The Ditty Chasers: Communications Intelligence during WWII

What we know as Morse code today was devised by Samuel F.B. Morse and first used on railroads in the middle of the 19th Century. The code was later adapted to accommodate countries on an international basis and modified slightly. During the 1920s and 1930s the practice of sending messages over the airwaves was common. Businesses and governments could communicate with distant locations almost instantaneously and the airwaves were filled with the sound of 'dits' and 'dahs', or dots and dashes as they appear visually. Corey Ward was a 1934 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and during his time at sea, serving his obligated active duty, he learned to copy Morse code as a means of keeping up with the news while in the middle on one ocean or another. His final assignment was in naval intelligence and he started to study the Japanese language. Upon his release from active duty he took a job with the government and became a watch supervisor for the navy's communications intelligence effort at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. The objective of the group was to copy the Morse code messages off the airwaves and attempt to extract any worthwhile intelligence. As early as 1930, the navy had been devoting a small amount of manpower to copying Japanese radio traffic, which they had learned to decrypt. Because of the differences in the English and Japanese languages the Japanese developed four letter groups to represent different interpretations of the arcane Katakana language. The U.S. Navy communicators had learned to decipher the groups they used and with a bit of effort could convert the coded groups to the old language, which could then be read by anyone who knew the dialect of the language they used. A small group of Navy and Marine Corps operators, somewhere around 200, carried on the job from 1930 to 1941, going through three iterations of changes to the code system the Japanese were using. The events leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor were cataloged by the naval code takers, even to the point of suspecting the targets the Japanese were going to attack on that fatal day. This is the story of the role the Morse code intercept operators played during WWII. Though the story is fictional as far as the characters and their actions are concerned, the events portrayed as they relate to the different battles of that era are more accurate than not.