By February 1942, the 74 men of Station Cast on the Philippineisland of Corregidor had becomesome of the most important sailors in the U.S. Navy. These radio operators, linguists, and cryptanalysts were eavesdropping on enemy radio transmissions and had made steady progress decipheringthe Japanese naval code. The U.S. military hoped this top-secretproject would soon give the United States advancenotice of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s plans.
Station Cast’s problem was its location. The Japanese had invaded the Philippines two months earlier and were pushing the American and Filipino defend- ers back toward a last-ditch stand on the Bataan peninsula on the island of Luzon. Corregidor, a small fortified island in Manila Bay, lay only two miles off Bataan. If Bataan fell, which seemed inevitable, Corregidorwould soon follow.
The navy couldn’t let Station Cast’s personnel fall into enemy hands. The Japanese knew what these men were doing and would torture them to learn American codebreaking secrets. If that happened, the enemy would change its codes, and that would force the navy to start the tedious, time-consuming process of figuring out the enemy ciphers from the beginning.
Evacuating the sailors posed monumental challenges. The Japanese had clamped a tight naval and air blockade on Bataan and Corregidor, making rescue by airplane or surface ship next to impossible. Submarines offered the only alternative, but they would have to dodge Japanese destroyers on the lookout for them.
The men of Station Cast knew this and the knowledge gnawed at them. They wondered if the navy could rescue them and worried that their superiors had something far more drastic and final in mind. They feared that, one way or another, they wouldn’t get out of Corregidor alive.
BY THE TIME the United States entered the war in December 1941, the U.S. Navy had made codebreaking a high priority. The Japanese relied heavily on radio signals to send information to their bases and warships
