Tom Dyer was toast. Face unshaven, eyes bloodshot, hair shaggy, Dyer had worked and slept in the same uniform for days. As he finally blundered into the daylight, a fellow Navy officer blurted, “Now there goes a bird who should be sent to sea to get straightened out.”

What the officer didn’t know, recalled naval cryptologist W.J. Holmes, was that Dyer was part of a super-classified team — Station HYPO — that had just decoded the Japanese navy’s secret battle plans. That critical intelligence from HYPO helped win the Battle of Midway, arguably the most decisive naval action of World War II.