The world wonders

"The world wonders" was a phrase used as security padding in an encrypted message sent from Admiral Chester Nimitz to Admiral William Halsey, Jr. on October 25, 1944, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.^[1] The words, intended to be without meaning, were added to hinder Japanese attempts at cryptanalysis, but were mistakenly included in the decoded message given to Halsey and interpreted by him as a harsh and sarcastic rebuke. As a consequence, Halsey dropped his pursuit of a Japanese carrier task force in a futile attempt to aid United States forces in the Battle off Samar.^[2]

Background

Nimitz (left) and Halsey in 1943.

On October 20, 1944, United States troops invaded the island of Leyte as part of a strategy aimed at isolating Japan from the countries it had occupied in South East Asia, and in particular depriving its forces and industry of vital oil supplies. The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) mobilized nearly all of its remaining major naval vessels in an attempt to defeat the Allied invasion.^[3][4] In the ensuing Battle of Leyte Gulf the Japanese intended to use ships commanded by Vice-Admiral Jisaburō Ozawa, "Northern Force", to lure the main American covering forces away from Leyte, thus allowing the main IJN forces, "Southern Force" and "Center Force", to attack the invasion force in a pincer movement. Northern Force would be built around several aircraft carriers, but these would have very few aircraft or trained aircrew, and was in reality little more than "bait".^[3][4][5]

Halsey, in command of the naval forces covering the invasion, fell for the ruse, and convinced that Northern Force constituted the main Japanese threat, proceeded northward in pursuit with the carriers of 3rd Fleet and a powerful force of battleships, designated Task Force 34. This left the landing beaches covered only by sixteen escort carriers with about 450 aircraft from the 7th Fleet. On the morning of the 25th a strong Japanese force of battleships slipped through the San Bernardino Strait headed toward the American landing forces,^[6] prompting their commander, Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, to send a desperate plaintext message asking for support.^[7]

Message

When Nimitz, at CINCPAC headquarters in Hawaii, saw Kinkaid's plea for help he sent a message to Halsey, simply asking for the current location of Task Force 34, which due to a previous misunderstanding, was unclear:^[6]

Where is, repeat, where is Task Force Thirty Four?

With the addition of metadata including routing and classification information, as well as the padding at the head and tail, the entire plaintext message to be encoded and transmitted to Halsey was:

TURKEY TROTS TO WATER GG FROM CINCPAC ACTION COM THIRD FLEET INFO COMINCH CTF SEVENTY-SEVEN X WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR RR THE WORLD WONDERS^[8]

U.S. Navy procedure called for the padding to be added to the start and end of the message, which were vulnerable to cryptanalysis due to the use of common phrases and words (such as "Yours sincerely") in those sections.^[9] The words chosen for padding should have been obviously irrelevant to the actual message, however Nimitz's enciphering clerk used a phrase that "[just] popped into my head".^[10]

While decrypting and transcribing the message, Halsey's radio officer properly removed the leading phrase, but the trailing phrase looked appropriate and he seems to have thought it was intended and so left it in before passing it on to Halsey,^[1] who read it as

Where is, repeat, where is Task Force Thirty Four? The world wonders.

The structure tagging (the 'RR's) should have made clear that the phrase was in fact padding. In all the ships and stations that received the message, only New Jersey's communicators failed to delete both padding phrases.^[11]

Consequences

The message (and its trailing padding) became famous, and created some ill feeling, since it appeared to be a harsh criticism by Nimitz of Halsey's decision to pursue the decoy carriers and leave the landings uncovered. "I was stunned as if I had been struck in the face", Halsey later recalled. "The paper rattled in my hands, I snatched off my cap, threw it on the deck, and shouted something I am ashamed to remember", letting out an anguished sob.^[12] RADM Robert Carney, Halsey's chief of staff (who had argued strongly in favor of pursuing the carriers), witnessed Halsey's emotional outburst and reportedly grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him, shouting, "Stop it! What the hell's the matter with you? Pull yourself together!" Recognizing his failure, Halsey sulked in inactivity for a full hour while Taffy 3 was fighting for its life—falsely claiming to be refueling his ships—before eventually turning around with his two fastest battleships, three light cruisers and eight destroyers and heading back to Samar, too late to have any impact on the battle.^[13]

References

1. Black, Conrad (2005). Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom. Public Affairs. Retrieved 19 March 2009.
2. North, Oliver; Joe Musser (2004). War stories II: heroism in the Pacific. Regnery Publishing. ISBN 9780895261090.
3. Fuller, John F. C. (1956). The Decisive Battles of the Western World. III. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode.
4. Morison, Samuel E. (1956). "Leyte, June 1944 – January 1945". History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. XII. Boston: Little & Brown.
5. Smith, Robert Ross (2000) [1960]. "Chapter 21: Luzon Versus Formosa". Command Decisions. United States Army Center of Military History. CMH Pub 70-7. Retrieved 8 December 2007.
6. Woodward, C. Vann (1947). The Battle for Leyte Gulf. New York: Macmillan.
7. Kahn (1996) [1967]. "Chapter 17: The Scrutable Orientals". The Codebreakers. Scribner. p. 609. ISBN 978-0-684-83130-5. ...Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid sent, in clear, a desperate call for the gunfire of Task Force 34 ships.
8. Tuohy, William (2007). America's Fighting Admirals: Winning the War at Sea in World War II. MBI Publishing Company. ISBN 9780760329856.
9. Kahn (1996) [1967]. "Chapter 17: The Scrutable Orientals". The Codebreakers. Scribner. p. 609. ISBN 978-0-684-83130-5. Naval communications procedure called for the head and tail of messages -- their most vulnerable points -- to be concealed by nulls consisting of meaningless words.
10. Kahn (1996) [1967]. "Chapter 17: The Scrutable Orientals". The Codebreakers. Scribner. p. 609. ISBN 978-0-684-83130-5. This "padding" was supposed to be totally alien to the text, but the enciphering ensign at Pearl Harbor violated that rule when he used a phrase that was 'just something that popped into my head'
11. Potter, E B (2003). Bull Halsey. Naval Institute Press. ISBN 9781591146919.
12. Thomas, Evan (2006). Sea of thunder: four commanders and the last great naval campaign, 1941–1945. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 9780743252218.
13. Miller, Nathan (1997). War at Sea: A Naval History of World War II. US: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195110388.

• Miller, Nathan (1982) [1977]. The U. S. Navy: an illustrated history. New York: Bonanza Books. pp. 366–71. ISBN 0-517-38597-X. OCLC 8493587.