Elliot Carlson has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators. The most-rated is Joe Rochefort's War.
Stanley Johnston's Blunder
Summary
In 1942 Stanley Johnston is embarked in the aircraft carrier USS Lexington during the Battle of the Coral Sea. In addition to recording the crew's doomed effort to save the ship, Johnston displays great heroism, earning the praise of the Lexington's senior officers. They even recommend him for a medal. Then his story darkens. On board the rescue ship Barnett, Johnston is assigned to a cabin where messages from the Pacific Fleet commander, Admiral Chester Nimitz, are routinely, and carelessly, circulated. One reveals the order of battle of Imperial Japanese Navy forces advancing on Midway Atoll. Carlson captures the outrage among US Navy brass when they read the 7 June 1942 Chicago Tribune front-page headline, "Navy Had Word of Jap Plan to Strike at Sea." Admirals note that the information in the Tribune article parallels almost precisely the highly secret material in Nimitz's dispatch. They fear Japanese commanders will discover the article, grasp that their code has been cracked, and quickly change it, thereby depriving the US Navy of a priceless military asset. Drawing on never-before-released testimony, Carlson takes listeners inside the grand jury room where jurors convened by the Roosevelt administration consider charges that Johnston violated the Espionage Act.
©2017 Elliot Carlson (P)2017 Tantor
Joe Rochefort's War
Summary
Elliot Carlson's biography of Captain Joe Rochefort is the first to be written of the officer who headed the U.S. Navy's decrypt unit at Pearl Harbor and broke the Japanese Navy's code before the Battle of Midway. Listeners will share Rochefort's frustrations as he searches in vain for Yamamoto's fleet prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and share his joy when he succeeds in tracking the fleet in early 1942 and breaks the code that leads him to believe Yamamoto's invasion target is Midway. His conclusions, bitterly opposed by some top navy brass, are credited with making the U.S. victory possible and helping change the course of the war. The author tells the story of how opponents in Washington forced Rochefort's removal from the decrypt unit at Pearl and denied him the Distinguished Service Medal recommended by Admiral Nimitz. In capturing the interplay of policy and personality and the role played by politics at the highest levels of the Navy, Carlson reveals a side of the intelligence community seldom seen by outsiders. For a full understanding of the man, Carlson examines Rochefort's love-hate relationship with cryptanalysis, his adventure-filled years in the 1930s as the right-hand man to the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Fleet, and his return to code-breaking in mid-1941 as the officer in charge of Station Hypo at Pearl Harbor. He traces Rochefort's career from his enlistment in 1918 to his posting in Washington as head of the Navy's code-breaking desk at age 25, and beyond. In many ways a reinterpretation of Rochefort, the book makes clear the key role his codebreaking played in the outcome of Midway and the legacy he left of reporting actionable intelligence directly to the fleet. An epilogue describes efforts waged by Rochefort's colleagues to obtain the medal denied him in 1942, a drive that finally paid off in 1986, when the medal was awarded posthumously.
©2011 Elliot Carlson (P)2012 Tantor