Last month the Naval Institute Press published Joe Rochefort’s War: The Odyssey of the Codebreaker Who Outwitted Yamamoto at Midway by Elliot Carlson. The book is the first biography of the officer who headed the Navy’s decryption unit at Pearl Harbor and began to break the Japanese navy’s code before the Battle of Midway. Based on his unit’s interpretations of the coded Japanese messages, Rochefort believed Japanese Combined Fleet Commander Isoroku Yamamoto’s invasion target would be Midway. His conclusions and the U.S. Navy victory there changed the course of the war.
Captain Joseph J. Rochefort was among the first people the Naval Institute interviewed in 1969 for its fledgling Oral History Program. Two years later, the Office of Naval Intelligence requested the Institute forward its completed series of Rochefort interviews to the National Security Agency (NSA), which classified it Secret Codeword, confiscating the tapes and transcript to prevent further use. In 1983 the NSA returned an unclassified, sanitized version of the oral history to the Institute with approximately 95 percent of the original manuscript intact.
In his research Carlson consulted the Rochefort oral history as well as the histories of a number of other distinguished retired naval officers in the Institute’s collection. The resulting book is not only authoritative but a good read.
The oral history discipline was relatively new in the late 1960s when the Naval Institute launched its program. The Institute tapped Dr. John T. Mason Jr., an Episcopal minister who had worked in the Office of Naval Intelligence during World War II, as its first full-time historian. When Mason retired in 1982, respected author, historian, and editor Paul Stillwell took charge of the program. There are now more than 250 bound oral-history volumes of Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard personnel in the Institute’s collection.
Today the primary challenge is funding. Oral histories are produced solely through charitable gifts the Foundation receives. Opportunities are available to underwrite dozens of worthy histories and to provide much-needed general program support. Tax-deductible gifts can be mailed to the Naval Institute Foundation, 291 Wood Road, Annapolis, MD 21402. You can also make your gift online through the Institute’s website, at www.usni.org (click “Donate”). Please stipulate that your gift is for the Oral History Program.
USNI Photo Archive ‘By the Numbers’
46: Number of five-drawer cabinets housing the main photo collection
51: Special donated collections, including personal photo albums, scrapbooks, letters, and postcards
350: World War II color photos
439: Glass-plate negatives
1,200: Prints in the professional-photographer collection
4,600: Oversized images stored in 46 flat boxes
11,900: Photos of foreign military installations, personnel, and cities
12,000: Images of military weapons
16,800: Aircraft photos
29,100: Combat photos
35,448: Negatives in the main collection
40,600: Images of U.S. personnel from all armed services
41,500: Portrait and candid shots of individuals
58,700: Photos of foreign ships
72,600: Slides preserved in 121 loose-leaf folders
131,500: Images of U.S. Navy ships
442,800: Approximate number of prints in the main collection
One number the Naval Institute is striving to increase is 17,000—that’s how many images we have been able to scan so far and to make available online. Tax-deductible gifts to the Foundation earmarked for the photo archive are used to help digitize photos and protect the rest of the collection until it too can be placed online. For information on how to help, please contact Sue Sweeney at (410) 295-1054 or [email protected].