A Priceless Advantage: U.S. Navy Communications Intelligence and the Battles of Coral Sea, Midway, and the Aleutians

A Priceless Advantage: U.S. Navy Communications Intelligence and the Battles of Coral Sea, Midway, and the Aleutians documents how Navy codebreaking shaped three Pacific campaigns of 1942. Frederick D. Parker wrote it for the NSA's Center for Cryptologic History. It is Volume 5 of the agency's United States Cryptologic History, Series IV: World War II. The NSA first published it in 1993, revised it in a second edition in 2011, and reissued it in 2017 for the seventy-fifth anniversary of Midway.

Parker draws on surviving COMINT records held by NSA, the military services, and the National Archives. He shows how communications intelligence helped Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet. The report calls it a "priceless advantage" in the battles of Coral Sea and Midway. Parker also covers the Aleutians campaign, an episode he notes other historians have often left out, and describes one instance where COMINT was available to a task force commander but went unused.

Parker served in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1943-45 and 1950-52. He held a B.S. from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. He retired from NSA in 1984 after thirty-two years of service. Afterward he continued the work as a volunteer and reemployed annuitant at the Center for Cryptologic History, where he also wrote on Navy communications intelligence in the Pearl Harbor period.