Why was the US codebreaking in the pacific revealed faster than Bletchley park?

Why is it that the US codebreaking in the Pacific war was revealed much faster than Bletchley park? BP was not reveald until 1974 according to wikipedia and i belived the codebreakers in the Pacific were reveald much earlier. Calbear or others with knowledge, please enlighten us
 
Possibly because the Foreign Office were selling captured Enigma machines to the Dominions after the war and didn't want them to know we could read their encrypted traffic? By '74 it wouldn't matter.
 
Part because the Brits are tighter about keeping secrets. Another factor is the Japanese code & encryption systems were trashed at the wars end. No one recycled them & it did not matter if anyone knew we were reading them. Plus there were some sloppy leaks. i.e.: the 1942 news story in the Chicago Tribune that strongly hinted the Battle of Midway was won through code breaking.
 

GarethC

Donor
The governing legislation in the UK made it a criminal offence to reveal information for thirty years after it was classified, and by and large the Bletchley staff obeyed that.

The US narrative was that Japanese codes were poorly constructed and relied on an unwarranted assumption that American know-how was unable to comprehend Japanese-language messages even with fairly basic encryption.

The British narrative was that the Enigma machine was really really clever but beaten by even cleverer British mathematicians.

The American narrative doesn't impact the Cold War much. The British one is really quite important if the Soviet M-125 cipher machine is vulnerable to the same sorts of attack.
 

Deleted member 1487

Racism probably was a factor; no one took the Japanese as a serious power, so saying they broke their codes wouldn't really mean much. Admitting that they had broken the German codes would signal they could do the same and had done the same to the Soviets, so to avoid them potentially changing their signal security it was probably thought best to keep that under wraps for a while until it no longer mattered.
 
Racism probably was a factor; no one took the Japanese as a serious power, so saying they broke their codes wouldn't really mean much. Admitting that they had broken the German codes would signal they could do the same and had done the same to the Soviets, so to avoid them potentially changing their signal security it was probably thought best to keep that under wraps for a while until it no longer mattered.


I don't think that is true after the pre-war racism about Japan being unable to fly aircraft properly was disproved.
 
The poms released details of their WW1 code breaking efforts in the interwar period, indeed by 1934 the Germans had enough details in their hands to assess the
capture of code books aboard the cruiser Magdeburg was little short of disastrous. Thus, it aint that surprising that second time round they kept their cards close to their chests...

The yanks didn't have such an experience after WW1
 
I think its very simple,

The Mostly British people involved were told to keep quiet and they did - to the point when they only spoke up after the WW2 decryption efforts became public knowledge

Locally here in the 80s and 90s when Bridges were being rebult/replaced frequently demolition charges were being discovered that had been planted during the invasion scare in 1940 and never removed

The people responsible for placing them when asked why they had not said anything simply replied they had been ordered not too

In addition the decryption issue was ongoing well into the cold war vs the Russians while the Japanese where a puppet nation then ally post war
 

Deleted member 1487

I don't think that is true after the pre-war racism about Japan being unable to fly aircraft properly was disproved.
I misread the title of the post (again...I should stop posting after drinking coffee on an empty stomach in the morning) thinking why was code breaking in the Pacific acknowledged before that in Europe. However I do think the US did want to brag about it's codebreaking efforts against the Japanese partially out of a sense of restoring pride given that the Japanese were whipping the US for the first 6 months of the war. The Brits were more focused on Europe so didn't really have so much of anything to prove, especially as the Pacific/Asian theater was largely forgotten post-war.
 
In large part it's differences in governing ethoi - the British government has always been much more closely guarded in its affairs, even more so when it comes to intelligence matter. Case in point they didn't officially admit that the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly incorrectly referred to as MI6, actually existed until 1986. I don't think Government Communications Headquarters (GCGQ), the eventual successor of Bletchley Park, was officially recognised until eight or nine years after that.

There's also the fact that post-war the capability was still highly useful. The Soviets had apparently picked up some German machines and made used of them, and built off them which still allowed some vulnerability. Private companies in Germany and other countries were selling variations of Enigma and Lorenz machines on the commercial market to businesses and national governments, they were in use for quite some time so the ability to read their messages was advantageous.
 

Cook

Banned
Why is it that the US codebreaking in the Pacific war was revealed much faster than Bletchley park?

Party Politics takes precedence over National Security.

Republicans were blaming the Roosevelt administration for losing (and or provoking) Pearl Harbour; this became so acrimonious that in September of 1945 a Senate committee was established, the 'Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack' (commonly referred to as the Pearl Harbour Committee) to determine what was known, when it was known, and if indeed anyone in the Roosevelt administration or the Departments of the Navy or Army had been negligent in their duties. The result of this was that America's pre-war breaking of the Japanese diplomatic 'Purple' cypher was revealed. It was all about scoring points in the blame game.
 
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Possibly because the Foreign Office were selling captured Enigma machines to the Dominions after the war and didn't want them to know we could read their encrypted traffic? By '74 it wouldn't matter.
ENIGMA machines were being manufactured and sold by the original company for years to both nation states and corporations both before and after WW2. Also the UK has always been a very secretive state, there were documents from the Crimean War that were only declassified in the 1990's for example.
 
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