Hello and welcome to episode 106 of the unauthorized history of the Pacific War podcast.

My name is Seth Peridon, historian and deputy director of the Mississippi Armed Forces Museum here at Camp Shelby, and with me as always, is my esteemed co-host, retired Navy captain Bill Toaddy, former skipper of the fast attack submarine U.S.S. Indianapolis, Commodore of Submarine Squadron 3 in Pearl Harbor, and many other postings.

Aside from Bill and I, we have a special guest today whom many of you listeners have probably heard of or at least seen, but I'll let Bill do the formal introduction of our guest and our topic. Bill, take it away.

Thanks, Seth. If the two of us were to define the two main thrust of our

podcast, the unauthorized history of the Pacific War, it would be one, to correct some of the

mythology that has emerged over the decades, and two, to see what lessons might be gleaned

that could be important were war to break out in the Pacific

again. In my view, our subject for today falls into the second category because it's about the

impact of strategic alignment and chains of command on operational success. Station hypo was one of

three main stations in the Navy used to listen

and break Japanese naval codes. Hypo was the phonetic word for the letter H, which stood for

Hawaii, since Station Hippo was the code breaking office located in the basement of the Hawaiian

Naval District Commandress Building

in Pearl Harbor. As an aside, I visited those rooms when I was Commodore in Pearl,

and they were being used to store furniture for the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard headquarters

building, but we'll leave that for another potential future discussion on what's happening to all these historic sites over the decades.

But germane to today's conversation, in the early months of the war, the Naval District Hawaii commander reported not to Admiral Nimitz, but to Admiral King directly.

That would be corrected in the coming months, but since Station

Hypo supported combat operations in the Pacific, Admiral Nimitz certainly thought of it as one of

his assets, while Admiral King's staff in Washington saw it solely and completely theirs, to include Station Hippo's brilliant leader,

Commander Joe Rochefort.

This led to a chain of command problem that would ultimately lead to Rochefort's dismissal

...