 intercepts and tried to discover the latter's new secrets. For a time, the Navy's OP-20-G code-breakers capably aided them until concerns about Japan's naval cryptosystems required their full attention. Two pivotal SIS discoveries eventually helped pierce the Purple haze. The staff had determined that Purple had aspects of the Red's six-and-20 letter divisions, but the efforts to define these arrangements were time-consuming. Then, in 1935 a new team member from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Leo Rosen, found a faster way to test possible letter substitutions and variations. He used telephone selector switches the very process fundamental to the unseen 97! Another major cryptanalytic breakthrough was made in September 1940 by Genevieve Grotjan, who identified pivotal intervals between message letters and their ciphertext equivalents. Locating such patterns helped reveal how the positions of letter replacements were advanced in the Purple code. Grotjan's discovery formed a real foundation upon which the other staff members helped build. Their combined efforts led to the first two solutions of Purple on September 27, the same day that the Tokyo-Berlin-Rome Tripartite Pact was signed. The next advance involved building analogs of the Alphabetical Typewriter 97. Two were constructed by Rosen at a cost of $684.65 in the autumn of 1940. Each was a maze of wires and clattering relays inside a black wooden box, and they did indeed speed solutions. Other analogs were built by the Navy, and some were given to tin British to avoid decryption transfer delays Though Tokyo's foreign office communiques carried many clues about impending conflict with the United States, no known Purple decryption conveyed specific facts about Pearl Harbor as a certain war target. But the December 1941 disaster did lead to a greatly increased demand for signals intelligence. (Some credit the term "Magic which refers to U.S. efforts to break Japanese codes between 1935 and 1939, to Friedman who called his team magicians.) Germany had warned Japan that some Japanese codes had been compromised before Pearl Harbor. It seems incredible that Japan's leaders failed to alter the 97 significantly or replace it at some point after full-scale hostilities began. Of course, embassy traffic was not intended to convey active military details. But skilled analysts could learn much from such clues as the sites contacted, number of messages exchanged, policies discussed and even offhand opinions about current events in different combat zones. Indeed, Purple experts gained immensely valuable information from a diplomat at the highest Axis levels. He was Hiroshi Oshima, Japan's Berlin ambassador and a former military attache. His careless communiques divulged top Nazi secrets. Oshima's Purple coded cables to Tokyo provided details about many political, economic and military matters during the early war years. In late October 1943, Nazi concern about an Allied invasion of Europe was increasing. Oshima toured Germany's own defense line, the Siegfried Line, and its European Westwall fortifications. Oshima's lengthy comments about defensive preparations were coded and radioed to Tokyo. The intercepted messages revealed facts that combined - with information from spies, resistance groups, aerial photography and intelligence gained from the Ultra operation that broke German ciphers directly benefited General Dwight Eisenhower's plans for the June 1944 D-Day invasion. Oshima continued his reports as the war dragged on, trying to make the best of the Reich's ever-worsening prospects. When returned to Tokyo after the war, he reportedly denied that he had sent messages detailing German defenses. Interestingly, the only intact portion of a 97 ever found was located in the ruins of Japan's Berlin embassy. When hostilities ended in September 1945, the facts about Purple's solution gradually emerged. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall wrote that it "contributed greatly to the victory and tremendously to the saving in American lives." **************************************************** GERMAN TUBES AVAIL; I just got a load of WW II German tubes from my contact in Russia, I am offering them to anyone in the group and a few interested people. I will hold on to them for a fw weeks and then will sell them in bulk to a tube dealer who has expressed an interest in them. They are primarily for the E 51-E 53 Koln Receiver and for some aircraft radios. Here is the list. RL 2 P 3 - 2 tubes RV12P2000- New in box- 1 tube RV12P2000- 70 tubes RG -D 60 16 tubes OSRAM URA610 - 1 each LK 121 Rectifier tube- 3 /with large tube pullers small tube pullers 35 large tube puller 1(4 if taken off the LK 121 tubes) The price is $20.00 per tube. Or will trade for equipment I'm in need of, a list is available on request. If you are interested, let me know. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The RL 2 P3 were used in the TornFu b... , f and so. ("2" stands for 2 volt, P = penthode, 3 stands for 3 watt) The RV 12 P 2000 tubes were the backbone of nearly all German A.C. powered commercial electronic apparatus too. The RG 12 D 60 were not only used in the Koeln E 52 - 53, but for several other occassions as well. The RV 12 P 2000 is the standard receiver tube for Luftwaffe apparatus as: FuG 10, FuG 16, etc. as well. The RV12 P 2000 is a very reliable tube, and it still works above 150 MHz quite well. The Germans produced approx. 16 million or more items. In eastern Europe for several decades and shortly after the War in Germany this tube were still in production. Although the post War Telefunken samples were not of good quality, these were marked "Ulm". There are even some RV 12 P 2000s which carries a NATO stock number!! THE WILLIAM L. HOWARD ORDNANCE TECHNICAL INTELLIGENCE MUSEUM e-mail wlhoward@gte.net Telephone AC 813 585-7756 **************************************************** GEORGE H's NEEDS; Good Early Morning Military Radio Guy, I need some odds and ends as follows for the TV-7A/U Tube Tester one (1) type JAN 83 tube one (1) screw base "shorts" lamp one (1) each type E104, E105 & E107 adapters and the Tech Manual TM11-5083. For the Tek stuff I need the following for a Tektronix Type 532 O'Scope one (1) power cord one (1) set of probes Any help will be deeply appreciated. 73s George KC5WBV gah@koyote.com **************************************************** HUMOR; The following are actual excerpts from classified sections of city newspapers. Illiterate? Write today for free help. Auto Repair Service. Free pick-up and delivery. Try us once, you'll never go anywhere again. Our experienced Mom will care for your child. Fenced yard, meals, and smacks included. Dog for sale: eats anything and is fond of children. Man wanted to work in dynamite factory. Must be willing to travel. Stock up and save. Limit: one. Semi-Annual after-Christmas Sale. 3-year old teacher needed for pre-school. Experience preferred. Mixing bowl set designed to please a cook with round bottom for efficient beating. Girl wanted to assist magician in cutting-off-head illusion. Blue Cross and salary. Dinner Special -- Turkey $2.35; Chicken or Beef $2.25; Children $2.00 For sale: antique desk suitable for lady with thick legs and large drawers. Now is your chance to have your ears pierced and get an extra pair to take home, too. We do not tear your clothing with machinery. We do it carefully by hand. For sale. Three canaries of undermined sex. Great Dames for sale. Have several very old dresses from grandmother in beautiful condition. Vacation Special: have your home exterminated. Get rid of aunts. Zap does the job in 24 hours. Toaster: A gift that every member of the family appreciates. Automatically burns toast. For Rent: 6-room hated apartment. Man, honest. Will take anything. Used Cars: Why go elsewhere to be cheated. Come here first. Christmas tag-sale. Handmade gifts for the hard-to-find person. Wanted: Hair cutter. Excellent growth potential. Wanted. Man to take care of cow that does not smoke or drink. Our bikinis are exciting. They are simply the tops. Wanted. Widower with school age children requires person to assume general housekeeping duties. Must be capable of contributing to growth of family. And now, the Superstore-unequaled in size, unmatched in variety, unrivaled inconvenience. We will oil your sewing machine and adjust tension in your home for $1.00. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dirty, Dirty Bird... A woman was thinking about finding a pet to help keep her company at home. She decided she would like to find a beautiful parrot; it wouldn't be as much work as say a dog, and it would be fun to hear it speak. She went to a pet shop and immediately spotted a large beautiful parrot. She went to the owner of the store and asked how much. The owner said it was $50. Delighted that such a rare looking and beautiful bird wasn't more expensive, she agreed to buy it. The owner looked at her and said, "Look, I should tell you first that this bird used to live in a house of ill repute. Sometimes it says pretty off color stuff." The woman thought about this, but decided she had to have the bird. She said she would buy it anyway. The pet shop owner sold her the bird and she took it home. She hung the bird's cage up in her living room and waited for it to say something. The bird looked around the room, then at her, and said, "New house, new madam." The woman was a bit shocked at the implication, but then thought that's not so bad." A couple hours later, the woman's two teenage daughters returned from school. When they inspected the bird, it looked at them and said, "New house, new madam, new prostitutes." The girls and the woman were a bit offended at first, but than began to laugh about the situation. A couple of hours later, the woman's husband came home from work. The bird looked at him and said, "New house, new madam, new prostitutes; same old faces. Hi George!" ******************************************* EDITOR; Dennis Starks; MILITARY RADIO COLLECTOR/HISTORIAN military-radio-guy@juno.com When finished reading use browser back button or go to http://www.prc68.com/MCGP/MCGP.html