00:00:28.820I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
00:00:34.740Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
00:00:38.440If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
00:00:44.860War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Band.
00:00:48.040I want to pivot to the commemoration of what we're doing, the Battle of Midway, and also the 250th.
00:01:00.500It's right and proper that we remember, when we talk about American exceptionalism,
00:01:06.680the greatest moments we've had in our military and how that saved the country from absolute total destruction.
00:01:14.140And I think in this 250th year, it's important for us to not just follow the revolutionary generation, but also to make sure that we know their virtues and how it kind of resonates down through the ages.
00:01:29.500We're going to get to the Battle of Midway and talk about it.
00:01:33.060But first, Captain Fennell, because the interesting thing on this story, when you really get behind of it, a lot of it revolves around China and approaches to China and trying to control China, as we'll get into the Japanese co-prosperity sphere, right?
00:01:50.180And FDR and the great leaders we had then, of course, standing on the giants of the 19th century that knew that we're a Pacific nation and that the strategic pivot of the United States is the Central Pacific Ocean, which is so relevant, particularly in today's time.
00:02:08.160But you tried to warn the nation about this, about this situation, not just with China, but China's intent to really build a global naval force and a global military.
00:02:19.800But we were heading towards a conflict with China if we did not wake up, in particular, our political leaders in D.C.
00:02:28.660What is so amazing, it really is very much about what very smart naval officers and naval intelligence officers tried to warn same folks in Washington, D.C. back in the 1930s, and people would not heed their calls, and that led to the destruction of Pearl Harbor.
00:02:47.080Eventually, it led to our victory at Midway.
00:02:49.100But talk to me about your warning back in the Obama administration about the rise of China.
00:02:55.500well steve i was a product of my environment i had uh in a 29 year career i had eight years at
00:03:05.280the pacific fleet headquarters in pearl harbor working the headquarters building where nimitz
00:03:10.760had built uh as a as a mid-grade officer lieutenant commander commander then i went
00:03:17.240out to japan on the kitty hawk uh as the director of intel for the carrier strike group out there
00:03:22.680back to Washington, focused on China at the Office of Naval Intelligence, back out to the
00:03:29.000Seventh Fleet, and then to the Pacific Fleet. And so throughout that period, I had known the history
00:03:34.860of what happened at Pearl Harbor and what happened at Coral Sea and what happened at Midway.
00:03:41.600And I knew, like I've mentioned before, Admiral Showers and other people from that generation,
00:03:46.900But Admiral Showers was very big to me, and he told me the firsthand observations of Joe Rochefort and Eddie Layton and what they did to support Admiral Nimitz in that conflict.
00:03:59.140And so in my career, it was just natural as we saw the rise of the Chinese Navy starting around 99, 2000, that we were doing our job, which is to tell our commanders what the enemy is doing today and where he's going to be tomorrow.
00:04:14.820That was Joe Rochefort's motto. Tell your commander, it's your duty to tell your commander where the adversary is today and where he will be tomorrow.0.59
00:04:24.920In essence, meaning I'm going to predict, I'm going to assess his future movements, not just tactically at the ship level, not just operationally at the strike group level, but maybe even strategically.
00:04:36.420And that's what I was trying to do in those years that I was on active duty.
00:04:40.200And I was fortunate enough to be able to get the opportunity to tell those stories in public at a couple of conferences in San Diego, the U.S. Naval Institute and Armed Forces Communication Electronic Association.
00:04:55.440It's called WEST. It's a big Navy Marine Corps conference that happens each year in the early January, February timeframe in San Diego.
00:05:03.060and I was invited to speak in 2013 and 2014 about the Chinese growing naval threat. And I just told
00:05:10.940the truth. I didn't really have any ulterior motives, just to kind of articulate at an
00:05:16.500unclassified level what I knew I was seeing from all source information. And it got some attention
00:05:22.560the second year, not just with the Chinese, but with inside the U.S. government,
00:05:29.940with inside the Obama administration who had a policy of unwritten policy of don't provoke China.
00:05:36.620And they didn't like that. And there was a consternation over that.
00:05:42.080Talk to me for a second before I get back into the 1930s and the warnings that were given then
00:05:46.460that were looked aside that led to Pearl Harbor and then to Midway. What was it like? One of the
00:05:51.800things as a young naval officer, and I always wanted to go to the Pacific Fleet as a kid and
00:05:56.700and had my dreams granted by the Navy as I got commissioned,
00:06:01.980I got assigned to a sports class out of San Diego
00:06:04.180that would eventually rotate into the 7th Fleet
00:06:07.180and do those tremendous Westpac deployments
00:06:09.560and eventually one into the Persian Gulf and North Arabian Sea.
00:06:13.580But in getting to Pearl Harbor for the first time,
00:09:49.460Yeah, I think, you know, what happened out there in the Pacific,
00:09:54.360we can say that there was warning and people were aware.
00:09:57.980You can go to the fact that Senator Carl Vinson passed the Two Ocean Navy Act, right, in 1938, 39, 40.
00:10:08.280There was several acts from the Congress and the Senate that funded the Navy that helped us win this war in the Pacific.
00:10:14.880So there were people that were aware, but we were in a different kind of a posture in terms of, you know, kind of living in a little bit in the denial.
00:10:23.880And also, as you said, we had this view about everything's about Europe.
00:10:29.580James Schlesinger, in his speech about Midway in 2017, talked about Churchill's grand strategy,
00:10:36.180which was the whole thing, everything that we want from the Americans is to be fighting
00:10:43.040And that's, for Schlesinger, why he considered Midway was more than a decisive naval victory.
00:10:47.980He said it was more than a turning to the tide in the Pacific War.
00:10:50.940He said, in a strategic sense, Midway represents one of the turning points of world history, and in that role, it remains underappreciated.
00:10:59.240But the role that he's speaking to is to help Roosevelt and Churchill finish and achieve the grand strategy of defeating Hitler.
00:11:08.640While they took the first blow from the Japanese on 7 December, they weren't really, even then, willing to say, 7 December gave Churchill the excuse to say, now we're in the war.0.84
00:11:22.260And you'd think, okay, now we're in the war, America, let's go fight Japan.0.89
00:11:26.000But actually, we turned to the Atlantic and going after Hitler in full force.0.84
00:11:31.020The United States and Pearl Harbor, when Pearl Harbor occurred, we had two aircraft carriers around Hawaii, the Enterprise and the Lexington, Enterprise about 250 miles west of Hawaii.0.81
00:11:46.240Lexington was about 500 miles southeast of the Midway, and the Saratoga had just finished overall and was in San Diego.
00:11:54.280And New Yorktown wouldn't arrive from the Atlantic fleet until December, late and mid to late December.
00:11:59.020So we had two aircraft carriers when Pearl Harbor started, and the Japanese had a lot more than that, like six, eight more heavy carriers and light carriers.
00:12:10.140So we were really not prepared as a nation for what was coming.
00:12:14.680And at the strategic sense, you have to ask yourself, why were we not prepared for that?0.98
00:12:20.160And my concern in my career was, if we got surprised by the Japanese in their 30s, in the late 30s, 1941, how can we prevent that happening again from China?0.91
00:12:32.420Because China has the same or greater ambitions than Japan had.0.87
00:12:37.540Japan had a regional greater co-prosperity sphere of influence in that region of Asia.
00:12:46.400The Chinese Communist Party, as Xi has said, has a global governance initiative, a global security initiative, a global civilization initiative.
00:12:54.820They are seeking to control the globe, and they're building a military force and an economic force and everything else to achieve that goal.
00:13:05.940And two, if we can't deter it, are we going to allow people to be killed like we were in Pearl Harbor and even some of the people that were killed at Midway?0.97
00:13:14.340it um you talk about the co-prosperity sphere and the chinese have it now the japanese the0.77
00:13:22.900japanese philosophy of going to east asia of of indo of indo french indochina the british out of
00:13:29.700singapore the americans out of the philippines the dutch out of the east indians of what's
00:13:33.920indonesia today was essentially to drive the whites out they felt that they asians should0.82
00:13:39.780control asian they they should be the dominant power in asia and drive the whites out they'd0.91
00:13:44.480look to do this with shattering blows right military blows uh at pearl harbor and then later0.99
00:13:50.580at midway uh let's take a short commercial break where we get back with uh captain finnell
00:13:54.940he called it james slushner called it one of the turning points in world history
00:14:01.780the battle of midway intelligence officers fleet sailors and some incredibly heroic pilots both
00:14:09.360navy pilots and marine corps pilots the story of midway read that story study that story you'll
00:14:15.840find out anything you want to know about american exceptionalism about american greatness
00:14:19.760that is making america that was making america great hopefully we can make her great again
00:14:26.340short commercial break birch gold is our sponsor go to go to the end of the dollar empire this
00:14:32.240birchgold.com slash bannon get it today all eight installments totally completely free
00:23:12.380Abel Nimitz, I think a submarine officer, did the high command see the value of intelligence?
00:23:22.380I mean, after Pearl Harbor, we're ever saying, how do we get caught by surprise?
00:23:26.340And D.C. is trying to shift blame to everybody.
00:23:28.900Was Rochefort, were these great intelligence officers that actually had broken codes,
00:23:35.700were they dismissed as, hey, you blew it at Pearl Harbor?
00:23:38.420are they saying, hey, you guys actually had, you've broken the naval codes, you've broken
00:23:41.980the diplomatic codes. We now know to pay attention to you. I mean, what was the status
00:23:46.980of our intelligence services, the naval intelligence to the high operational command?
00:23:54.840Right. So going back into the 20s, there was this establishment of these radio listening
00:23:59.360posts across the Pacific. And by the time Pearl Harbor happens, you know, the guys at station
00:24:06.400hypo there were not allowed to look at the Japanese naval communications, JN-25. So after
00:24:14.140Pearl Harbor, the folks back in D.C., the Redmond brothers who worked for Admiral Kelly Turner,
00:24:20.900they put out this kind of whisper campaign against Joe Rochefort to say, hey, he missed it. It was
00:24:28.440those guys in Hawaii that missed the attack. It's their fault. But it wasn't their fault because0.97
00:24:33.520they had been giving tasking to say, you're not going to look at, you guys are in Hawaii,
00:24:37.680but we're not asking you to look at the naval communications. We want you to look at the
00:24:42.180fleet admiral communications, which was a very difficult code and was very rare.
00:24:47.960There was not that much communication, so it made it harder to do traffic analysis to break it.
00:24:53.220And Rochefort was, you know, he was given an order to look at one element of the Japanese
00:24:58.340communications, and he did that. And then when the attack happened, they all said, hey,
00:25:03.060how come you didn't look at the fleet communications? He's like, well, hey, you didn't
00:25:07.040ask me to do that, but now I'm going to do it. And so from essentially December 8th until Midway,
00:25:13.520Joe Rochefort and his team started breaking JN-25, this fleet communications code. And by the time
00:25:19.800that Battle of Midway started, they had gone from 0% understanding to about 30%. So I always like to
00:25:26.560use the example, if you took a Sunday New York Times and you laid it on your coffee table on a
00:25:31.940morning and started reading it, but you only had 30% of the words, would you know what was going
00:25:36.960on in America? Would you be able to tell stories? Well, if you're Joe Roche, you would, because you
00:25:42.100were not just a cryptanalyst. You also had lived in Japan. You spoke Japanese. You understood
00:25:47.240Japanese culture. And you used that along with your team to decrypt and understand where the0.99
00:25:53.680Japanese were going. While he's doing all that, the folks back in D.C. are picking at him and
00:26:00.500saying, oh, no, they're not going to Midway. They're going to go to the Aleutians. They're
00:26:05.840going to go to the Philippines. They're going to go to the West Coast. And so there was this battle0.59
00:26:10.280in the intelligence community, but there was no trust in the guys forward. And Rochefort and his
00:26:18.020team were able to decipher and understand that it really was the Japanese intent to strike again,
00:26:25.160another striking blow at Midway. And the folks in D.C. did not believe that. So what happened is
00:26:32.560on the island, his team, Rochefort's team, came up with an idea. And there's a cable between Oahu
00:26:40.520and Midway. It's 1,500 miles, about 1,400 nautical miles from Oahu, Pearl Harbor to Midway.
00:26:47.620There's an undersea cable. And Jasper Holmes was a submarine officer that worked for Joe Rochefort.
00:26:53.100He recommended to Rochefort, why don't we send an underground cable message to the guys in Midway and tell them to come up in clear voice on their HF radio and say, our osmosis machine to purify water is broken and we need water from Oahu.
00:27:12.380Bring us water. And Rochefort and Holmes knew that if the people in the command on Midway,
00:27:20.000the few Marines and Navy officers there, came up and said that, that in Wake Island,
00:27:25.360the Japanese had a listening post, that the Japanese listening post in Wake Island would
00:27:30.120intercept that and report back to Tokyo, guess what? Midway's out of water. And when they did
00:27:36.100that rochefort and holmes knew that the japanese would use the two-letter designation alpha foxtrot
00:27:42.820af and so they did this test they sent an underground cable message the midway came up
00:27:49.140on hf they made the report it got intercepted by the japanese on wake and they reported it back to
00:27:55.580tokyo but what rochefort and what i want i want to hold that until the uh next segment and we're
00:28:05.260going to say, why Midway? Why this small island in the middle of nowhere? Then the battle's
00:28:10.560actually engaged, and you will be blown away by the heroism and valor of the United States Navy
00:28:16.380and the ability to react. Short commercial break. I want to thank Birch Gold as our sponsor. Text
00:28:21.800Bannon, B-A-N-N-O-N, at 989898, the ultimate guide for investing in gold and precious metals.
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00:29:57.760so in the vast pacific from the illusions all the way down coral sea was right off australia
00:30:05.440you know pearl harbor in the hawaiian islands are not that big when you actually look at them
00:30:09.780in the map or the charts of the pacific why midway why this tiny essentially runway
00:30:16.120literally in the middle of nowhere, 1,400 miles,
00:30:19.880kind of even deeper into the Central Pacific.
00:31:28.480And so as they raced or came across the Pacific from west to east, they focused on Midway.
00:31:34.080midway and you know the folks in the intel center there are stationed hypo and on honolulu at pearl
00:31:40.300harvard they understood that and and as i mentioned in the last segment when midway came up and gave
00:31:46.460that message and say we're out of water and the wake island japanese listening post intercepted
00:31:51.480it and reported it to tokyo re-intercepted that communication and rochefort and the team at hypo
00:31:58.180intercepted it. And their guys, the people that did the work, the lieutenants and petty officers
00:32:04.440were like, let's report this out. We got it. It proves we were right. And Rochefort said, no,
00:32:09.060no, no, no, we're not going to report this out. We're going to let somebody else in our network
00:32:13.440report this. And so there was a fleet radio unit, Melbourne, Frumel, and the folks at Frumel also
00:32:21.300intercepted the Wake Island communications to Tokyo and reported out in a report to the
00:32:27.900U.S. side saying, hey, station hypo or station AF is midway. AF is midway. And they reported that
00:32:38.300out back to the U.S. side, but it got back to Washington. And so Rochefort was very astute
00:32:44.920and said, I'm not going to say I was right in a report. I'm going to let somebody else say it for
00:32:49.220me. And they did. And when that happened, they took that information to Admiral Nimitz. And
00:32:54.080And Admiral Nimitz had been asking Admiral Ernest King, who was the chief of naval operations in D.C., hey, I want to send my carriers up to Midway because that's where the Japanese were going to attack.
00:33:04.880And King, advised by Kelly Turner and the Op-20G Redmond brothers who didn't like Rochefort, they said, no, no, no, that's wrong, that's wrong, that's wrong.
00:33:15.240And when finally there was empirical, undeniable empirical proof, Nimitz went back to King and King said, yep, get him up there.
00:33:22.400And that's when we sent up Enterprise Hornet in Yorktown. And the Enterprise and the Hornet were formed Task Force 16. And they got up there and were, you know, east of Midway as the Japanese were west of Midway.
00:33:37.200And Eddie Layton, who was Nimitz's intel officer, was very close with Rochefort, who was the radio intelligence cryptographer, we'd call him today.
00:33:48.100Rochefort was working very closely with Layton, who was the N2, the director of intelligence for Nimitz.
00:33:56.420And he came in and said, I think the first time we're going to detect them is in this location, on this vector, at this time, and this many miles from Midway.
00:34:04.440And when the first patrol boat, the PBY, founded on June 4th, found the Japanese strike force, it was literally five miles off, five degrees off in vector and five minutes off in time.0.88
00:34:20.800And Nimitz, you know, kind of joked with his Eddie Layton and said, hey, you were five minutes off, five miles off and five degrees off, which was to say you were right on.0.97
00:34:29.080You were spot on. You predicted where we would find them.
00:34:31.700And then the battle ensued over the next couple of days with the Japanese carriers getting closer, never detecting the American carriers at first. It was us that were the fortunate ones that knew where their carriers were. And then the Japanese came out and started bombing Midway to destroy the forces that we had there.0.78
00:34:48.680And we had Marine forces there from fighter squadrons and Marine ground forces there, and they were under incredible assault.0.95
00:34:57.180And the Marines, as I, you know, there's a piece out today about VMFA 221, and they had these, you know, Buffalo aircraft that were, you know, built in the 20s that were really not appropriate for dealing with the Japanese Zeros and fighters that they encountered.
00:35:14.580And that Marine squadron suffered 75 percent casualties. And those Marines essentially went into combat knowing that they were going to die. And they did it anyway. And the Japanese launched their strikes and then got back to their carriers. And while they were refueling and rearming, our carriers attacked them. And that's when we had our greatest victory.
00:35:36.640How did you find, but explain to the audience, and if you haven't been there, the Pacific is so vast.
00:35:43.280It's, I mean, you've got to sail it to really understand how vast this is.
00:35:49.260It puts the Eurasian landmass, it's bigger than the Eurasian landmass.
00:35:55.380How did our pilots actually find the targets?
00:35:59.220they they had estimates from leighton and rochefort that said we because they're intercepting
00:36:06.380their communications and they think based upon where the communications are between all the
00:36:11.620ships in this keto butai that they and and where they were going and the orders that they were
00:36:16.980being given they were you know there was communications that said hey go to this place
00:36:21.400go to that place and the speed of advance in the locations that's how we identified where they would
00:36:27.280be. And Rochefort and his team, they're in the basement at Station Hypo that included, for
00:36:32.880instance, petty officers from the USS California. Our battleships before, you know, in the battleship
00:36:39.060Navy, each battleship had a band. They had several, you know, I don't know how many people in the band,
00:36:45.000a dozen or so sailors that were a band. And that night before on Saturday night, there was a,
00:36:51.600they always had a, in Pearl Harbor, they had a battle of the bands down there in Waikiki and
00:36:56.400the Navy bands would play against each other, you know, 1940 swing music. And the band from
00:37:01.860the California that was, their ship was sunk. They were off the ship. Their ship was sunk.
00:37:07.060There's a, you know, a linkage between musicians and people that can read sheet music and understand
00:37:12.060music and cryptologic work. And so they went and asked the band from the California to come over
00:37:17.640and work in Station Hypo because they needed more people because the volume of traffic under this
00:37:22.540new code that they were looking at, Jan 25, was much greater than the Imperial Admiral's code.
00:37:29.340And so there was all kind of people, not a lot, there was, you know, probably less than 70 people
00:37:35.520working in that basement, but they worked 24 hours a day to break that code and to find out where
00:37:40.360this Kido Butai striking force would be. And they served it up to Nimitz and Fletcher and Spruance0.82
00:37:46.680on a tee, and they got it, and they were able to then allow our, you know, great sailors and0.91
00:37:52.800aviators to get in the position to be able to conduct the strikes that caught the Japanese0.73
00:37:57.380while they were in the middle of rearming and refueling and start sinking all four of their
00:38:01.940aircraft areas. It was massive. Talk to us about these strikes, the valor and heroism
00:38:07.260and proficiency of these strikes. Well, a lot of, I mean, some of our torpedo bomber
00:38:14.420squadrons, you know, they took heavy casualties as well because they had to fly straight down
00:38:20.020or low and be put in the range of the Japanese self-defense guns. And so we lost a lot of our
00:38:28.700torpedo aircraft, but they continue to fly in, you know, essentially suicide missions to be able to
00:38:35.960deliver their ordnance. Oh, by the way, not all of our torpedoes work correctly. We had problems
00:38:41.560with torpedoes. We had problems with aircraft performance. So we had a fleet that was, you know,
00:38:47.720not as on the same technological standard as the Japanese. The Japanese had better aircraft. They0.98
00:38:54.940had better pilots in a way. Their pilots were very, very well trained. They viewed pilots,
00:39:01.020the Imperial Japanese Navy viewed pilots as kind of samurai warriors. And so they put everything
00:39:07.980into them. And this is one of the effects of the battle. Not only did they lose four aircraft
00:39:12.900carriers, they lost a generation of aviators. And they never really quite recovered from that
00:39:19.660when they lost so many of these aviators that they'd put so much time and energy and effort
00:39:24.880and training to make them these great aviators. They lost them. And we, on the other hand,
00:39:31.040said we're Americans and we're going to train people from all over America, farm boys from
00:39:36.100Iowa, to people from the cities, whatever, and we're going to get as many people flying
00:39:40.200and being capable of doing that. That came about later, but that was one of the strategic pivot
00:39:46.720points, which was we started to be in command of carrier aviation compared to the Japanese,
00:39:54.120with really a devastating blow to lose four heavy carriers in one battle. And we lost one to
00:40:02.420Yorktown, which was devastating. But comparatively, it was a massive blow to the Japanese when they1.00
00:40:09.200thought they were going to give us the second decisive knockout blow after Pearl Harbor.
00:40:15.160Tojo in the army, he was now prime minister. It was a military, essentially dictatorship.
00:40:20.980The army had always been brewing for a fight with the Americans, figuring the Americans
00:40:25.560would not fight. And they had combat experience and obviously in China for a long time.
00:40:31.000The Navy was always very hesitant. The highest levels of the Navy were always very hesitant about taking on the Americans because they felt the American, you know, Yamamoto knew the industrial capacity of it.
00:40:43.440But how did that inform decisions they made strategically, the Navy, on this, understanding that they had a lot more respect for their opponent than the Japanese Army Command did?
00:40:54.500Well, I think you could say in a sense they were a bit reluctant in their attack, because if they had been really focused, they wouldn't have allowed this great rest of their carrier force under Yamamoto and Admiral Kondo, which had two light carriers, five battleships, four heavy cruisers, and two light cruisers that were 700 miles away.
00:41:19.880They should have been providing support to those four carriers that were kind of exposed.
00:41:25.240So in that sense, there was this kind of, I think, I don't want to say that they didn't really, they weren't willing to go die for what they believed in.
00:41:34.120But there was some kind of, I say, they weren't as, they weren't sure.
00:41:39.520And so there was a little bit of trepidation.
00:41:41.100Oh, by the way, the Army, the Imperial Japanese Army, was very aggressive, as you said, and they were wanting to have an attack on American soil.
00:41:52.120And so they had a plan, and there was attacks that occurred before the Midway battle on the Aleutians.
00:41:57.640And so that required Imperial Japanese Navy ships go up and cover that invasion up in the Aleutians.
00:42:04.600The Japanese landed and took parts of Alaska.
00:42:07.820Now, it wasn't a state at the time, but it was considered Japanese or American interests and territory.
00:42:13.620And so the Japanese Imperial Army wanted to go there and they wanted to use it for a divert.
00:42:18.220But they also wanted it for a symbolic, hey, we've taken some territory.
00:42:21.600They needed some territory to tell the people of Japan that we were successful because they didn't get any territory in Pearl Harbor.
00:42:29.240They didn't get any territory necessarily.0.55
00:42:37.820But Pearl Harbor and the Aleutians and then Midway were all about this tug of war between the Army, Imperial Japanese Army and the Navy.
00:42:46.360And I think the Navy leadership, and as you said, Yamamoto knew the strength of America.
00:42:52.440And he had that famous quote, you know, I think we've awakened a sleeping giant.
00:42:56.640And so there was some subconscious concern about what have they done.
00:43:01.200And I think that affected the not maybe not the combat operations of the day, but I think strategic thinking to allow that separation between the two forces of those not concentrate forces.
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00:45:40.280It is what our service is all about, and that's why these individuals are revered for the sacrifice, knowingly, understanding they were going to die, went in and took care of their jobs anyway.
00:46:00.280Joe Rochefort was treated very poorly.
00:46:02.920After this great battle, and if you can put up that last graphic just so people can see the battle in the numbers, Rochefort was, in all accounts, one of the key architects of finding the Japanese fleet and having this victory that's up on the screen there.
00:46:22.760After it was over, Admiral King, the CNO, went to Nimitz and said, hey, on the advice of his intel people there, communications people in OP-20G, and said, we need to have Eddie Layton, who was the N2, and Rochefort brought back to D.C. so we can debrief what happened at Midway.
00:46:39.560And they did, Nimitz said, no, I can't do that because I'm working on my next plan and I can't get, those two guys are too important.
00:46:48.840So King came back about three weeks later and said, hey, Chester, I really want those guys back here.
00:46:54.800And Nimitz went to Layton and said, the CNO is really adamant.
00:46:58.280And I can protect you because you're my end too, but I cannot protect Joe Rochefort because in the chain of command, he worked for the 14th Naval District.
00:47:06.400And so they brought Joe Rochefort back right after Midway within a couple of months.
00:47:10.880They brought him back to D.C. and they relieved him of being the officer in charge of Station Hypo and that team of radio intelligence cryptographers, cryptanalysts that did this great victory.
00:47:23.520And they brought him back and they said, hey, you're not going back there.
00:47:29.340And so what do you want to do? And he goes, well, I would like to command at sea.
00:47:32.200And they said, oh, sorry, you know too much information. You have too much intelligence.
00:47:35.780So you're not going to go there and you're going to have to stay back here.
00:47:39.300And he ended up going out to San Francisco, the mayor's island, and became the commanding officer of a floating dry dock for the rest of the war.
00:47:48.260The guy that knew Yamamoto, the guy that broke the coast.
00:49:57.820I think at this point, it would be a service to his family and his history to say, hey, listen, this guy knew something was wrong. He tried within the confines of his authority to make us prepared.
00:50:13.640And remember, back in those days, there was no Pentagon. There was no chairman of the Joint Chiefs. It was the War Department, the Army, and there was the Navy Department. And trying to get things done under those confines was not easy.
00:50:27.820And, you know, Kimmel was there when they brought the Pacific Fleet from San Diego to Hawaii, and he had warned about that, or Richardson had, and then Kimmel.
00:50:39.880And so there was concerns that they had about what was happening.
00:50:44.340He did as much as he could, and to place the entire blame on him when the rest of the system had this knowledge.