Edwin Layton, intelligence, and the southwest assumption

Edwin Layton served as Kimmel's intelligence officer and later became a major member of Chester Nimitz's intelligence team alongside codebreaker Joseph Rochefort. Layton and Rochefort had studied Japanese together in Tokyo, and their later partnership helped turn restricted intelligence into operational estimates for Nimitz. The cited account says traffic analysis pointed toward Japanese submarines and perhaps a carrier division in the Marshall Islands, producing an expected threat from the southwest. This supports the argument that Kimmel concentrated scarce reconnaissance in the direction indicated by his intelligence, not in the northern sector from which the carrier force actually approached. Nimitz's view was that the fleet's presence in harbor may have spared lives, because an attempted interception by slow battleships against faster Japanese carriers could have ended with ships sunk beyond salvage at sea.