Strange War Stories, A Stream of Consciousness Production
. Most people seem to know that, during World War 2, American code-breakers were able to read secret Japanese radio messages. The ability to do this helped the US Navy to locate and sink many enemy ships, thereby saving American lives. What fewer people know is that many of the American code-breakers were musicians. After the disaster at Pearl Harbor, the Navy decided that it did not need so many members of its bands. So, they reassigned most of the musicians to other duties. The chief American code-breaker knew that musicians have a talent for detecting subtle nuances of rhythm. This skill is very important for code-breakers, and so he requested and got a large number of them, with good results. One such former musician was Howard Tyler. Howard was given a folder of un-decoded Japanese secret messages, and told to decode them. To do so, he began listening to Japanese secret radio messages, and soon identified the one whose fold...