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Joseph Rochefort

Surname Rochefort Given Name Joseph Born 12 May 1900 Died 20 Jul 1976 Country United States Category Military-Sea Gender Male

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

ww2dbaseJoseph John Rochefort was born in Ohio, United States in 1900. In 1918, he dropped out of high school to join the United States Navy; the fact that he never graduated from high school was known by very few. He initially served with the rating of electrician 3rd class; failing to secure a transfer to the United States Naval Reserve Flying Corps, he instead transferred to the United States Naval Auxiliary Reserve in New York, New York, United States, where he attended the Navy Steam-Engineering Training School hosted by nearby Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, United States. His studies at Stevens was limited to military training only; he was never matriculated at Stevens and did not attend any academic courses taught by the regular faculty at Stevens. In Jun 1919, he graduated from the Navy Steam-Engineering Training School and was commissioned a temporary ensign for service as the engineering officer of a tanker and later a minesweeper. In Mar 1921, he married Elma Fay Aery. Two months later, he took a test at Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, California, United States, soon succeeding in transferring into the regular navy at the rank of ensign. This made him one of the "mustangs", a nickname for the very few US Navy officers who did not attend the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, United States. In the early 1920s, he briefly served aboard battleship USS Connecticut, cruiser USS Charleston, and destroyer USS Stansbury before returning to the tanker USS Cuyama which was his first assignment after completing the Navy Steam-Engineering Training School back in 1919. On 28 Sep 1924, while serving as officer of the deck aboard Cuyama during the early hours of the day, Cuyama and several destroyed tied to her began drifting in San Francisco Bay in California, with the ships slamming into each other and into nearby ships, causing minor damage to several ships; luckily for Rochefort, responsbility to this accident would not be placed on his shoulders, thus saving his young career. Between Dec 1924 and Sep 1925, he was the assistant engineering officer of battleship USS Arizona; around this time, his interest in puzzles and card games, and his skills with them, led to his officers recommending him for intelligence work, leading to his Oct 1925 transfer to Washington DC, United States to serve with the cryptanalysis section of the office of the Chief of Naval Operations. In Feb 1926, as the previous cryptanalysis section chief took on sea duty, he assumed command of the section. In Sep 1927, when it was Rochefort's time for sea duty, he became the executive officer and navigator of destroyer USS Macdonough. While serving aboard Macdonough, he observed a general poor handling of sensitive radio communications codes by communications officers in his fleet and submitted a report to his superiors noting so; this report did not achieve much improvement, and it might had, though impossible to conclude with certainty, earned him some political enemies. Between Sep 1929 and Jun 1932, he and his family relocated to Japan as he was chosen as a part of a very small group of US Navy officers (only two were chosen per year) to study the Japanese language. Returning to the US in Oct 1932, he was assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence located in Washington DC. His knowledge in language and intelligence work would not be put to use immediately, however, as he returned to sea duty, serving aboard battleship USS Maryland, battleship USS California, cruiser USS New Orleans, and cruiser USS Indianapolis in the 1930s. Although serving in operational roles aboard ships and in fleets, he always had his eyes on communications and intelligence.

ww2dbaseIt was not until 1941 when Rochefort officially returned to communications and intelligence work. He reported to the main US Navy building at Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii on 2 Jun 1941 to command a cryptanalysis section code name Station HYPO, where he and his team busily intercepted and decrypted Japanese Navy communications, with priority placed on the disposition of Japanese warships and the projection of where the warships might travel to in the short term. Rochefort was known to his subordinates as a very casual commanding officer, unlike most of Rochefort's peers. He did not enforce a strict dress code for his officers and men, and did not require his subordinates to address him as "sir" or "commander" after every sentence. Working in the cold basement of the main US Navy building in Pearl Harbor, he often wore a smoking jacket to keep warm; the practical purpose of the jacket would later be exaggerated into a form of eccentricity by fellow officers who viewed cryptanalysis as an auxiliary function of the navy performed by oddballs. By Sep 1941, the team had already detected hints of Japanese aggression in the Pacific Ocean, and Rochefort reported such findings to the admirals in Pearl Harbor and in Washington. The team regularly uncovered strong hints throughout the fall of 1941, such as the changing of encryption in Nov and the changing of warship call signs in Dec, but Rochefort, along with most of the US Navy leadership, did not believe Pearl Harbor would be among the first Japanese targets. The resulting devastating raid on Pearl Harbor would remain a sore spot in his heart for years to come. In the subsequent month, Station HYPO produced valuable intelligence that aided the carrier raids in the Marshall Islands and the Gilbert Islands, among other early US operations in the Pacific War. On 27 Apr 1942, his team intercepted and decrypted a Japanese Navy radio message requesting navigation charts for the Dutch Harbor and Kodiak Island areas of the Aleutian Islands; not long after, another request for charts of the Hawaiian Islands was intercepted. By May 1942, Rochefort had hypothesized, with good certainty, that the Japanese were going to attack the Aleutian Islands and Midway Atoll. He was able to convince his superior at Pearl Harbor Chester Nimitz, and by mid-May Ernest King was convinced as well, but there were still others (amongst them other intelligence officers) who believed the Japanese were instead heading south toward Port Moresby in Australian Papua or toward northern Australia. To confirm this idea, Rochefort adopted his subordinate Lieutenant Commander Jasper Holmes's idea in which a fake message regarding a breakdown of the water distiller system in Midway was sent over radio unencrypted; the message was intercepted by Rochefort's Japanese counterparts and, falling for the bait, the Japanese promptly ordered the invasion fleet to take along ample water, thus confirming the target of the upcoming Japanese attack. The team would accurately determine the Japanese carrier fleet strength and the approximate location where the carriers would launch the attacks, both of which greatly contributed to the eventual US victory. Although Nimitz supported a recommendation (by David Bagley) to award Rochefort a Distinguished Service Medal for his success, political intrigues at upper levels of the US Navy, namely a disliking of Rochefort on the part of Ernest King's chief of staff Russell Wilson, caused this recommendation to be rejected by King. Ultimately Rochefort only received a letter from King with simple words of congratulations. Rochefort cared little, though, as he believed such high recognitions for him or his team might attract unwanted attention for Station HYPO's highly classified work. In late Jun 1942, he was named the temporary chief of the Intelligence Center of Pacific Ocean Areas of the US Navy Pacific Fleet, an organization still being formed. Around this time, he had sensed that the bureaucratic in-fighting in the US Navy threatened his career in naval intelligence. In late Oct 1942, he received word that he was to be temporarily transferred to Washington DC, and knew that it was in effect his relief from Station HYPO. This relief was made official on 16 Nov. Perhaps unjustifiably, he blamed Chester Nimitz for not being able to protect him from his political enemies; he did, however, encourage his former subordinates to be loyal to his successor William Goggins, as Goggins had little to do with the fight between Office of Naval Intelligence and Office of Naval Communications for the control of the cryptanalysis sections of the US Navy.

ww2dbaseBetween Nov 1942 and May 1943, Rochefort was attached to the Western Sea Frontier based in San Francisco, California. Between Aug 1943 and Apr 1944, he oversaw the construction of floating drydock USS ABSD-2; although slated to be the ship's commanding officer upon completion, he was transferred a short time before ABSD-2 set sail for the Admiralty Islands. Assigned to the Far Eastern Section of the US Navy Office of Naval Intelligence, he led a team in evaluating previously captured Japanese messages to form a larger picture of the Japanese situation.

ww2dbaseAfter the end of the Pacific War, Rochefort found himself idling, and thus requested for sea duty. The transfer was accepted, and on 1 Oct 1945 he was detached from intelligence for combat information center training in San Diego, California and damage control training in San Francisco, California, both intending to refresh his knowledge in preparation for command at sea. In Nov, already slated for sea command, he was unexpectedly ordered to travel to Washington DC to act as a witness for a Pearl Harbor raid investigation. Stuck in naval bureaucracy once again, he became disenchanted and requested retirement, which was granted on 9 Jul 1946, effective 1 Jan 1947. In Jun 1948, he contacted his high school, which he dropped out of in 1918, noting that his cryptanalysis and language work with the US Navy should provide enough real world credit for him to receive a high school diploma; the high school agreed. With a diploma in hand, he enrolled in the University of Southern California to study international relations, with some additional courses in the Russian language and in advanced mathematics. His college career would end abruptly in 1950, however, as he agreed to be reactivated by the US Navy to head up the Intelligence Section of the Fleet Evaluation Group during the Korean War; in this role, he visited Japan twice, first time to investigate why the US military was taken by surprise early in the Korean War and to propose new processes to prevent such surprise from happening again, and the second time to ensure that the group's proposals were being implemented. Shortly after he returned to the United States, he requested for permission to retire, but this time he was denied. Instead, he was sent to the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, United States to join a US Navy committee to study the Battle of Leyte Gulf; his primary role was to translate Japanese documents relating to the battle. While he would note that his work at Newport was most enjoyable, reduced budget for the US Navy meant that less critical positions like the one he held would be eliminated. He retired from the US Navy in Mar 1953 and shortly after returned to his studies at the University of Southern California. He later ventured into some real estate work. Around this time, he was also approached by a group of Pearl Harbor conspiracy theorists who wished to prove that Franklin Roosevelt had concrete knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as early as 4 Dec 1941 per the "East Wind" message; while Rochefort offered some help, ultimately what he offered gave the conspiracy theorists nothing to further their cause. In the 1960s, his health as well as his wife's health began to decline. In 1969, his wife Elma Fay would pass away first from congestive heart failure. Rochefort worked as a consultant for the 20th Century Fox film "Tora! Tora! Tora!", released in 1970. He was later a consultant for the Universal Pictures film "Midway", released in 1976; aside from providing direction as a veteran who played a part in the battle, he also coached actor Hal Holbrook who played an exaggeratingly eccentric Rochefort in the film.

ww2dbaseAs the calendar turned into 1976, Rochefort's health declined further as he suffered from ulcers, low blood pressure, and heart disease. He passed away on 20 Jul 1976 after a heart attack at the Little Company of Mary Hospital in Torrance, California. He was buried at the Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California next to his wife.

ww2dbaseIn the 1950s and 1960s, Rochefort's former subordinate Jasper Holmes started a campaign to get a Distinguished Service Medal for Rochefort, the award that was denied by Ernest King and King's chief of staff Russell Wilson in 1942; Holmes was not able to secure the award before the usual cutoff time for decorations had passed. In 1981, another former subordinate Donald Showers, more recently a high level official in the Central Intelligence Agency, made the attempt once again. After the request for review sat in US Navy bureaucracy for many months, it was approved in 1985. The posthumously medal was personally awarded to the Rochefort family by US President Ronald Reagan in 1986, witnessed by Vice President George Bush and other high level officials; the ceremony took place in the Roosevelt Room in the White House in Washington DC, United States. Later in the same year, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2000, he was posthumously inducted into the Central Security Service Hall of Fame of the United States National Security Agency.

ww2dbaseSources:

Elliot Carlson, Joe Rochefort's War

Wikipedia



Last Major Revision: Dec 2014

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