I found this to be a decently informative overview of the Allied code breaking effort on the Japanese codes, but I could not help feeling like something was missing. The book never came alive for me in the way that creative non-fiction books by writers such as Erik Larson, Steven Johnson, or Simon Winchester do. I felt like I was reading a school paper that went through everything that happened in order. Everything was there but it was inert. I also felt like the author's stated opinion that the Americans get too much credit for breaking these codes and the British too little informed his writing a little too much. There were points where it seemed like he had just told us the Americans had done all this great work and he would then say that the British really deserve credit for it. Odd. It was very interesting to read about these efforts, clearly much more ink has been spilled over the breaking of the ENIGMA machine code, and I think it is important to remember this story also. I'm just not sure this is the best book to do so. ( )

The Americans, English, Australians, and the Canadian codebreakers helped turn the tide in WWII in the Pacific against the Japanese. ( )

A good overview of the struggle to gain information behind the Japanese Empire approaching and during World War II. The book is filled with personal accounts which make it very personal. Thinking the Pacific War was mostly an American endeavor I learned more about the front in southeast Asia than I had ever been taught. The book does seem to follow a repetitive pattern which can be tedious; move, gather intelligence, crack a code (or almost), codes change, move or start all over. O, and bicker with the Americans.

The repetitive nature of the story is probably has more to do with the nature of the material; code cracking is a boring and repetitive task with lots of work for, what is often, very little. And cryptography uses abstract mathematical concepts most are quite without the background to understand. So those who know cryptography will probably be disappointed in the lack of detail, what detail does exists frustrates the rest. For the difficulty of the material I probably dock a star.

All in all I enjoyed the overview of the Pacific theater of the war and learning more about all the effort which was put into intelligence to bring it to a close. ( )

http://www.bagofspoons.net/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/Review/20060108emperorscodes.ht... ( )