Marching Orders

"Breaking the Japanese codes shortened the course of the war by two years." -General S. J. Chamberlin, General MacArthur's operations officer. Proclaimed "one of the most important books ever published on World War II," Marching Orders provides a stunning account of how the American military's breaking of the Japanese diplomatic Purple codes led to the defeat of Nazi Germany. Bruce Lee, having had access to more than one million pages of US Army documents and thousands of pages of daily top-secret messages dispatched to Tokyo from the Japanese embassy in Berlin, assembles fascinating revelations about pivotal moments in the war, including the reason Eisenhower stopped his army at the Elbe and let the Russians capture Berlin, the invasion of Europe, and the battles on the African and Eastern fronts. Magic and Ultra were the names of the Allied code-breaking efforts that unlocked the secrets of the Axis powers. One of the most extraordinary takeaways from these ingenious deciphering activities was the fact that Japanese leaders were intransigent in their refusal to surrender, which led to the strategic and fateful decision to drop the atomic bomb and force an end to the conflict in which thousands of lives would have been lost. This groundbreaking book clearly demonstrates how the success of the American code breakers led to so many favorable military and strategic outcomes for the Allies and hastened the end of this devastating war.