Elliot Carlson‘s award-winning biography of Capt. Joe Rochefort is the first to be written about the officer who headed Station Hypo, the U.S. Navy's signals monitoring and cryptographic intelligence unit at Pearl Harbor, and who broke the Japanese Navy's code before the Battle of Midway. The book brings Rochefort to life as the irreverent, fiercely independent, and consequential officer that he was. Readers share his frustrations as he searches in vain for Yamamoto‘s fleet prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but share his joy when he succeeds in tracking the fleet in early 1942 and breaks the code that leads Rochefort 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 to change the course of the war. The author tells the story of how opponents in Washington forced Rochefort‘s removal from Station Hypo 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 codebreaking in mid-1941 as the officer in charge of Station Hypo. He traces Rochefort‘s career from his enlistment in 1918 to his posting in Washington as head of the Navy's codebreaking desk at age twenty-five, 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. “Carlson, a career journalist, demonstrates his skill at storytelling throughout the book. For example, the description of the weeks before Midway reads like a Tom Clancy novel. Carlson mastered pertinent archival sources in the creation of this biography. Naval documents, oral histories, published memoirs, and even interviews with participants contributed to a fully researched study that left few stones unturned. This is a lengthy study of 456 pages, not including front matter, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. Carlson’s biography of Joe Rochefort is well worth the investment for those interested in the Battle of Midway, cryptanalysis, and naval culture.”— H-Net.org   " Joe Rochefort's War is a story of a talented, sometimes abrasive, but always effective, officer battling the bureaucracy and unjustified criticism in a tradition-bound Navy. RAdm. Donald 'Mac' Showers, who worked with Rochefort in 1942, notes in his foreword to this book that it is 'an account that is long overdue.' (ix) Well told and well documented, Carlson's book has done a fine job."— Studies in Intelligence   “Carlson’s book serves as an important contribution to U.S. Navy history and heritage in addition to the history of U.S. intelligence.”— Communiqué   “Good intelligence wins battles and can even turn the scale in wars. Much of the writing about code breaking is too arcane to appeal to a wide readership but, just occasionally, one comes across a book which ties code breaking to the personalities involved, to bureaucratic politics and to the general course of a war. This is one such book…This well-written study is both gripping and moving; it makes an important and readable contribution to the history of the Pacific war.”— The Naval Review   “ Joe Rochefort’s War is a brilliant triumph, reflecting both the author’s astonishingly comprehensive research and his sympathetic but clear-eyed analysis…Carlson, in addition to his other virtues is a fine storyteller. Anyone interested in the Battle of Midway should want to know more about the obscured genius at its center. This superb biography delivers Rochefort in full—the achievements and the man.”— World War II   “…Fills a gap in the general knowledge about the career and fate of an enigma of World War II in the Pacific.”— The Daybook   “Elliott Carlson does an excellent job not only of leading us through Joe Rochefort’s life, but also giving us a feel for how the U.S. Navy operated in the interwar period, its organization, how things really got done, it’s politics, and the culture of the naval officer corps…Carlson is a journalist and this excellent biography has a journalistic flavor… Joe Rochefort’s War is a very good read, a well-researched and fascinating biography of one of the truly great cryptologic warriors of World War II.”— Cryptologia   “…Masterful book, likely to be Joe Rochefort’s definitive biography…The bo