Message
When Nimitz, at CINCPAC headquarters in Hawaii, saw Kinkaid's plea for help he sent a message to Halsey, simply asking for the current location of Task Force 34, which due to a previous misunderstanding, was unclear:
Where is, repeat, where is Task Force Thirty Four?With the addition of metadata including routing and classification information, as well as the padding at the head and tail, the entire plaintext message to be encoded and transmitted to Halsey was:
TURKEY TROTS TO WATER GG FROM CINCPAC ACTION COM THIRD FLEET INFO COMINCH CTF SEVENTY-SEVEN X WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR RR THE WORLD WONDERS
U.S. Navy procedure called for the padding to be added to the start and end of the message, which, due to the common words and phrases often being used in those sections, were vulnerable to cryptanalysis. The words chosen for padding should have been obviously not part of the actual message, however Nimitz's enciphering clerk used a phrase that " popped into my head".
While decrypting and transcribing the message, Halsey's radio officer properly removed the leading phrase, but the trailing phrase looked appropriate and he seems to have thought it was intended and so left it in before passing it on to Halsey, who read it as
Where is, repeat, where is Task Force Thirty Four? The world wonders.The structure tagging (the 'RR's) should have made clear that the phrase was in fact padding. In all the ships and stations that received the message, only New Jersey's communicators failed to delete both padding phrases.
Read more about this topic: The World Wonders
Famous quotes containing the word message:
“For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
—Bible: New Testament, 1 Corinthians 1:18.
“I believe in Michael Angelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)