Codebreaker in the Far East

Telegraph:

In Codebreaker in the Far East (1989), Stripp described his career as a cryptanalyst within an account of the contribution of British signals intelligence in the Allied victory in Burma in 1945. More tantalisingly, in 2001, he published The Code Snatch, a fictionalised account of the theft of a Japanese military codebook in late 1944. The novel was based on true events, though Stripp would never be drawn on the exact points where fact and fiction coincided.

Stripp's career in Signals Intelligence began in 1943 when, as a first-year Classics scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, he received a note from his tutor saying that an Army officer was coming to interview people about "something to do with languages". To Stripp's surprise his interviewer seemed more interested in his proficiency in crosswords and his ability to read an orchestral score than "grit, gristle and leadership", so that at one point he wondered whether he was being conscripted for a military band. Things became only slightly clearer two months later when he was dispatched to Bedford with around 35 other recruits, mostly Oxbridge classicists, to take a crash course in written Japanese.

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Stripp arrived at Bletchley Park in the spring of 1944 and was set to work translating signals decoded via the Japanese Air Force code known as 6633, which had been broken before his arrival. Most came from Burma, and Stripp was "staggered" by the amount of useful information they contained. Even though the war was thousands of miles away, he became so involved that "it was almost a shock to leave the building at the end of a long shift and emerge into the humdrum Midland landscape with not an oriental face in sight".

Code 6633 would prove particularly important during the later stages of the campaign in Burma. In late 1944 codebreakers detected the pulling back of one of the Japanese air regiments, a crucial early hint that Japanese plans had changed and that they intended to fight from behind the Irrawaddy and not in front of it. This titbit of information influenced General Slim into replacing plans for a decisive battle on the plain in front of the river with a plan to strike at the nerve centre of Japanese operations at Meiktila to the south, a change of strategy that effectively won him the campaign.

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There is more. Stripp is one of those characters that helped win the war, but no longer exist in the modern UK. In the US now he would probably be under attack and threaten with indictment for intercepting enemy communications. Such is the change of attitude by liberals who want to make war against our side. The guy was a true hero who helped change the course of the war in the Burma theater.