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The Japanese tried to crack the code by torturing a poor guy called Joe Kieyoomia who was Navajo, but not a code-talker or even aware of the existence of the pr

The Japanese tried to crack the code by torturing a poor guy called Joe Kieyoomia who was Navajo, but not a code-talker or even aware of the existence of the program, but they didn't get far. Amazingly, he survived the concentration camp, the Bataan death march and getting nuked in Nagasaki, returning to the US and living until 77. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Kieyoomia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Kieyoomia

KennyBlanken 2y ago
It's worth noting just how extreme the levels of crime against humanity committed by the Japanese were. The Germans (and Swiss...) for the most part imprisoned / shot PoWs. The Japanese used PoWs for chemical and biological weapon testing and vivisection, and they would find the most depraved ways to draw out mass torture of PoWs. For example, they would do things like put US soldiers into baskets so small PoWs could not move at all inside them, load them into unventilated railroad boxcars with no water, then load them into ships, sail out to sea, and drop them overboard into shark-infested waters. Then there's the Nanjing Massacre where in a matter of days Japanese soldiers slaughtered something like 300,000 Chinese civilians at a rate of around 7,000 civilians a day. That was just one of the more than a dozen massacres. It's widely believed that Japan slaughtered more civilians than the Germans. The sheer level of depravity is astounding. And what's especially disturbing are the lengths conservatives in the Japanese government have gone to over the last several decades to rewrite history and erase these atrocities, while pushing harder and harder against the restrictions on their armed forces.
- krapp 2y ago
  Also worth noting that along with Operation Paperclip, where the US recruited Nazis to bootstrap their space program, the US also recruited Japanese war criminals to continue their experimentation in torture and chemical and biological warfare, which led to (among other things) MKULTRA.
  - scarecrowbob 2y ago
    Seriously. And in Bluebird and Artichoke the US directly continued that work, and not in some kind of "generic spirit" way, but in literal extensions of existing programs using people gathered via Paperclip. And in Korea the US used bioweapons developed by the Japanese during a retreat in late 1952. The Japanese were indeed horrible during the war. The take that the Germans and the US treatment of "expendable" humans during and after these wars was somehow more justified or less horrific is a uniquely horrible and ahistorical take.
- lobochrome 2y ago
  I'm sorry "the Swiss" had PoW as a neutral party? Also - the Soviet PoWs in the camps would like to have a word with you.
  - wongarsu 2y ago
    Mostly pilots of planes that ended up in Switzerland. Without GPS or mid-air refueling that did happen a lot. Swiss neutrality meant shooting at any military that entered their territory, no matter which side they were on, and taking anyone who surrendered captive. Anything else could be seen as helping one side or the other, which wouldn't be very neutral. Not that they were always above helping them in non-military ways
    - VagabundoP 2y ago
      Same in Ireland. But those sneaky British pilots kept "escaping" from the Curragh where they were interned.
    - sidewndr46 2y ago
      I seem to remember that navigation systems existed during WWII for both taking bearings and computing your actual location, albeit in a wide margin of error. The British apparently jammed some well enough that Nazi pilots just landed somewhere in the Northern part of the UK
      - Onavo 2y ago
        Dead reckoning while flying is hard even today. If you are flying under IMC (instrument meteorological conditions, pilot slang for "bad weather/can't see shit"), you generally have to trust that your meters and instruments are working. Without GPS (or ground based triangulation methods), you generally have to guess where you are. It's very easy to accidentally end up in a small country like Switzerland. If anyone's looking to build a startup in aviation, try building an alternative to pitot tubes. It's pretty much the last remaining vacuum instrument that hasn't been replaced by a solid state/MEMS alternative. And vacuum instruments are about as reliable as Windows Vista.
- repiret 2y ago
  Not to take away from the depravity of Japanese violence in WWII, but 300,000/7,000≈43. The rate was either higher, or “a matter of days” is probably the wrong term.
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    The massacre took place over about 6 weeks, so the latter.
- permo-w 2y ago
  from a warfare perspective, this is really bad strategy. it strikes fear into your enemies, but it's massively outweighed by making your enemies fight to the absolute last to not be captured
  - underbiding 2y ago
    It's pretty classic in-group / out-group conditioning. In fact, incentivizing your enemies to also commit their own atrocities incentivizes your own to fight to the absolute last. The depravity and feedback loop is intentional for these kinds of extremely ideologically motivation groups.
  - roshin 2y ago
    The idea was that the Japanese soldiers would see the atrocious that they were doing, realize that the Americans would want revenge, so the Japanese better fight to the death, since that's better than what the Americans would do to them in captivity. It ends up that the Americans weren't too in to revenge, so the captured Japanese were surprised.
    - KennyBlanken 2y ago
      The idea was that the Japanese considered themselves superior and everyone else was inferior, sub-human, and needed to be punished for defying them.
    - trissi1996 2y ago
      They dropped 2 nuclear bombs on, mostly on innocent civilians, seems like pretty good revenge to me.
      - pfdietz 2y ago
        And even before that, burned > 500 square miles of Japanese urban areas to ash. Granted, by the last weeks of the war, the USAAF was dropping leaflets warning they'd be back with incendiaries in a few days, a masterstroke in psychological warfare.
      - 2y ago
- zxcvbnm69 2y ago
  [dead]
- bowsamic 2y ago
  > And what's especially disturbing are the lengths conservatives in the Japanese government have gone to over the last several decades to rewrite history and erase these atrocities, while pushing harder and harder against the restrictions on their armed forces. This is still a hot issue in Japanese Buddhism and demonstrates the difference between the sects: Consider Soto and Rinzai Zen, vs Jodo Shinshu. Leaders from both supported the war efforts and nationalism, but since Soto and Rinzai teachers are supposed to be enlightened, the Soto and Rinzai authorities have not been able to apologise for their support. On the other hand, since in Jodo Shinshu everyone, including the head of the school (monshu), is on the same spiritual level (there is no attainment in Jodo Shinshu), they were easily able to apologise for the acts and ideas of the WW2 monshu.
- sib 2y ago
  >> It's worth noting just how extreme the levels of crime against humanity committed by the Japanese were. >> The Germans (and Swiss...) for the most part imprisoned / shot PoWs. Not to take anything away from the Japanese, and the Soviets, who were also horrible to POWs, but I'm pretty sure that the WWII Germans are charter members of the Hall of Fame for crime against humanity. They just didn't do most of it specifically to POWs.
  - nkingsy 2y ago
    Western POWs. Eastern front was a whole other thing.
    - sib 2y ago
      Fair enough! (And if you want a good history of horror in broadly-speaking early-middle 20th century Eastern Europe, I suggest reading Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder.)
sidewndr46 2y ago
That's kind of interesting because the limited understanding I had based off an interview I watched was the code talkers were not actually using Navajo as some form of steganography. Even a direct translation to Japanese by an expert in both languages would give you a seemingly meaningless sentence. I specifically remember the guy saying "potato" was used to refer to hand grenades for example.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  That's why encrypted messages still use code words and code phrases. Although the US did crack the Japanese encryption, the use of code words stymied them. The inference that Midway was the target of the Japanese attack was guesswork on what the code word for Midway was. Code words and phrases can be cracked once one gets enough context.
  - bluejekyll 2y ago
    > was guesswork on what the code word for Midway More specifically, it was active counter intelligence where the US sent a false report of a water issue on Midway broadcast in the clear that they then picked up the Japanese report of the issue. They used that to discern which codeword Japan used for Midway.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      You're right, but it was still scant information with which to bet the fleet on. The Japanese might have suspected that their code was broken, and so used disinformation to mislead the US Navy. Hell, it's what I would have done whether I thought the code was broken or not. The Germans had plenty of evidence that Enigma was broken. The High Command refused to believe it. I would have used the broken Enigma to send the Allies into a trap. The way to play the code breaking game is to assume the enemy has broken it, and act accordingly to your own advantage.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]

KennyBlanken 2y ago

It's worth noting just how extreme the levels of crime against humanity committed by the Japanese were. The Germans (and Swiss...) for the most part imprisoned / shot PoWs. The Japanese used PoWs for chemical and biological weapon testing and vivisection, and they would find the most depraved ways to draw out mass torture of PoWs. For example, they would do things like put US soldiers into baskets so small PoWs could not move at all inside them, load them into unventilated railroad boxcars with no water, then load them into ships, sail out to sea, and drop them overboard into shark-infested waters. Then there's the Nanjing Massacre where in a matter of days Japanese soldiers slaughtered something like 300,000 Chinese civilians at a rate of around 7,000 civilians a day. That was just one of the more than a dozen massacres. It's widely believed that Japan slaughtered more civilians than the Germans. The sheer level of depravity is astounding. And what's especially disturbing are the lengths conservatives in the Japanese government have gone to over the last several decades to rewrite history and erase these atrocities, while pushing harder and harder against the restrictions on their armed forces.

krapp 2y ago
Also worth noting that along with Operation Paperclip, where the US recruited Nazis to bootstrap their space program, the US also recruited Japanese war criminals to continue their experimentation in torture and chemical and biological warfare, which led to (among other things) MKULTRA.
- scarecrowbob 2y ago
  Seriously. And in Bluebird and Artichoke the US directly continued that work, and not in some kind of "generic spirit" way, but in literal extensions of existing programs using people gathered via Paperclip. And in Korea the US used bioweapons developed by the Japanese during a retreat in late 1952. The Japanese were indeed horrible during the war. The take that the Germans and the US treatment of "expendable" humans during and after these wars was somehow more justified or less horrific is a uniquely horrible and ahistorical take.
lobochrome 2y ago
I'm sorry "the Swiss" had PoW as a neutral party? Also - the Soviet PoWs in the camps would like to have a word with you.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  Mostly pilots of planes that ended up in Switzerland. Without GPS or mid-air refueling that did happen a lot. Swiss neutrality meant shooting at any military that entered their territory, no matter which side they were on, and taking anyone who surrendered captive. Anything else could be seen as helping one side or the other, which wouldn't be very neutral. Not that they were always above helping them in non-military ways
  - VagabundoP 2y ago
    Same in Ireland. But those sneaky British pilots kept "escaping" from the Curragh where they were interned.
  - sidewndr46 2y ago
    I seem to remember that navigation systems existed during WWII for both taking bearings and computing your actual location, albeit in a wide margin of error. The British apparently jammed some well enough that Nazi pilots just landed somewhere in the Northern part of the UK
    - Onavo 2y ago
      Dead reckoning while flying is hard even today. If you are flying under IMC (instrument meteorological conditions, pilot slang for "bad weather/can't see shit"), you generally have to trust that your meters and instruments are working. Without GPS (or ground based triangulation methods), you generally have to guess where you are. It's very easy to accidentally end up in a small country like Switzerland. If anyone's looking to build a startup in aviation, try building an alternative to pitot tubes. It's pretty much the last remaining vacuum instrument that hasn't been replaced by a solid state/MEMS alternative. And vacuum instruments are about as reliable as Windows Vista.
repiret 2y ago
Not to take away from the depravity of Japanese violence in WWII, but 300,000/7,000≈43. The rate was either higher, or “a matter of days” is probably the wrong term.
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  The massacre took place over about 6 weeks, so the latter.
permo-w 2y ago
from a warfare perspective, this is really bad strategy. it strikes fear into your enemies, but it's massively outweighed by making your enemies fight to the absolute last to not be captured
- underbiding 2y ago
  It's pretty classic in-group / out-group conditioning. In fact, incentivizing your enemies to also commit their own atrocities incentivizes your own to fight to the absolute last. The depravity and feedback loop is intentional for these kinds of extremely ideologically motivation groups.
- roshin 2y ago
  The idea was that the Japanese soldiers would see the atrocious that they were doing, realize that the Americans would want revenge, so the Japanese better fight to the death, since that's better than what the Americans would do to them in captivity. It ends up that the Americans weren't too in to revenge, so the captured Japanese were surprised.
  - KennyBlanken 2y ago
    The idea was that the Japanese considered themselves superior and everyone else was inferior, sub-human, and needed to be punished for defying them.
  - trissi1996 2y ago
    They dropped 2 nuclear bombs on, mostly on innocent civilians, seems like pretty good revenge to me.
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      And even before that, burned > 500 square miles of Japanese urban areas to ash. Granted, by the last weeks of the war, the USAAF was dropping leaflets warning they'd be back with incendiaries in a few days, a masterstroke in psychological warfare.
    - 2y ago
zxcvbnm69 2y ago
[dead]
bowsamic 2y ago
> And what's especially disturbing are the lengths conservatives in the Japanese government have gone to over the last several decades to rewrite history and erase these atrocities, while pushing harder and harder against the restrictions on their armed forces. This is still a hot issue in Japanese Buddhism and demonstrates the difference between the sects: Consider Soto and Rinzai Zen, vs Jodo Shinshu. Leaders from both supported the war efforts and nationalism, but since Soto and Rinzai teachers are supposed to be enlightened, the Soto and Rinzai authorities have not been able to apologise for their support. On the other hand, since in Jodo Shinshu everyone, including the head of the school (monshu), is on the same spiritual level (there is no attainment in Jodo Shinshu), they were easily able to apologise for the acts and ideas of the WW2 monshu.
sib 2y ago
>> It's worth noting just how extreme the levels of crime against humanity committed by the Japanese were. >> The Germans (and Swiss...) for the most part imprisoned / shot PoWs. Not to take anything away from the Japanese, and the Soviets, who were also horrible to POWs, but I'm pretty sure that the WWII Germans are charter members of the Hall of Fame for crime against humanity. They just didn't do most of it specifically to POWs.
- nkingsy 2y ago
  Western POWs. Eastern front was a whole other thing.
  - sib 2y ago
    Fair enough! (And if you want a good history of horror in broadly-speaking early-middle 20th century Eastern Europe, I suggest reading Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder.)

sidewndr46 2y ago

That's kind of interesting because the limited understanding I had based off an interview I watched was the code talkers were not actually using Navajo as some form of steganography. Even a direct translation to Japanese by an expert in both languages would give you a seemingly meaningless sentence. I specifically remember the guy saying "potato" was used to refer to hand grenades for example.

WalterBright 2y ago
That's why encrypted messages still use code words and code phrases. Although the US did crack the Japanese encryption, the use of code words stymied them. The inference that Midway was the target of the Japanese attack was guesswork on what the code word for Midway was. Code words and phrases can be cracked once one gets enough context.
- bluejekyll 2y ago
  > was guesswork on what the code word for Midway More specifically, it was active counter intelligence where the US sent a false report of a water issue on Midway broadcast in the clear that they then picked up the Japanese report of the issue. They used that to discern which codeword Japan used for Midway.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    You're right, but it was still scant information with which to bet the fleet on. The Japanese might have suspected that their code was broken, and so used disinformation to mislead the US Navy. Hell, it's what I would have done whether I thought the code was broken or not. The Germans had plenty of evidence that Enigma was broken. The High Command refused to believe it. I would have used the broken Enigma to send the Allies into a trap. The way to play the code breaking game is to assume the enemy has broken it, and act accordingly to your own advantage.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]