Re: Word from Frances Wilbur

[Dennis <ixohoxi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    Thanks, Jim!!

> One  of the Purple
> messages told of changing all the keys on Purple around the
> Pacific. The new keys or rotors were going to be shipped out on a
> ship  marked as a HOSPITAL SHIP for security. We were between a
> rock and a hard  place. We did NOT want the Japanese to know we
> werre reading their messages.
>
>  Finally it was decided to ask one of our subs to sink the
> "Hospital Ship".  There was a huge fuss over that. The captain of
> the sub was court-martialed  publicly, but they put him in the
> witness program, was given another  identity, his family moved
> away, etc.

> [Answer: I know nothing about this.]

    In the Navy's official history of the US Navy submarine war in WWII,

    Morison, Samuel Eliot, *History of United States naval operations
in World War II* ( 1947),  D 773 M6.

it mentions that the US submarine *Queenfish* sank a lighted Japanese
hospital ship, for which the captain received a letter of reprimand.
Not surprisingly, there's no mention of the crypto angle.  Hermann
Wouk's novel *War and Remembrance* talks about this incident and says
that the hospital ship was actually carrying large quantities of war
stores, which were found in the water after the sinking. The novel gives
no sources for this.

Dennis