The world wonders

Encryption cyphers can be defeated when easily guessed common patterns are recognized in the messages. Messages typically have common intros and salutations such as "Dear" and "Sincerely" which can lead to the defeat of the cypher. To remove common phrases from the start and the end, in WWII the US Navy would add unique non-relevant padding phrases separated from the main text by a word of two characters. The padding would be added before encoding and stripped after decoding. So a simple message like "Halsey: Come home. -CINPAC" might become the message "I love gibberish nn Halsey: Come home. - CINPAC rr exo zagrat a zpqtrec" during encrypted transmission.

Nimitz (left) and Halsey in 1943

On October 20, 1944, United States troops invaded the island of Leyte as part of a strategy aimed at isolating Japan from the resource-rich territory it had occupied in South East Asia, and in particular depriving its forces and industry of vital oil supplies. The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) mobilized nearly all of its remaining major naval vessels in an attempt to defeat the Allied invasion.[3][4] In the ensuing Battle of Leyte Gulf the Japanese intended to use ships commanded by Vice-Admiral Jisaburō Ozawa, "Northern Force", to lure the main American covering forces away from Leyte, thus allowing the main IJN forces, "Southern Force" and "Center Force", led by the 18-inch gunned super-battleship Yamato, the largest and most powerful ship afloat, to attack the invasion force in a pincer movement. Northern Force would be built around three expendable small light aircraft carriers, but these would have very few aircraft or trained aircrew, serving merely as "bait".[3][4][5]

Halsey, in command of the mobile naval forces covering the invasion's northern flank, fell for the ruse, and convinced that Northern Force constituted the main Japanese threat, proceeded northward in pursuit with the carriers of 3rd Fleet and a powerful force of battleships, designated Task Force 34. This left the landing beaches covered only by sixteen escort carriers with about 450 aircraft from the 7th Fleet. On the morning of the 25th a strong Japanese force of battleships slipped through the San Bernardino Strait headed toward the American landing forces,[6] prompting their commander, Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, to send a desperate plaintext message asking for support.[7]

When Nimitz, at CINCPAC headquarters in Hawaii, saw Kinkaid's plea for help he sent a message to Halsey, simply asking for the current location of Task Force 34, which due to a previous misunderstanding, was unclear:[6]

Where is, repeat, where is Task Force Thirty Four?

With the addition of metadata including routing and classification information, as well as the padding at the head and tail, the entire plaintext message to be encoded and transmitted to Halsey was:

TURKEY TROTS TO WATER GG FROM CINCPAC ACTION COM THIRD FLEET INFO COMINCH CTF SEVENTY-SEVEN X WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR RR THE WORLD WONDERS[8]

U.S. Navy procedure called for the padding to be added to the start and end of the message, which were vulnerable to cryptanalysis due to the use of common phrases and words (such as "Yours sincerely") in those sections.[9] The words chosen for padding should have been obviously irrelevant to the actual message, however Nimitz's enciphering clerk used a phrase that "[just] popped into my head".[10] Coincidentally, historians note that "The world wonders" is also present in Lord Tennyson's poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" about the eponymous battle against long odds fought the exact same day nearly 100 years earlier.[11]

While decrypting and transcribing the message, Halsey's radio officer properly removed the leading phrase, but the trailing phrase looked appropriate and he seems to have thought it was intended and so left it in before passing it on to Halsey,[1] who read it as:

Where is, repeat, where is Task Force Thirty Four? The world wonders.

The structure tagging (the 'RR's) should have made clear that the phrase was in fact padding. In all the ships and stations that received the message, only the decoder on Halsey's flagship, the New Jersey, failed to delete both padding phrases.[12]

The message (and its trailing padding) became infamous, and created some ill feeling, since it appeared to be a harsh criticism by Nimitz of Halsey's decision to pursue the decoy carriers and leave the landings uncovered. "I was stunned as if I had been struck in the face", Halsey later recalled. "The paper rattled in my hands, I snatched off my cap, threw it on the deck, and shouted something I am ashamed to remember", letting out an anguished sob.[13] RADM Robert Carney, Halsey's chief of staff (who had argued strongly in favor of pursuing the carriers), witnessed Halsey's emotional outburst and reportedly grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him, shouting, "Stop it! What the hell's the matter with you? Pull yourself together!" Recognizing his failure, Halsey sulked in inactivity for a full hour while Taffy 3 was fighting for its life—falsely claiming to be refueling his ships—before eventually turning around with his two fastest battleships, three light cruisers and eight destroyers and heading back to Samar, too late to have any impact on the battle.[14]

• Miller, Nathan (1982) [1977]. The U. S. Navy: an illustrated history. New York: Bonanza Books. pp. 366–71. ISBN 0-517-38597-X. OCLC 8493587.