Talk:World War Two in the Pacific

Leyte

I added much more detail and used better sources, esp Halsey's memoir and Woodward's summary of interviews with Kurita.Richard Jensen 20:59, 18 June 2008 (CDT)

It is correct Halsey became enraged and changed his action due to a perceived insult from Nimitz, but Nimitz's actual message was a simple request for information. The series of errors by both the sending and receiving cryptographic errors caused the message given to Halsey to read quite differently than what Nimitz had written.

I cited Kahn as reasonably available, but you'll find the actual message, complete with handling errors, on numerous texts available through Google Books. It's a well-known example of how military communications procedures can fail; I watched my one-time boss, a former director of NSA, wince whenever I used it in a class for the Defense Information Systems Agency. Howard C. Berkowitz 22:06, 18 June 2008 (CDT)

I used the version in Halsey's memoir because it was the impact on Halsey that really mattered (Kahn gets its info fourth-hand). This is the kind of colorful and revealing detail that we can shift to the Halsey bio when it gets written. The point is that Halsey still did not realize he had been fooled by the Japanese decoys! That's what made him so angry: he says he was ordered away from his lifelong dream of a super victory when in fact he had been tricked.Richard Jensen 23:27, 18 June 2008 (CDT)