The world wonders " The world wonders " was a phrase used as security padding in an encrypted message sent from Admiral Chester Nimitz to Admiral William Halsey , Jr . on October 25 , 1944 during the Battle of Leyte Gulf . The words , intended to be without meaning , were added to hinder Japanese attempts at cryptanalysis , but were mistakenly included in the decoded message given to Halsey and interpreted by him as a harsh and sarcastic rebuke . As a consequence , Halsey dropped his pursuit of a Japanese carrier task force in a futile attempt to aid United States forces in the Battle off Samar . Background . On October 20 , 1944 , United States troops invaded the island of Leyte as part of a strategy aimed at isolating Japan from the countries it had occupied in South East Asia , and in particular depriving its forces and industry of vital oil supplies . The Imperial Japanese Navy ( IJN ) mobilized nearly all of its remaining major naval vessels in an attempt to defeat the Allied invasion . The Japanese intended to use ships commanded by Vice - Admiral Jisaburō Ozawa , " Northern Force " , to lure the main American covering forces away from Leyte , thus allowing the main IJN forces , " Southern Force " and " Center Force " , to attack the invasion force in a pincer movement . Northern Force would be built around several aircraft carriers , but these would have very few aircraft or trained aircrew , and was in reality little more than " bait " . Halsey , in command of the naval forces covering the invasion , fell for the ruse , and convinced that Northern Force constituted the main Japanese threat , proceeded northward in pursuit with the carriers of 3rd Fleet and a powerful force of battleships , designated Task Force 34 . This left the landing beaches covered only by a small group of escort carriers from the 7th Fleet . On the morning of the 25th a strong Japanese force of battleships slipped through the San Bernardino Strait headed toward the American landing forces , prompting their commander , Admiral Thomas C . Kinkaid , to send a desperate plaintext message asking for support . Message . When Nimitz , at CINCPAC headquarters in Hawaii , saw Kinkaid ' s plea for help he sent a message to Halsey , simply asking for the current location of Task Force 34 , which due to a previous misunderstanding , was unclear : With the addition of metadata including routing and classification information , as well as the padding at the head and tail , the entire plaintext message to be encoded and transmitted to Halsey was : U . S . Navy procedure called for the padding to be added to the start and end of the message , which were vulnerable to cryptanalysis due to the use of common phrases and words ( such as " Yours sincerely " ) in those sections . The words chosen for padding should have been obviously irrelevant to the actual message , however Nimitz ' s enciphering clerk used a phrase that " [ just ] popped into my head " . While decrypt ing and transcribing the message , Halsey ' s radio officer properly removed the leading phrase , but the trailing phrase looked appropriate and he seems to have thought it was intended and so left it in before passing it on to Halsey , who read it as The structure tagging ( the ' RR ' s ) should have made clear that the phrase was in fact padding . In all the ships and stations that received the message , only ' s communicators failed to delete both padding phrases . Consequences . The message ( and its trailing padding ) became famous , and created some ill feeling , since it appeared to be a harsh criticism by Nimitz of Halsey ' s decision to pursue the decoy carriers and leave the landings uncovered . " I was stunned as if I had been struck in the face " , Halsey later recalled . " The paper rattled in my hands , I snatched off my cap , threw it on the deck , and shouted something I am ashamed to remember " , letting out an anguished sob . RADM Robert Carney , Halsey ' s Chief of Staff ( who had argued strongly in favor of pursuing the carriers ) , witnessed Halsey ' s emotional outburst and reportedly grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him , shouting " Stop it ! What the hell ' s the matter with you ? Pull yourself together ! " Recognizing his failure , Halsey sulked in inactivity for a full hour while Taffy 3 was fighting for its life – falsely claiming to be refueling his ships – before eventually turning around with his two fastest battleships , three light cruisers and eight destroyers and heading back to Samar , too late to have any impact on the battle . The padding phrase may have been inspired by both a sense of history and a knowledge of poetry . The day the message was sent was the 90th anniversary of the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Battle of Balaclava . A famous poem about the charge was written by Tennyson , and contains the stanza :