Matt Beckdtt

Dad. Patriot.(not the trump kind) Proud Marine. I retweet, lots. Overly optimistic golfer. Aragorn.

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

84 years ago today, four Japanese aircraft carriers were burning in the Pacific because of a man who went to work in a smoking jacket and slippers.

Washington took his job, buried his name, and blocked his medal for 44 years.

This is the story of Joseph Rochefort, the codebreaker who saved Midway.

December 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor burns. Rochefort, head of a Navy codebreaking unit on Oahu, takes it personally. He tells a colleague that an intelligence officer has exactly one job: to tell his commander today what the enemy will do tomorrow. On December 7, he believes he failed at it.

He decides he will never fail at it again.

His unit is Station HYPO, hidden in a windowless basement at Pearl Harbor that his men call "the Dungeon." It is cold, damp, and lit like a morgue. Rochefort wears a smoking jacket over his uniform to fight the chill and slippers because the concrete floor wrecks his feet. He works 20 hour days, sleeps on a cot in the basement, and lives on coffee.

His team is just as strange. Brilliant misfit cryptanalysts like Joe Finnegan and Ham Wright, plus the surviving bandsmen of the battleship USS California, sunk on December 7. The musicians turn out to be naturals at running the IBM punch card machines. Sailors who played trombones in November are reconstructing an enemy cipher by March.

Their target: JN-25, the Imperial Japanese Navy's operational code. Tens of thousands of code groups, layered with additives, changed regularly. On a good day HYPO can read maybe 10 to 15 percent of any message. They rebuild the rest from fragments, traffic patterns, callsigns, and Rochefort's freakish memory. He had spent three years in Japan learning the language. He could hold months of intercepts in his head at once.

By May 1942, processing up to 140 decrypts a day, HYPO sees something enormous taking shape. Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor, is massing nearly 200 ships for one decisive battle. The target appears in the intercepts as two letters: AF.

Rochefort is certain AF is Midway Atoll.

Washington is certain he is wrong. The Navy's own codebreaking office, OP-20-G, argues for the South Pacific. Others fear Hawaii again, or even the West Coast. The Army wants planes held back to defend San Francisco. If Nimitz bets his last carriers on Midway and Rochefort is wrong, the Pacific is lost.

So HYPO sets one of the great traps in the history of intelligence.

The idea comes from staffer Jasper Holmes. The order goes to Midway by undersea cable, which the Japanese cannot tap: broadcast by radio, in plain language, that your water distillation plant has broken down.

Midway sends the fake distress call.

Two days later, HYPO decrypts a Japanese intelligence report to fleet commanders: AF is short of fresh water.

Two letters, confirmed. The argument is over.

Now Nimitz goes all in. The carrier Yorktown, mauled in the Coral Sea and given 90 days of repairs, is patched up in 72 hours and sent back out. Three American carriers slip northeast of Midway and wait at a spot on the map they name Point Luck.

On May 27, HYPO cracks the Japanese date and time cipher, the final piece. Nimitz's intelligence officer Edwin Layton, Rochefort's closest friend and partner, gives Nimitz a prediction of nearly insane precision: the Japanese carriers will be spotted on bearing 325 degrees, 175 miles from Midway, around 0600 on June 4.

On the morning of June 4, 1942, a PBY scout plane radios in the sighting. Nimitz turns to Layton and says: well, you were only five minutes, five degrees, and five miles out.

What follows are the most consequential ten minutes of the Pacific war. American dive bombers catch the Japanese carriers with fueled planes and stacked ordnance on their decks. By nightfall, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu, four of the six carriers that hit Pearl Harbor, are gone, along with thousands of men and the irreplaceable core of Japan's elite naval aviators. Six months after Pearl Harbor, Japan's advance across the Pacific is broken. It never recovers.

A basement full of misfits had handed the US Navy the greatest ambush in its history.

Then came the knives.

The same Washington officers who had called Midway wrong now claimed the credit. They whispered that Rochefort was difficult, an ex-enlisted man without the right pedigree. Nimitz recommended him for the Distinguished Service Medal. Washington killed it. Nimitz tried again. Killed again.

In October 1942, four months after the victory he made possible, Rochefort was pulled from HYPO. The man who outwitted Yamamoto spent much of the rest of the war commanding a floating dry dock in San Francisco Bay.

He never lobbied for himself, never wrote a self-serving memoir, and rarely spoke of it. He said his real reward came at Midway itself. He died in 1976, unknown to the public, medal denied.

His old shipmates refused to let it go. Layton and others fought the Navy bureaucracy for years with the declassified record. In 1985 the Navy relented, and on May 30, 1986, President Reagan presented the Distinguished Service Medal to Rochefort's children in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.

44 years late.

One man in slippers, in a basement, out-thought an empire and was punished for being right.

[Hidden History @HiddenHistoryYT]

Midway (2019) - Destroying the Akagi Scene

[Hidden History @HiddenHistoryYT]

82 years ago today, eight American sailors jumped onto a sinking Nazi submarine in the middle of the Atlantic.

What they pulled out of it changed the war. And the Navy buried the whole story for years.

First, you need to know that U-505 was already cursed. German sailors called her the unluckiest boat in the fleet. In October 1943, during a brutal British depth-charge attack, her own captain shot himself in the head in the control room, in front of his crew. He remains the only submarine commander in history known to have killed himself underwater in combat. His second-in-command calmly took over, rode out the attack, and sailed her home.

Eight months later, her luck ran out completely.

June 4, 1944. Two days before D-Day. Captain Daniel Gallery's hunter-killer group, built around the escort carrier USS Guadalcanal, had been stalking U-boats off West Africa. Gallery had an idea his superiors considered borderline insane: don't sink the next one. Capture it. No US Navy crew had boarded and taken an enemy warship on the high seas since 1815.

The destroyer escort USS Chatelain caught U-505 on sonar and fired a salvo of hedgehog bombs. The U-boat broke the surface 700 yards away. Gunfire raked the conning tower, wounding her captain. He gave the order to abandon ship.

The Germans rushed out so fast they botched the scuttling. The sub was flooding, but her engines were still running. She was circling the battle at six knots, empty, sinking, and very possibly rigged with demolition charges.

So Lt. Albert David and eight men from USS Pillsbury chased her down in a whaleboat, leaped aboard, and climbed down the hatch into a dark, flooding submarine that could explode or go under at any second. They shut the scuttling valves, disarmed the charges, and stopped the flooding.

Down there they found the prize: Enigma cipher machines and roughly 900 pounds of codebooks and charts. Current settings. The keys to the German navy's secret communications.

But here's the catch. The treasure was only valuable if Germany never found out. One leak and Berlin changes every code overnight.

So the Navy ran one of the great cover-ups of the war. The sub was towed 1,700 miles to Bermuda and given a fake American name: USS Nemo. Around 3,000 sailors were sworn to total silence. The 58 captured German crewmen vanished into a POW camp in rural Louisiana, hidden even from the Red Cross. Germany declared U-505 lost with all hands and notified the families. The dead men were alive in Louisiana, and their boat was working for the US Navy.

The secret held until the war ended.

Lt. David received the Medal of Honor, the only one awarded in the Atlantic Fleet in all of WWII.

And the submarine? In 1954, Chicagoans raised $250,000 to bring her home. She was towed across Lake Michigan and dragged through the streets of Chicago to the Museum of Science and Industry.

She's still sitting there right now. You can walk through her.

[Canada Hates Trump @AntiTrumpCanada]

MANY PEOPLE ARE SAYING THE LINE TO PISS ON HIS GRAVE WILL START IN CANADA. IT’LL BE TREMENDOUS, PROBABLY THE GREATEST LINE IN HISTORY. AND WE’LL BE EATING A LOT OF ASPARAGUS, THE FINEST ASPARAGUS, SO BIG, SO STRONG. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER. CHT 🇨🇦

[Nils Lofgren @nilslofgren]

Nils Lofgren - World Through Your Eyes https://t.co/ZEtLYYE5wI via @YouTube
inspired by @NiallHarbison @happydoggothai @rickygervais @azsweetheart013 and every animal rescue on earth, saving n healing our sacred animals. hope u hear this Niall…for every dog that ever lived 🔥🎶

[Jeff Roush @JeffRoushPoetry]

Ohio’s GOP has all sorts of complaints about Ohio. In none do they mention that their being in charge lines right up with it all. Their solution? Same play: keep shuffling their chairs of incompetence and corruption while this Titanic state keeps sinking.

https://t.co/FgTnkVDRRO

[Maura DragonHeart 🍀🇺🇸🇮🇪🇮🇹 🌛🌝🌜💙 @maura_resister]

"Pedolph" 👏👏

[James Li @5149jamesli]

I am proud that my representative, @RepSaraJacobs was one of only two members of Congress (with Ro Khanna), who voted to strip language that would hand over our national sovereignty to Israel.

To the rest of you, you just committed treason against the United States of America.

[War Times @wartirnes]

D-Day in Color: The Filthy Thirteen Prepare for Normandy 🇺🇸

U.S. paratroopers of the 101st Airborne prepare for the Normandy invasion with war paint, heavy gear, and final briefings before boarding their C-47 aircraft.

Featuring the legendary “Filthy Thirteen” of the 506th PIR, with their signature Mohawks, face paint, and fearless reputation before jumping into occupied France.

[Walk Among Heroes @walkamongheroes]

One of the last original Higgins boats from D-Day - plywood and steel - that’s what stood between those men and the beaches of Normandy. Can you imagine?

@WW2Facts @Normandy

#dday #normandy #heroes #neverforget #ww2history

[Matt Beckdtt @MBeckdtt]

If by 'weird' you mean perfect then yeah...

[js1512179 @js1512179]

@LPGA Is it me, or does she have really weird shaped legs?

[crunchyrugger @crunchyrugger]

having dinner at a hotel bar the other night struck up a conversation with a mid-level United Healthcare exec. he told me he puts over $300,000 a year on his company credit card just for entertaining clients. In case you’re wondering why you can’t afford health insurance

[LPGA @LPGA]

Gaby Lopez, class act 🙌

[Joseph Miscimarra 🇺🇸 @jmisci]

This week I came across the obituary of a photographer named David Plowden. I was unfamiliar with his work, but decided to browse his website after reading that he specialized in photos of trains and industry.

I’m not much of an art guy, but these photos are astonishing. (1/4)

[Arienne Childrey @Ari4Ohio]

As a trans candidate impacted in 2024, I applaud Rep. Tex Fischer for keeping his word.

HB 950 is a step forward on name disclosure rules. Not perfect, but real progress.

Democrats and Republicans who want fairness should support it.

https://t.co/HUqnXh73mH

[Power to the People ☭🕊 @ProudSocialist]

Thank you @RoKhanna for defending our country against this madness and corruption:

"Last I checked, Netanyahu doesn't have a seat on this committee.”

It is treasonous that the House Armed Services committee just voted to merge our military with Israel’s.

Rise up America!

[Rachel Coyle @RachelCoyleOhio]

https://t.co/7XDhGww5DZ

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

@KingLibertarian It’s showtime!

[Ossoff's Office @SenOssoff]

WATCH: Republicans again blocked Sen. Ossoff's amendment to prevent insurance companies from denying or delaying needed care.

“Instead of slush funds for criminals and corrupt ballrooms, let's do something useful. Let's ban insurance companies from denying or delaying medically necessary health care to Americans," Sen. Ossoff said.

[John Jackson @hissgoescobra]

Russia and the U.S. will play a hockey game on July 1st in Moscow. This is humiliating and disgraceful. Any U.S. hockey player that attends this barbaric sportswashing of Russian genocide should be canceled and shunned for life. Let’s start exposing them.