People: David Mead
AMERICA'S BEST-KEPT WAR SECRET
Who really ended World War II? As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Japan's surrender, we now know--at last--that one major hero was an obscure English professor who taught at MSU from 1948 until his retirement in 1981.
David Mead, of East Lansing, never fired a rifle, stormed a beach or dropped a bomb. Indeed, no one knew about him until two years ago, when the former Signal Corps officer decided to reveal his role in ending World War II. All David did was to crack the Japanese army code in April, 1943. That monumental breakthrough allowed the Allies to listen in on Japan's strategic plans, and hence counter every move with just the right countermove. 'Although I had no experience in cryptography,' Dave recounts, 'I had one of the cryptanalyst's essential traits--an infatuation with solving puzzles. My years of literary study may also have given me the illusion that solving enemy codes would be a life of romantic adventure.'
Buried under ceiling-high stacks of paper in Arlington Hall, VA, David took 10 months and forests of IBM printouts to crack the very intricate Japanese code. In 1945 he was awarded the Legion of Merit.
Why did he choose to come clean now? At first, he says, he kept quiet for security reasons. Then, he says, he felt people would not be interested in stories about a distant war. But, he explains, 'When I got to be 80, I said this is a story about World War II that nobody knows about. Nobody knows who broke this code. (Yet) it was a major accomplishment.'
So he wrote his memoirs for Crypotologia magazine and filled one of the major gaps in history. A graduate of Ohio State university, David is a native of Cadiz, OH. 'It's a small town in Eastern Ohio,' he says. 'Its claim to fame is that Clark Gable and General Custer were born there.' David, one might say by contrast, did 'give a damn' about ending a war on the winning side.
