Frank Joseph - 13 Jan

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the message was lost. For want of a message, the battle was lost. For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

14th Century English Proverb

Because Turning Points is an alternative investigation of mankinds most controversial conflict, it is itself necessarily contestable. But in the decades following 1945, the Second World Wars most decisive events are still repeatedly assigned to major battles before Moscow and Stalingrad on the Eastern Front, the Normandy Invasion in the West, El Alamein in North Africa, and Midway Island in the Pacific Theater.

The Soviet capital was allegedly saved by a brutal Russian winter that fortuitously paralyzed Hitlers ill-equipped troops, and he was later defeated at the city named after his bolshevik nemesis, due to the dogged resistance of its Red Army defenders. Masses of men and materiel simply overwhelmed all German resistance in France from D-Day onward, after Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery had out-foxed the Afrika Korps in Egypt less than two years earlier. Near Midway Island, U.S. carrier-based dive-bombers dealt the Imperial Japanese Navy a blow from which it never recovered.

While this consensus reality given out to explain Allied victory is correct only in the most fundamental sense, it was so woefully incomplete, as to have been seriously misleading. For example, before Admiral Chichi Nagumos task force got under way to Midway Island, American cryptanalysts had thoroughly broken his military codes. Days prior to the engagement, Admiral Chester Nimitz was provided with the enemys time and place of arrival, complete order of battle, and numerical strength, including numbers and types of aircraft. The intercepts also showed how Nagumo had divided his ships into four, separate task groups too widely separated for mutual support.

By contrast, the Japanese were almost totally unaware of their opponent's true strength and dispositions, even after the battle began. Nimitz had all the information and time necessary to set up an ambush that rendered the Battle of Midway a foregone conclusion.

The crucial role played by his cryptanalysts was not generally acknowledged, however, until many years later, leading 20th Century historians to place too much emphasis on American heroics or Japanese bungling. Both, to be sure, were significant factors in the fleet confrontation, although the actual scale of their contributions to its outcome needs to be understood within the context of code-breaking, which was, after all, the single most important element available to whichever side possessed it.

More disclosures such as this one were going public around the turn of the present Century, as once-classified documents lost their top-secret clearance and aging veterans, whose life-long reputations were intimately bound to their Second World War experiences, passed away. Out of respect for Monty, the ultimate significance of Bletchley Park cryptanalysts at the battle that made him 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein was suppressed, even for some years after his death, in 1976.

Especially with the rapid expansion of the Internet, an already vast body of information composed of hitherto obscure, censured and otherwise unknown or forgotten material is growing into an ever-broadening treasure trove of knowledge available to everyone. The wealth of data thus emerging in an irrepressible flood is re-writing the past more radically than any historical revisionist could have previously imagined. Revealed is not only the critical performance of code-breaking in World War Two, but the numerous coincidences or twists of fate, just at the right (or wrong) moment and place, to turn the destiny of an entire global conflagration.

These subtle synchronicities, although mostly overshadowed by the larger events that make it into the textbooks, have been integral components of every war, as indicated by the well-known English proverb --- more than six hundred years old --- quoted above. It summarizes the importance of military logistics throughout the history of human warfare. An important thing to note is that these chains of causality are only seen in hindsight. Nobody ever lamented, upon seeing his unshod horse that the kingdom would eventually fall because of it. Yet, an observation at the core of this adage is a perennial truth that especially applies to and strangely illuminates the neglected, if decisive turning points of our civilizations most profoundly influential conflict.