THE PRAIRIE EDITOR: More Historical Facts You Probably Didn't Know

WINSTON CHURCHILL FIRST 
BECAME FAMOUS AS A JOURNALIST 
COVERING THE BOER WAR IN 
SOUTH AFRICA 
Only 25 years old, and recently retired as an officer in the
British army, young Winston had traveled had over the globe,
writing articles and books, but it was his exploits (including
capture and escape from the Boers) which made the young
aristocrat famous in his home country well before his first
election to Parliament --- and four decades before becoming 
his nation's wartime prime minister.

A CENTURY AGO, ARGENTINA HAD 
THE FIFTH LARGEST ECONOMY IN THE 
WORLD AND A VIBRANT DEMOCRACY; 
NOW IT’S 22ND, ITS BONDS ARE OFTEN 
IN DEFAULT, AND IS A POLITICAL MESS
It's perhaps the modern world's most notorious case (until 
Venezuela) of riches to rags. It is also a case study of what 
happens when the redistributionist economics genie is let loose.

GRAHAM GREENE’S COUSIN
Famed British novelist Graham Greene was a cousin of Robert
Louis Stevenson.

ALTHOUGH U.S. CRYPTOGRAPHERS 
BROKE THE JAPANESE “PURPLE” 
DIPLOMATIC CODE IN THE LATE 1930’S, 
THE VITAL MILITARY CODE WAS NOT 
BROKEN UNTIL 1942
The “breaking” of the Japanese “Purple” code by U.S.
cryptologists prior to the outbreak of World War II is well-known,
but unlike the similar “breaking” of the German secret “Enigma”
code by the British later, U.S. and Allied military intelligence
services had just a partial advantage in the Pacific because
“Purple” was only the diplomatic code. It had been decoded by
 the brilliant efforts led by Colonel William Friedman who along
with his wife  Elizabeth had been cryptographers even before World
War I. Friedman’s subsequent pioneering cryptological methods
had trained a whole generation of pre-war U.S. codebreakers,
including Captain Joseph Rochefort who had been assigned 
after Pearl Harbor to tackle the still unsolved Japanese naval
code. Captain Rochefort and his team did break this code in
early 1942, and their efforts assisted in the key U.S. victory at
Midway. As in the case of Enigma, the Allies successfully
kept their knowledge of the secret codes from the enemy. On
occasion this produced painful dilemmas for Allied leaders
because acting on information obtained from secret enemy
codes in certain circumstances would have given away the fact
that the codes had been broken. A notorious example of this
took place in 1941 when British intelligence learned from Engima
that the Germans believed that a Lisbon-to-London passenger
flight then in the air included a major Allied figure, perhaps
Winston Churchill, and that it would be shot down. The major
figure was actually famed English movie star Leslie Howard,
but to halt the flight would likely give away the fact that Enigma
had been broken by the Alllies. The Nazi Luftwaffe did
shoot down that plane , and Howard  perished. Although
Colonel Friedman was rightly honored and credited for his
remarkable codebreaking contributions, bureaucratic politics
prevented Captain Rochefort from any honors for his vital role
until after his death when the full story of his wartime activity
was revealed and published. and he received many high
honors posthumously. The different timetable for breaking the
two Japanese codes has also led to the mistaken belief by some
that President Franklin Roosevelt knew about the attack at Pearl
Harbor before it happened. U.S. intelligence did have messages
decoded from the diplomatic code, but they were carefully
worded to avoid mentioning the decision, time and place of any
attack.

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Copyright (c) 2017 by Barry Casselman. All rights reserved.