by Rear Admiral Robert A. Theobald
With corroborative forewords by Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, U.S.N., Ret., and Fleet Admiral William F. Halsey. U.S.N.
FOREWORDS
PART I: President Roosevelt Brings War to the United States
Chapter 1. Main Deduction: President Roosevelt Circumvents American Pacifism
Chapter 2. President Roosevelt's Progressive Moves Toward War
PART II: Magic Was for Washington and Manila But Not for Hawaii
Chapter 3. Magic
Chapter 4. Tokyo's Interest in the Exact Location of U.S. Vessels in Pearl Harbor
Chapter 5. Japanese Diplomatic Dispatches During November, 1941
Chapter 6. The Code Destruction Message
Chapter 7. The White House Conference of November 25, 1941
Chapter 8. The So-Called War Warning Message
Chapter 9. The Final Denial of Magic to the Hawaiian Commanders
PART III: Preservation of the Pearl Habor Secret
Chapter 10. The True Story Was Not for Public Knowledge
Chapter 11. The Winds Code and Its Execute
Chapter 12. The Eight Pearl Harbor Investigations
PART IV: Conclusion
Chapter 13. The Final Summation
APPENDIX
ADMIRAL KIMMEL'S
FOREWORD
REAR ADMIRAL THEOBALD's studies have caused him to conclude that we were unready at Pearl Harbor because President Roosevelt's plans required that no word be sent to alert the Fleet in Hawaii. He has produced a readable, concise, and convincing presentation of the evidence which supports his deductions regarding the President's plan and the details of its execution. In my philosophy I can find no reasons which justify the formulation and execution of such a plan. The individuals in high position in Washington who willfully refrained from alerting our forces at Pearl Harbor should never be excused.
The Commanders at Pearl Harbor were never informed of the text nor even given a summary of the American note delivered to the Japanese Ambassadors on November 26, 1941, which effectually ended the possibility of further negotiation and thus made the Pacific war inevitable. They were never informed that the United States had assured the British of armed support if the Japanese attacked the British. The existence of this assurance was divulged during the Congressional Investigation in 1946.
During some three months prior to the attack, several inconsequential Japanese intercepts were supplied to me, but a great number of vitally important messages which disclosed Japanese intentions were never supplied to the Commanders at Pearl Harbor, notably: the Tokyo- Honolulu dispatches regarding the exact location of ships berthed in Pearl Harbor; the Tokyo-Washington messages which emphasized a deadline date by which the Washington conference must reach a satisfactory agreement or "after that things are automatically going to happen."
No hint of vital intercepts received, decoded, and delivered to responsible officials in Washington on December 6 and December 7, 1941, was sent to the Navy and Army Commanders in the Hawaiian area.
Admiral Theobald was serving as Commander, Destroyers, Battle Force and was actually in the Port of Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked. He assisted me and was present when I gave my testimony before the Roberts Commission. He writes with the authority of personal knowledge concerning the proceedings of that Commission as well as the events that preceded the attack on the Fleet.
HUSBAND E. KIMMEL
Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy (Retired)
New London, Conn.
December, 1953
ADMIRAL HALSEY'S
FOREWORD
ADMIRAL THEOBALD's book digests and correlates the results of his painstaking research into a mass of documentary evidence. Whether or not you agree with any or all of his conclusions, his book is a "must" for every American who believes in fair play. Read it with an open mind and arrive at your own conclusions. I find in it an approach different from any I have previously seen to the disaster at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
At that time I was one of the three senior commanders of the Pacific Fleet, serving under Admiral Kimmel. I am sure he kept me informed of all the intelligence he possessed. Certainly I did not know then of any of the pertinent "Magic Messages." All our intelligence pointed to an attack by Japan against the Philippines or the southern areas in Malaya or the Dutch East Indies. While Pearl Harbor was considered and not ruled out, the mass of the evidence made available to us pointed in another direction. Had we known of Japan's minute and continued interest in the exact location and movement of our ships in Pearl Harbor, as indicated in the "Magic Messages," it is only logical that we would have concentrated our thought on meeting the practical certainty of an attack on Pearl Harbor. I am sure I would have protested the movement of my Task Force to Wake Island in late November and early December. I am also sure no protest would have been necessary; because if Kimmel had possessed this intelligence, he would not have ordered that movement.
I then had my flag in the Enterprise, one of the two carriers we had operating in the Pacific. The second was the Lexington, part of a Force under Rear Admiral Newton's command. The Saratoga, the third and only other carrier assigned to the Pacific Fleet, was on the West Coast of the United States, completing periodic overhaul and repair.
We were sadly deficient in long-distance scouting planes. The only Army planes available were B-18's. These planes were slow, shortlegged, and unfitted for overseas scouting. There were not sufficient PBY's-Navy scouting planes and good, old, slow, and cumbersome work horses-to run a continuous 36o' search without wearing out materiel and personnel. We were further handicapped by directives requiring the training of large quotas of personnel in these planes for service in the Atlantic. This, together with the transfer of the carrier Yorktown to the East Coast of the United States, was a tremendous drain on our already slim resources.
Nevertheless, had the "Magic Messages" been known to us, there can be no doubt that a 360" search would have been ordered and maintained to the breaking point of materiel and personnel. I have always considered Admiral Kimmel and General Short to be splendid officers who were thrown to the wolves as scapegoats for something over which they had no control. They had to work with what they were given, both in equipment and information. They are our outstanding military martyrs.
WILLLIAM F. HALSEY
Fleet Admiral, U.S. Navy
Fishers Island, N. Y.
September, 1953
AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
HAVING been present at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and having appeared with Admiral Husband E. Kimmel when that officer testified before the Roberts Commission*, the author has ever since sought a full understanding of the background that made that day possible. For many years, he gathered and pieced together the available evidence which appeared to shed light upon the Washington happenings concerned with that attack. These studies produced very definite conclusions regarding the manner in which our country's strategy had been shaped to entice the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, and the efforts that have since been made to keep these facts from the knowledge of the American People.
For over three years, the thirty-nine-volume set which comprises the Record of Proceedings of all the Pearl Harbor Investigations has been available to the author. Serious study of these volumes has caused many revisions of errors in detail, but it has served to divest the writer's mind of all doubt regarding the soundness of his basic conclusions.
It is firmly believed that those in Washington who knew the facts, decided from the first that considerations of patriotism and loyalty to their wartime Commander-in-Chief required that a veil of secrecy should be drawn about the President's handling of the situation which culminated in the Pearl Harbor attack.
While there was great justification for this secrecy during the continuance of the war, the reasons for it no longer exist. The war is finished. President Roosevelt and his administration are now history. Dictates of patriotism requiring secrecy regarding a line of national conduct in order to preserve it for possible future repetition do not apply in this case because, in this atomic age, facilitating an enemy's surprise attack, as a method of initiating a war, is unthinkable. Our Pearl Harbor losses would preclude that course of action in the future without consideration of the increased destructiveness of present and future weapons. Finally, loyalty to their late President in the matter of Pearl Harbor would be better served today, if his friends would discard their policy of secrecy in favor of full publicity.
Another consideration which today strongly favors a complete understanding of the whole Pearl Harbor story, is the thought of justice to the professional reputations of the Hawaiian Commanders, Admiral Kimmel and General Short - a justice which is long overdue.
Throughout the war, maintenance of the national morale at the highest possible level demanded complete public confidence in the President and his principal military advisers. During that time, the public could not be given cause to assign a tithe of blame for the Pearl Harbor attack to Washington. And so, dating from the report of the Roberts Commission, most of the responsibility for Pearl Harbor has been placed upon the two Hawaiian Commanders. This carefully executed plan which diverted all suspicion from Washington contributed its full measure to the successful conduct of the war.
The time has come when full publicity should be given to the Washington contribution to the Pearl Harbor attack, in order that the judgment of the American people may assign to Admiral Kimmel and General Short no more than their just and proper share of the responsibility for that tragic day.
Manifestly, many readers will be reluctant to agree with the main conclusions which have been reached in this study. In recognition of this fact, the normal sequence of deductive reasoning is discarded in favor of the order used in a legal presentation. The case is stated at the outset, and the evidence is then marshalled and discussed. The reader is thus enabled to weigh each fact, as it is presented, against the conclusions, which have been firmly implanted in the mind of the author by the summation of these facts.
The sole purpose of the subject matter contained herein is a searching for the truth, and it is hoped that the absence of any ulterior motive is apparent throughout. Comments of a critical character concerning the official actions of officers frequently intersperse the pages which follow. No criticism of the officer is intended. Those officers were obeying orders, under circumstances which were professionally most trying to them. Such comments are necessary to a full understanding of the discussion of the moment, however, but there is no intention to impugn the motives of any individual. Patriotism and loyalty were the wellsprings of those motives.
There is necessarily considerable recurrence of the same thought and argument in the development of the successive phases of this closely interwoven subject. Sometimes this has been unavoidable if the connected flow of a particular line of reasoning was to be maintained. At other times, the repetition was deliberately used for emphasis.
ROBERT A. THEOBALD
Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy (Retired)
Marblehead, Mass.
February, 1954
TRANSCRIPT OF THE
AUTHOR'S NAVAL CAREER
* Admiral Kimmel had asked
the author to act as his counsel before the Roberts Commission, but the Admiral
was not allowed counsel. Nevertheless, although his status before the Commission
was anomalous, the author did accompany the Admiral whenever the latter
testified before that body, and late on the first day of that testimony was
sworn as a witness. During the discussion connected with this swearing, the
following exchange occurred:
Justice Roberts: "So it is understood that you are not acting as counsel."
Admiral Theobald: "No, sir."
General McCoy: "The admiral is not on trial, of course."
Justice Roberts: "No, this is not a trial of the admiral, in any sense.
It has always been difficult to understand Justice Roberts' statement that
Admiral Kimmel was not on trial. The Commission came into being to investigate
the surprise attack upon the Fleet which he had commanded at the time, and it
was generally recognized that the result of the inquiry would be the severe
arraignments of Admiral Kimmel and General Short, which did constitute the
principal findings of the Commission; findings which were given wide publicity
at the earliest possible moment.
IN the spring of 1940, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France were conquered by Germany, and throughout the remainder of that year Great Britain's situation was so desperate that many expected her collapse early in the ensuing year. Fortunately, however, the Axis powers turned East in 1941 to conquer Greece and to attack Russia.
There is every reason to believe that when France was overcome President Roosevelt became convinced the United States must fight beside Great Britain, while the latter was still an active belligerent, or later sustain the fight alone, as the last democratic stronghold in a Nazi world. Never, however, had the country been less prepared for war, both psychologically and physically. Isolationism was a dominant philosophy throughout the land, and the armed forces were weak and consequently unready.
The United States not only had to become an active participant in democracy's fight as quickly as possible, but a people, completely united in support of the war effort, had to be brought into the arena. But, how could the country be made to fight? Only a cataclysmic happening could move Congress to enact a declaration of war; and that action would not guarantee that the nation's response would be the completely united support which victory has always demanded. This was the President's problem, and his solution was based upon the simple fact that, while it takes two to make a fight, either one may start it.
As the people of this country were so strongly opposed to war, one of the Axis powers must be forced to involve the United States, and in such a way as to arouse the American people to wholehearted belief in the necessity of fighting. This would require drastic action, and the decision was unquestionably a difficult one for the President to make.
In this connection, it should be remembered that Japan, Germany, and Italy signed the Tripartite Treaty on September 28, 1940, by which the tbree nations agreed to make common cause against any nation, not then a participant in the European war or the Sino-Japanese conflict, which attacked one of the signatories.
Thereafter, the fact that war with Japan meant war with Germany and Italy played an important part in President Roosevelt's diplomatic strategy. Throughout the approach to war and during the fighting, the primary U.S. objective was the defeat of Germany.
To implement the solution of his problem, the President: (1) instituted a successful campaign to correct the Nation's military unpreparedness; (2) offered Germany repeated provocations, by violations of neutrality and diplomatic usage; (3) applied ever-increasing diplomatic-economic pressure upon Japan, which reached its sustained climax on July 25, 1941, when the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands stopped their trade with Japan and subjected her to almost complete economic encirclement; (4) made mutual commitments with the British Prime Minister at Newfoundland in August, 1941, which promised mutual support in the event that the United States, Great Britain, or a third country not then at war were attacked by Japan in the Pacific; (5) terminated the Washington conference with the note of November 26, 1941, which gave Japan no choice but surrender or war; (6) retained a weak Pacific Fleet in Hawaiian waters, despite contrary naval advice, where it served only one diplomatic purpose, an invitation to a Japanese surprise attack; (7) furthered that surprise by causing the Hawaiian Commanders to be denied invaluable information from decoded Japanese dispatches concerning the rapid approach of the war and the strong probability that the attack would be directed at Pearl Harbor.
This denial of information was a vital feature of enticing a Japanese surprise attack upon Pearl Harbor. If Admiral Kimmel and General Short had been given the knowledge possessed by the Washington authorities, the Hawaiian Commands would have been alerted against an overseas attack. The Pacific Fleet would have kept the sea during the first days of December, 1941, until the issue of peace or war had been decided. With the highly effective Japanese espionage in Hawaii, this would have caused Tokyo to cancel the surprise attack.
The problem which faced Lincoln during March of 1861 was identical in principle — to unite the sentiment of the North behind the policy of compelling the seceded Southern states by force of arms to return to the Union. For a month after his inauguration, he made no move, and then South Carolina's insistent demands for the surrender of Fort Sumter gave him the answer to his problem. He refused to surrender the fort, and dispatched a fleet to reprovision it. South Carolina then fired the first shots of the Civil War. Pearl Harbor was President Roosevelt's Fort Sumter.
Diplomatically, President Roosevelt's strategy of forcing Japan to war by unremitting and ever-increasing diplomatic-economic pressure, and by simultaneously holding our Fleet in Hawaii as an invitation to a surprise attack, was a complete success. Militarily, our ship and personnel losses mark December 7, 1941 as the day of tragic defeat. One is forced to conclude that the anxiety to have Japan, beyond all possibility of dispute, commit the first act of war, caused the President and his civilian advisers to disregard the military advice which would somewhat have cushioned the blow. The President, before the event, probably envisaged a Panay incident [1] of somewhat larger proportions. Despite the fact that the attack laid the foundation for complete victory, a terrific price was paid, as the following account of the ship, plane, and personnel losses discloses.
The Japanese clearly intended that their entire surprise attack should be delivered against military objectives. The first waves of the attack were delivered against the airfields on the Island of Oahu-Army, Navy, and Marine Corps — to reduce the air-borne opposition as much as possible. The main attacks began 15 minutes after these preliminary attacks, and were primarily directed against the capital ships in Pearl Harbor. Damage inflicted upon smaller vessels was clearly the incidental consequence of the main operation. Very few planes dropped their bombs upon the city of Honolulu. Three planes did so in the late phases of the attack, but their last-minute changes of course indicated that this was done because those particular pilots did not care to encounter the severe anti-aircraft fire that was then bursting over their main target area.
In December, 1941, the capital ships of the Pacific Fleet numbered twelve: 9 Battleships; 3 Carriers. Of these, eight Battleships but none of the Carriers were present in Pearl Harbor at the time of the Japanese attack: the Battleship Colorado was in the Bremerton Navy Yard; the Carrier Enterprise was in a Task Force returning from Wake; the Lexington was in a Task Force ferrying planes to Midway; the Saratoga was on the West Coast, having just completed a Navy Yard overhaul.
The results of the Japanese air attacks upon the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, were as follows:
The Japanese attacks upon the various Oahu airfields resulted in the following U.S. plane losses: Navy 80; Army 97.
U.S. military personnel casualties were: Navy, including Marine Corps, 3077 officers and enlisted men killed, 876 wounded; Army, including the Army Air Corps, 226 officers and enlisted men killed, 396 wounded. Total: 4575.
The Japanese losses were 48 planes shot down and three midget submarines destroyed. These vessels displaced 45 tons and were of little, if any, military value.
NOTES:
DESPITE the many handicaps that bad to be overcome, the President's campaign for military preparedness was markedly successful during 1940 and 1941. His best ally was a Congress with a majority in each House anxious to wipe out the many years of inadequate appropriations for the military and naval establishments. On September 3, 1940, the United States obtained long-term leases to outlying bases in British territory, in exchange for 50 old destroyers. On September 16, the Selective Service Act became law. By the end of 1940, Congress had voted: an immediate increase of the Army to 1,000,000 enlisted men, with an eventual goal of 4,000,000; 50,000 planes for the Army Air Corps; 170,000 enlisted men for the Navy, and 34,000 for the Marines; 15,000 planes and 10,000 pilots for the Naval Air Force; and a naval building program which envisaged an eventual two-ocean navy and embraced 17 battleships, 14 heavy cruisers, 40 light cruisers, 197 destroyers and submarines.
Continuing his efforts, the President, on December 29, 1940, made a radio plea to the country for support for further large increases in the Army and Navy; and the budget submitted in January, 1941, recommended the then tremendous peacetime appropriation of $10,811,000,000 for the military and naval establishments. On April 10, 1941, the United States acquired defense rights in Greenland; and in July, 1941, with the consent of that government, American military forces occupied Iceland.
Germany's complacent acceptance of American violations of neutrality was a surprising feature of the European war, between June, 1940, and December, 1941. In fact, it was soon apparent that Germany did not intend to contribute to a break of diplomatic relations with the United States. American military intervention in Europe in World War I had proved decisive, and Hitler obviously was not courting a repetition in World War II.
The important American violations of neutrality during that period were: (1) shipments of considerable amounts of war material to Great Britain, commencing immediately after Dunkirk; (2) the acquiring of overseas bases in British territory, and in Greenland and Iceland; (3) the giving to Great Britain of 50 old destroyers, during a state of war between that country and Germany and Italy; (4) the President's broadcast warning to the Axis, December 29, 1940, that no Dictator could weaken American determination to help Great Britain; (5) the enactment of Lend-Lease, on March 11, 1941, and, thereafter, the extension of this unilateral wartime aid to the countries arrayed against the Axis-Great Britain, Russia, China, Greece, Holland, Norway, and Czechoslovakia; (6) the closing of the German and Italian consulates and the freezing of the assets of those countries in the United States by Executive Order, in answer to Axis attacks on American shipping; (7) the President's explanation to the world, in July, 1941, that the American occupation of Iceland was undertaken to forestall a possible seizure by Germany; (8) the announcement, also in July, 1941, that the United States Navy would keep the sea lanes open to Iceland and to all other advance garrisons, which meant a campaign against German submarines in the middle and western Atlantic [1]; (9) the President's public statement on September 11, 1941, that American naval vessels and planes would fire on Axis ships which entered waters vital to American interests.
President Roosevelt's progressive tightening of the diplomatic-economic pressure on Japan was most significant. On January 26, 1940, six months after its abrogation by the United States, the American-Japanese commercial treaty lapsed; and though 1940, successive restrictions stopped shipments of airplane fuel, scrap metal, and much-needed machinery and machine tools to Japan. On October 9, 1940, this country discontinued subsidies on wheat shipped to the Far East. During 1941, Anglo-American support caused the Dutch East Indies to refuse to be forced into Japan's economic empire. Early in 1941, Great Britain, The Netherlands, and the United States commenced to extend financial and military aid to China; and at the same time, the Anglo-Saxon countries began the recall of their citizens from the Far East.
On May 29, 1941, in retaliation for Japanese seizure of American gasoline in Haiphong, an Executive Order stopped export from the Philippines to Japan of raw materials essential to the prosecution of war. On July 25, in answer to Japan's seizure of French Indo-China, the United States, Great Britain, and The Netherlands, acting in concert, froze Japanese assets and stopped all trade with the offending country.
On Sunday, August 17, 1941, the day of his return from the Newfoundland meeting with Mr. Churchill, President Roosevelt held a conference with Ambassador Nomura, during which two State Department papers were read and discussed. Copies of these papers were given to the Japanese Ambassador for transmission to his government.
Both documents contained strongly worded passages, although they were mainly concerned with a summary of informal conversations between the Ambassador and the State Department during the preceding months, which had been interrupted when Japan occupied French Indo-China. Admiral Nomura was told that they were to be given the status of merely reference material. This permitted the President to express the American views in language which, in a formal note, could have precipitated an immediate crisis between the two countries.
One of the papers was an answer to proposals for a meeting between President Roosevelt and Prince Konoye, the Japanese Prime Minister, and for the resumption of the informal conversations in Washington. Its most significant extracts were as follows:
"The Acting Secretary of State ... pointed out that the government of the United States could only assume that the occupation by Japan of French Indo-China constituted notice to the United States that Japan had taken by forceful means a step preparatory to embarking on further movements of conquest in the South Pacific area. . . . The government of the United States accordingly had no alternative but to inform the Japanese Ambassador that, in the opinion of this government, the measures then taken by the Japanese Government had served to remove the basis for further conversations relative to a peaceful settlement in the Pacific area;
"It goes without saying that no proposals or suggestions affecting the rights and privileges of either the United States or Japan would he considered except as they might be in conformity with the basic principles to which the United States has long been committed;
"If ... a program based upon peaceable and constructive principles were to be adopted for the Pacific and if thereafter any of the countries or areas within the Pacific were menaced, the policy of aiding nations resisting aggression would continue to be followed by this government and this government would cooperate with other nations in extending assistance to any country threatened."
The other paper concluded with this warning:
"This government now finds it necessary to say to the government of Japan that if the Japanese Government takes any further steps in pursuance of a policy or program of military domination by force or threat of force of neighboring countries, the government of the United States will be compelled to take immediately any and all steps which it may deem necessary toward safe-guarding the legitimate rights and interests of the United States and American nationals and toward insuring the safety and security of the United States."
On September 3, 1941, the United States asked Japan to accept the following four principles as the basis for any further discussions: (1) respect for the territorial integrity and sovereignty of all nations; (2) non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations; (3) equality of opportunity in trade and economic matters; (4) status quo throughout the Pacific area.
Diplomatic exchanges during September accomplished nothing; and on October 2 the United States asked for clear-cut evidence that Japan intended to withdraw her troops from China and Indo-China. On October i6, Prince Konoye's Cabinet resigned, and two days later, that of General Tojo was installed. Washington immediately recognized that this change of Cabinets was a decided step toward war.
Japan had to break the economic encirclement to which she had been subjected since July 25 or abandon her plans to establish what she euphemistically characterized as the Asiatic Co-Prosperity Sphere. So, about the middle of November, Ambassador Extraordinary Kurusu joined Admiral Nomura, the accredited Japanese Ambassador, in Washington to negotiate a solution of U.S.-Japanese issues.
As a basis for the settlement of the differences, the Ambassadors proposed that: (1) the United States give Japan all the oil she needed, and release the frozen Japanese assets; (2) the United States cooperate with Japan to secure the goods and commodities from the Dutch East Indies, which the two nations needed; (3) Japan agree to withdraw troops from French Indo-China, "upon either the restoration of peace between Japan and China or the establishment of an equitable peace in the Pacific." In the meantime, Japan would withdraw troops from Southern Indo-China when the United States agreed to the foregoing proposals, provided the United States and Japan should mutually agree not to advance troops into Southeastern Asia and the South Pacific, except into that part of French Indo-China where the Japanese troops were then stationed.
Fifteen days after the United States, Great Britain, and The Netherlands stopped their trade with Japan as an answer to the latter's military occupation of French Indo-China, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill met at Newfoundland. The conference lasted from August 9 to 13, 1941.
The one official pronouncement concerning the conference was a joint statement, known as the Atlantic Declaration, which was released in Washington on August 14. This consisted of the enunciation of eight principles which set forth the lack of aggressive intentions on the part of the two counties, the postwar conditions which they deemed essential to a better world, and certain postwar actions which they considered should be taken against the aggressor nations following their defeat.
The Atlantic Declaration was an expression of lofty sentiments, which did nothing to further Anglo-American cooperation in the rapidly developing Pacific situation, which was the reason for the conference. The neutral character of the whole declaration is reflected in its preamble, which read, "The President of the United States and Prime Minister Churchill, representing His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom, being met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world."
No one, for a minute, can entertain the thought that president Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill made a twenty-five-hundred-mile round trip through a submarine-infested ocean, accompanied by high-ranking diplomatic, military, and naval advisers, to produce nothing more concrete than this neutral pronouncement. Fortunately, for the record, later events conclusively indicate that the two national leaders experienced a satisfactory meeting of their minds at Newfoundland, and that the understandings reached in their private talks constituted powerful support for their ensuing prewar diplomacy in Pacific matters.
The Prime Minister had undoubtedly hoped to lay the foundation for an Anglo-American alliance at the conference. He undoubtedly left Newfoundland fully cognizant of the strong isolationist sentiments in the United States, and with an appreciation that Japan's aggression must be counted upon to bring the United States into the war, despite the President's conviction that American participation was essential to ensure allied victory.
These facts and the complete understandings with which the two leaders parted are attested by the following passages in Mr. Churchill's speech to the House of Commons on January 27, 1942:
"We therefore have lain — I am putting it as bluntly as I can — for nearly two years under the threat of an attack by Japan with which we had no means of coping. But as time has passed, the mighty United States, under the leadership of President Roosevelt, from reasons of its own interest and safety but also out of chivalrous regard for the cause of freedom and democracy, has drawn ever closer to the confines of the struggle. And now that the blow has fallen, it does not fall upon us alone.
"...The probability since the Atlantic conference, at which I discussed these matters with Mr. Roosevelt, that the United States, even if not herself attacked, would come into the war in the Far East, and thus make final victory sure, seemed to allay some of the anxieties. The expectation has not been falsified by the events. It fortified our British decision to use our limited resources on the actual fighting fronts."
Two features of the foregoing quotations are worthy of particular attention. First, there is the statement that President Roosevelt's leadership brought the United States progressively closer to the war. Secondly, the Atlantic Conference provided Mr. Churchill with sufficiently strong assurances of U.S. military support in the Far East to enable him to base important wartime military decisions on those assurances. What stronger evidence can there be that President Roosevelt did make positive commitments at Newfoundland?
The following incidents offer further evidence that the conference produced mutual understandings:
On August 17, 1941, as we have just seen, President Roosevelt wasted no time upon his return to Washington in taking action calculated to agitate further the already strained U.S.-Japanese relations;
November 7, 1941, the President asked the Cabinet whether it thought the country would support active intervention by the Government on behalf of a nation subjected to further Japanese aggression in the Far East, and received the unanimous opinion that it would;
November 10, 1941, Prime Minister Churchill publicly announced in London that if war broke out between the United States and Japan, Great Britain would declare war upon Japan "within the hour" — a commitment he would never have made, with the tremendous war burdens his country was then supporting, unless he had his quid pro quo.
This close alignment of American and British diplomacy is conclusive proof that secret talks of the two leaders at Newfoundland produced an understanding so complete that it was an alliance in all but name. About December 5, when it was too late for American isolationism to affect the march of events, Great Britain received the assurances that converted this understanding into a military alliance.
This event became known as follows. Based on the assurances, the War Office in London, on December 6, sent the following order to Air Marshal Brooke Popham, the British Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Air Forces in Malaya:
"WE HAVE NOW RECEIVED ASSURANCES OF AMERICAN ARMED SUPPORT IN CASES AS FOLLOWS: (A) WE ABE OBLIGED TO EXECUTE OUR PLANS TO FORESTALL JAP LANDING ON ISTHMUS OF KRA OR TAKE ACTION IN REPLY TO NIPS INVASION ANY OTHER PART OF SIAM; (B) IF DUTCH INDIES ARE ATTACKED AND WE GO TO THEIR DEFENSE; (C) IF JAPS ATTACK US THE BRITISH. THEREFORE WITHOUT REFERENCE TO LONDON PUT PLAN IN ACTION if FIRST YOU HAVE GOOD INFO JAP EXPEDITION ADVANCING WITH THE APPARENT INTENTION OF LANDING IN KRA SECOND IF THE NIPS VIOLATE ANY PART OF THAILAND.
"IF NEI ARE ATTACKED PUT INTO OPERATION PLANS AGREED UPON BETWEEN BRITISH AND DUTCH."
This dispatch was quoted verbatim in a report of its receipt which the U.S. Naval Observer in Singapore made to Admiral Hart in Manila. Having no knowledge of the matter, the Admiral relayed the Singapore message to the Navy Department, with a request for instructions. The Pearl Harbor attack forestalled any Washington reply, and thereafter none was needed nor made. Consequently, nothing more concerning the incident has ever been made public. We do not know how the assurances were transmitted from Washington to London. We do not know what instructions, if any, were given to Admiral Stark and General Marshall. Certainly, none were ever sent to Admiral Hart.
This dispatch from the British War Office to the Commander-in-Chief in Singapore, sent before the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor, is definite proof that Anglo-American military cooperation was always an assured fact after the Newfoundland conference.
On November 26, 1941, Secretary Hull banded the Japanese Ambassadors the note which purported to set forth the American proposals for resolving the issues between the two countries. Shipped of its diplomatic verbiage and plainly stated, the note suggested that, in exchange for a new trade agreement and the unfreezing of each other's assets, Japan agree to: (1) the acceptance of complete defeat in the Sino-Japanese war, by the withdrawal of all her forces from China; (2) her tacit surrender to the economic encirclement, by a similar withdrawal from French Indo-China, whose inviolability would thereafter be respected; (3) her participation in a nonaggression treaty, whose practical effect would be to guarantee the following lands from attack: the Philippines, Siberia, the Dutch East Indies, China, Thai; (4) the abolition of the Japanese-created puppet governments in China and Manchukuo, by promising with the United States to support no government in China but that of Chiang Kai-shek; (5) the practical abrogation of Japanese obligations to Germany and Italy under the provisions of the Tripartite Treaty.
The details of the American note were reported to Tokyo in the Washington Embassy dispatch #1189 (see Chapter 5).
These American proposals were absolutely devoid of diplomatic finesse. A far more subtle note resisting the Japanese-suggested solution would have been equally effective in breaking off the negotiations. The only possible conclusion is that President Roosevelt wanted to be absolutely sure that Japan's answer would be a declaration of war. He used an iron-shod club instead of a diplomatic rapier to attain his purpose.
Everyone concerned recognized that this note put an end to the Kurusu-Nomura negotiations, and that war was inevitable. Secretary Hull at once informed the heads of the Army and Navy that diplomatic negotiations had failed, and that further action must be the responsibility of the Armed Forces. Tokyo, by secret dispatch, immediately told the Japanese Ambassadors that the American proposals were totally unsuited as a basis for further negotiations. On November 27, President Roosevelt talked to Mr. Churchill on the trans-Atlantic telephone, and the news must have been most welcome to the British Prime Minister, who had striven for so long to gain the United States as an active war ally.
President Roosevelt, by the note of November 26, definitely and deliberately brought war to the United States. He bad flung the gauntlet into Japan's face. The latter's attempt to break the encirclement had failed. She must now surrender or fight, and there was no question what her answer would be.
After all hope of a settlement had vanished, President Roosevelt sent a personal appeal to the Emperor, asking him to preserve peace. This arrived in Tokyo so late that Ambassador Grew was unable to deliver it before the Pearl Harbor attack. One can only conclude that this dispatch was sent solely for its possible effects in the pages of history.
The Pacific Fleet was retained in Hawaiian waters by order of President Roosevelt from April, 1940, until the Pearl Harbor attack.
Admiral J. 0. Richardson, Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet during 1940, visited Washington twice in the latter half of that year, to confer with the President and the officials of the State and Navy Departments. During these visits, he recommended that the Fleet be withdrawn to the West Coast because: (1) the ships were inadequately manned for war; (2) the Hawaiian area was too exposed for Fleet training during the existing international tension; (3) the Fleet defenses against both air and submarine attacks were far below the required standards of strength. In January, 1941, he was unexpectedly relieved of the Fleet command by Admiral Kimmel. See Appendix for amplification of (1) above.
In one of his talks with Admiral Richardson, President Roosevelt explained that the Fleet was being kept in the mid-Pacific because its presence there helped to deter Japanese aggression in the Far East. This statement must have been made to help the President surmount an embarrassing moment in the conversation, as he could not tell the Admiral the real reason for retaining the Fleet in Hawaii. Pearl Harbor is further from the Inland Sea-Formosa line than New York is from Gibraltar. The Fleet then based in Hawaiian waters was neither powerful enough nor in the necessary strategic position to exert any positive influence upon Japan's plans for Eastern Asia. That could only have been accomplished by basing an adequate naval force in the Philippines. And that Fleet could not possibly operate in the western Pacific because its train (tankers, supply vessels, etc.) was totally inadequate to sustain such operations at such a distance from a permanent major base — a fact that would not escape the trained Japanese espionage in Hawaii. Certainly, the Japanese did not hesitate to move into French Indo-China in July, 1941.
Furthermore, in March, 1941, the already inferior Pacific Fleet was further weakened by the detachment of three battleships, one aircraft carrier, four light cruisers, and eighteen destroyers for duty in the Atlantic; and in June, 1941, Washington gave serious consideration to the transfer of three additional battleships to the Atlantic. Such changes in Fleet dispositions, in those critical diplomatic days, would never have been made without the President's approval. With the effective Japanese espionage in Hawaii and in the Panama Canal Zone, changes in the strength of the Hawaiian forces and naval movements between the Pacific and the Atlantic were reported to Tokyo as soon as they happened. Consequently, the willingness to weaken the Pacific Fleet in the face of that well-known espionage, at a time when diplomatic pressure upon Japan should have been strongly maintained, is positive proof that President Roosevelt was not concerned with the Fleet's diplomatic effect upon Japan.
A passage in another of President Roosevelt's conversations with Admiral Richardson is most revealing. The Admiral asked whether or not the United States would declare war, if Japan should attack the Malay Peninsula, the Dutch East Indies, or Indo-China. The President replied that he was not sure that the United States would fight, even if the Philippines were attacked. Then, after a pause, he added that he was firmly convinced, however, that this country would be drawn into a Pacific war, because wars had a way of expanding, and, sooner or later, Japan would commit the act which would involve this country.
These remarks are worthy of careful scrutiny. If we would not fight for the Philippines, we certainly would not fight for Guam. The President, therefore, could foresee no Far Eastern action that would surely cause the United States to fight, and with the Asiatic eliminated, only two possible Pacific areas remained, Hawaii and the Panama Canal. It is important to note the clear proof, which we here have, that by October, 1940, President Roosevelt was firmly convinced that when Japan went to war, that country would soon commit an overt act against the United States, and it was his insistence that was keeping the Pacific Fleet in its exposed position in Hawaii.
As this chapter is concerned with President Roosevelt's moves toward war, we are here interested solely in the part which he played in the withholding of information from Admiral Kimmel and General Short. And that role would necessarily he confined to the formulation of the decision and its implementing orders to Admiral Stark and General Marshall.
In August, 1945, certain opinions of the Naval Court of Inquiry and the action of the Secretary of the Navy on those opinions were published. The Court criticized Admiral Stark's judgment because: he failed, during the critical period between November 26 and December 7, 1941, to transmit to Admiral Kimmel important information which he had regarding the Japanese situation; he did not immediately transmit, on December 7, the fact that a message bad been received which appeared to indicate that a break in diplomatic relations was imminent, and that an attack in the Hawaiian area might be expected soon.
The concluding paragraph of the action by the Secretary of the Navy on the Proceedings of the Court contained the following statement: "Admiral Harold R. Stark, USN (Retired), shall not hold any position in the United States Navy which requires the exercise of superior judgment."
The next day, at least one Washington, D. C. newspaper carried the Admiral's reply to these strictures. He said that his conscience was entirely clear, because all his official actions in the days before Pearl Harbor had been governed by orders from "higher authority." Admiral Stark repeated that statement, at least once, m private correspondence. During those days, President Roosevelt was the only naval authority higher in the chain of military command than Admiral Stark. [2]
It will be noted that the Admiral was replying to criticisms of his denial of information to Admiral Kimmel, the most arresting action of his administration in the period before Pearl Harbor. Therefore, when he said that everything that he did during that time was done on order of higher authority, his statement could only have meant that, for four months before the attack, invaluable information was denied the Pacific Fleet Commander by the direct order of President Roosevelt.
If such an order was issued to the Navy, a similar one must have been given to the Army. Such an order to only one of the military services would have been completely ineffective. And the evidence says that General Marshall was given a similar order. From early August to December 7, General Short received no more of the vital information known in Washington than did Admiral Kimmel.
There are only two possible explanations of the wholesale withholding of this information from the Hawaiian Commanders — either it was done by order of the President or it was the result of a decision jointly reached by General Marshall and Admiral Stark. The professional education, experience, and reputation of the two officers makes it unthinkable that either could reach such a decision on his own initiative, or agree to it unless he had no option in the matter.
Once again, we are face to face with the same fact — orders from President Roosevelt prevented practically all of the vital information concerning the developing Japanese situation from being transmitted to the Hawaiian Commanders.
And there are two other incidents which strongly support that deduction.
When the Washington negotiations were, in effect, terminated by the American note of November 26, it was necessary that some word be sent to the outlying commands. Failure to do this would have been too challenging a fact to the future reader of the history of these events. The President himself directed that this be done. Secretary Stimson emphasized that fact before the Army Pearl Harbor Board to explain his unnatural participation in the drafting of the War Department dispatch.
Normally, the preparation and sending of such a message would be a routine matter, entirely within the province of the military authorities, which would not receive even passing attention from either the President or the Secretary of War. The fact that the President considered it necessary to direct the Army and Navy to send the so-called war-warning messages of November 27 (see Chapter 8) is positive proof that he not only knew that vital information was being denied the Hawaiian Commanders, but that he expected that denial to continue unless he ordered otherwise.
The above incident emphasized President Roosevelt's actions on the evening of December 6, 1941. About 9:30 P.M., when he saw the 13 parts of the Japanese message received on that Saturday, he said to Mr. Harry Hopkins, "This means war." Later that same night, according to reasonably conclusive evidence, the President talked to Admiral Stark, after the latter had returned from the theatre. And yet, no message was sent to the Hawaiian Commanders on that night or during the next forenoon. The message, sent about noon on Sunday, was on General Marshall's initiative, and arrived too late, as we shall see.
Why, after the interest he bad taken in the sending of a message on November 26, did President Roosevelt do nothing on the night of December 6 to assure that Admiral Kimmel and General Short were informed of the receipt of the message which "meant war"? The only possible conclusion again is because he did not want those Commanders to be informed that the war was only hours away.
NOTES:
THE Japanese high-security communication systems were all enciphered codes. The Purple Code differed from the others in that it employed a machine to accomplish its enciphering and deciphering.
Washington broke this Purple Code so completely that not only was the code recovered and the cipher recognized as machine controlled, but the mechanics of the machine were also fully diagnosed. As a consequence, a number of Purple cipher machines were fabricated for use by American and British decrypting units.
In the use of an enciphered code, it is the universal practice to change the cipher periodically, usually once every twenty-four hours. A cipher schedule is communicated to the stations using the code, well in advance of the date upon which that schedule becomes effective. In the Purple machine, the key to each cipher was the setup of its internal mechanisms. The promptness with which the Japanese dispatches were decoded during the fall of 1941 clearly indicates that the American and British decrypting units were intercepting the transmissions of the cipher schedules.
The breaking of the Japanese diplomatic codes was a decrypting achievement of a high order. In recognition of that fact, the information obtained from the decoded Japanese dispatches was termed "Magic," and was so designated among its Washington recipients throughout 1941.
During the latter half of that year, the War and Navy Departments had identical organizations for the processing of Magic, and to avoid duplication of effort, the intercepted Japanese traffic was divided between the two Departments on a twenty-four hour basis. The Navy unit decoded and translated messages received on the odd-numbered days of the month, and the Army did the same for those received on the even-numbered days.
In the Navy Department, the task of decrypting and decoding was performed by the Communications Intelligence Unit, a subdivision of the Communications Security Division of the Office of Naval Communications. The short designation of the Security Division was OP-20-G, and that of the Intelligence Unit was OP-20-GY. The translation unit which completed the processing of the decoded traffic was designated OP-20-GZ.
The officer in charge of OP-20-GZ in late 1941 was Lieutenant Commander Kramer, whose duality of tasks in the handling of Magic made him subject to the orders of two superiors. In the work of translation, he was under the Head of Communications Security Division. When messages were ready for distribution, he made the deliveries under the direction of the Director of Naval Intelligence.
In the War Department, the decoding and translation were accomplished by the Signal Intelligence Service, under the control of the Signal Corps. Each processed message was delivered to the Far Eastern Section of the Military Intelligence Division, whose Chief, Colonel Bratton, made the deliveries for the War Department.
There were seven recipients of Magic on the Navy Department Distribution list, and six on that of the War Department. Fourteen finished copies of each message were prepared, and OP-20-GZ and the Signal Intelligence Service each supplied the other with seven copies of every message which it processed. The recipients were:
| Navy Department Distribution | War Department Distribution |
|---|---|
| President Roosevelt | Secretary Hull |
| Secretary Knox | Secretary Stimson |
| Admiral Stark | General Marshall |
| Rear Admiral Noyes | Brig. General Gerow |
| Rear Admiral Turner | Brig. General Miles |
| Captain Wilkinson | Colonel Bratton |
| Commander McCollum |
The War and Navy Departments employed identical methods to safeguard the deliveries of Magic. The messages were carried in locked pouches, to which only the recipient and the officer who made the deliveries had keys. One locked pouch was delivered to each recipient or his authorized representative. The usual practice was to leave the pouch on one delivery round, and to pick it up with its contained messages for return on the next. One copy of each message was filed, and all other copies were destroyed as quickly as possible. With only six recipients on its distribution list, the War Department could file a copy of every message at the moment of its receipt.
Colonel Bratton and Commander Kramer usually followed the same practice for the night distribution of important messages. The procedure was to deliver the locked pouch to the recipient at his home or wherever he might direct. Colonel Bratton, however, at times varied this procedure by delivering the pouches to officers on night duty in the respective offices of the several recipients, with the caution that the messages called for prompt delivery.
All the Japanese diplomatic and consular posts could receive high-frequency radio, but none was equipped to transmit. Consequently, most of the outgoing Tokyo diplomatic traffic was sent by radio, although the cables were also occasionally used. On the other hand, the messages to Tokyo had to be transmitted by commercial cable or radio, except in the rare instances when use was made of the trans-Pacific telephone.
During the latter half of 1941, the Japanese diplomatic traffic increased greatly. Fortunately, the Tokyo-Washington and the Tokyo-Berlin circuits covered the developing diplomatic situation very thoroughly, and the U.S. intelligence services concentrated on those circuits during that time, with such attention to other Japanese traffic as these priority restrictions made possible. The first of these two circuits covered the U.S.-Japanese negotiations and relations, while the second one gave information of the exchanges between Japan and her future Tripartite Treaty allies, Germany and Italy.
When the Purple machines became available in Washington, at least one was shipped to London. Two machines were retained by the Communications Intelligence Unit in the Navy Department, and two by the Signal Intelligence Service in the War Department. This permitted each of the Washington decrypting units to have one machine always set for the cipher of the current twenty-four hours, with the other at hand for use on the traffic of the preceding and other earlier such periods.
In April, 1941, the last machine available in the Navy Department was shipped to the Commandant of the Sixteenth Naval District in the Philippines; additional personnel, required to fill out a complete decrypting unit, accompanied the machine. The organization was established in the caves on Corregidor Island. The information contained in the outgoing Tokyo diplomatic messages was thus assured to the Commander-in-Chief of the Asiatic Fleet and the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Forces in the Philippines. There was no Purple machine for Hawaii.
Several thoughts immediately come to mind. First, when orders for the manufacture of these machines were placed in Washington, why did they not provide for two or three spares? If the thought of the spares had been overlooked, the later fabrication of an additional machine could not have been too lengthy a job. In any event, why not take care of American needs, including Hawaii, before giving any of these Purple machines to the British, who were not our allies at the time? There is one assured fact: these sell-evident solutions to the problem of providing one or more Purple machines for the Hawaiian Commanders are too obvious to have been overlooked when the decisions regarding the allocation of the machines were being made.
The distribution of Purple machines which was made meant that the Hawaiian Intelligence Units would never be able to decode any of the intercepted Japanese diplomatic traffic. The naval unit at Pearl Harbor could only continue to concentrate its efforts solely upon deductions that could be made from such features of Japanese naval radio traffic as ship's calls, volume of messages, and direction finder bearings of identified transmitting units.
The Joint Congressional Committee was told that the Manila area was chosen as the location of the last Purple machine available in the Navy Department because the Philippine stations were the most efficient in the Pacific in the receiving of Japanese radio messages. That was a fact as far as the Tokyo-Berlin circuit was concerned, but the explanation was a decidedly lame one. The Hawaiian reception of Japanese radio traffic was also eminently satisfactory, and the presence of the main U.S. Naval Forces in that area made it highly desirable militarily that the Magic, known to Washington and the Asiatic Commands, should also be available to the Hawaiian Commanders.
As we have seen, it would certainly have been possible to supply a Purple machine to Pearl Harbor by July at the latest, and to correct any existing decrypting deficiencies in the Radio Intelligence Unit at that Base by that time. Interception of the Japanese messages and their decryption in Hawaii would have been the complete answer to the reasons later given on the witness stand to explain why Magic was denied to Admiral Kimmel and General Short.
The two principal explanations of that denial by Army and Navy witnesses before the various investigations were: the great volume of the Japanese secret traffic; the possibility that the retransmission of Magic from Washington to Hawaii might inform the Japanese that their codes had been compromised, if they had similarly broken the American codes.
When the decision to locate the last Purple machine in the Philippines was reached, thought must have been given to the desirability, from a purely military standpoint, of making Magic available on the spot in Hawaii. The failure to accomplish this must therefore have been a deliberate act, and not an oversight. There was certainly no military consideration that would support a decision not to do so. The only possible conclusion is therefore that the failure to do so was part of a definite plan, which envisaged the denial of Magic to the Hawaiian Commanders and the assurance that this information would be available to the Asiatic Commanders.
Admiral Kimmel told the Joint Congressional Committee that, during July, 1941, he received the meanings of seven decoded Japanese dispatches, but that, after early August, the Navy Department sent him no word which adequately portrayed the growing tension between the United States and Japan, or suggested the possibility of Japanese action in the Hawaiian area in event of war. The timing of this silence is most significant. The diplomatic-economic encirclement of Japan had then been in effect less than three weeks. President Roosevelt returned from his Newfoundland conference with Mr. Churchill in the middle of August. Japan was soon to be forced by the United States to choose between war or surrender to the encirclement.
Despite the fact that Admiral Kimmel received the information from secret Japanese communications during July, 1941, the control of the dissemination of military intelligence from intercepted Japanese messages had been greatly tightened by both the War and Navy Departments during the early spring of that year.
This change in the War Department came into effect though the enunciation of a policy by General Marshall that the knowledge of the U.S. ability to decode the intercepted Japanese traffic was to be restricted to the least possible number of persons, and that no distribution of information from that source should be made outside Washington. If, at any time, the Director of War Plans considered that dissemination of such intelligence was necessary, he would prepare the required dispatch for General Marshall's action. Cognizance of this dissemination was thus restricted to the Army Chief of Staff and the Director of War Plans.
Parallel action in the Navy Department was the result of a conference between Admiral Stark, Rear Admirals Ingersoll and Turner and Captain Kirk, Director of Naval Intelligence, in April, 1941. Admiral Stark then decided that the Director of War Plans would thenceforth be charged with the responsibility for the dissemination of all information that involved the evaluation of Japanese intentions or that could influence the operations of the outlying commands. This decision was communicated to all the principal Assistants of the Chief of Naval Operations.
The elimination of one of the long-standing functions of the two Intelligence organizations in Washington, the dissemination of evaluated intelligence, was a unique happening.
If General Marshall and Admiral Stark were ordered, in mid-August, to stop the transmission of Magic to Hawaii, as Admiral Kimmel's testimony so strongly suggests, only two additional officers had to be informed — Brigadier General Gerow and Rear Admiral Turner.
The deliberate character of this denial is emphasized by the efforts which Admiral Kimmel made during the first half of 1941 to assure that the Navy Department would keep him fully informed on all matters that could affect the Fleet. During that time, he wrote two letters to Admiral Stark on the subject; one was dated February i8 and the other, May 26 The last paragraph of the second letter read: "It is suggested that it he made a cardinal principle that the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet, be immediately informed of all important developments as they occur and by the quickest available means.
Admiral Kimmel handed this letter to Admiral Stark personally during June, 1941, and was assured that the information to his command would be handled as he requested. This assurance was effective for less than two months.
The almost complete denial of information, during the three months preceding the Pearl Harbor attack, will be made very clear in the following chapters, which contain the most significant Japanese messages. Only One of the many messages which are not included herein was ever sent to Admiral Kimmel. In early December, a Japanese message from Bangkok to Tokyo concerning an intended Japanese landing at Khotu Baru in the Kra Peninsula was addressed to him for information.
This wholesale denial of information to Hawaii was contrary to the accepted tenets of the art of war. It is incomprehensible unless we accept that President Roosevelt wanted the Japanese surprise attack upon Pearl Harbor.
THROUGHOUT the first nine months of 1941, the Japanese Consulate in Honolulu, following the common practice of all such posts in American ports, had been reporting to Tokyo the movements of all U.S. naval units in the Hawaiian area. The interception of these routine reports had no significant value for U.S. Intelligence units. But Tokyo dispatch #83 of September 24, 1941, which is recorded below, completely changed the character of the Hawaiian Consulate reports, and removed them from the routine category. This message and the others which followed it on the Tokyo-Honolulu circuit held invaluable implications for the U.S. Army and Navy Intelligence Services.
As we are only interested in the information that was available to the Washington authorities before the pearl Harbor attack, the sequence of messages which follows contains only those which were decoded before that event.
When the War and Navy Departments Intelligence Divisions were weighing the implications of Tokyo's September 24 dispatch to the Honolulu Consulate, and more especially when they were reaching the only possible conclusions from that message, their minds must inevitably have reverted to a dispatch which had been received in Washington, eight months before. For that reason, that earlier communication is the logical introduction to the Tokyo-Honolulu traffic, which immediately follows it herein.
Ambassador Grew, Tokyo, to State Department, January 27, 1941:
"THE PERUVIAN MINISTER HAS INFORMED A MEMBER OF MY STAFF THAT HE HAS HEARD FROM MANY SOURCES, INCLUDING A JAPANESE SOURCE, THAT IN THE EVENT OF TROUBLE BREAKING OUT BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND JAPAN, THE JAPANESE INTENDED TO MAKE A SURPRISE ATTACK AGAINST PEARL HARBOR WITH ALL THEIR STRENGTH AND EMPLOYING ALL THEIR EQUIPMENT. THE PERUVIAN MINISTER CONSIDERS THE RUMORS FANTASTIC. NEVERTHELESS, HE CONSIDERED THEM OF SUFFICIENT IMPORTANCE TO CONVEY THE INFORMATION TO A MEMBER OF MY STAFF."
Tokyo to Consul General, Honolulu, September 24, 1941 (#83):
"HENCEFORTH, WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU MAKE REPORTS CONCERNING VESSELS ALONG THE FOLLOWING LINES IN SO FAR AS POSSIBLE:
"1. THE WATERS OF PEARL HARBOR ARE TO BE DIVIDED ROUGHLY INTO FIVE SUB-AREAS. WE HAVE NO OBJECTION TO YOUR ABBREVIATING AS MUCH AS YOU LIKE.
"AREA A. WATERS BETWEEN FORD ISLAND ANT) THE ARSENAL.
"AREA B. WATERS ADJACENT TO THE ISLAND SOUTH AND WEST OF FORD ISLAND. THIS AREA IS ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE ISLAND FROM AREA A.
"AREA C. EAST LOCH.
"AREA D. MIDDLE LOCH.
"AREA E. WEST LOCH AND THE COMMUNICATING WATER ROUTES.
"2. WITH REGARD TO WARSHIPS AND AIRCRAFT CARRIERS WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU REPORT ON THOSE AT ANCHOR, (THESE ARE NOT SO IMPORTANT) TIED UP AT WHARVES, BUOYS, AND IN DOCK. DESIGNATE TYPES AND CLASSES BRIEFLY. IF POSSIBLE, WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU MAKE MENTION OF THE FACT WHEN THERE ARE TWO OR MORE VESSELS ALONGSIDE THE SAME WHARF."
(Decoded in the War Department, October 9, 1941)
Consul General, Honolulu to Tokyo, September 29, 1941 (#178):
This message was in answer to Tokyo dispatch #83, and set up a two-letter code designation for each of the five prescribed Pearl Harbor areas.
(Decoded in the Navy Department, October 10, 1941)
Tokyo to Consul General, Honolulu, November 15, 1941 (#111):
"AS RELATIONS BETWEEN JAPAN AND THE UNITED STATES ARE MOST CRITICAL, MAKE YOUR 'SHIP IN HARBOR REPORT' IRREGULAR, BUT AT A BATE OF TWICE A WEEK. ALTHOUGH YOU ALREADY ARE NO DOUBT AWARE, PLEASE TAKE EXTRA CARE TO MAINTAIN SECRECY."
(Decoded in the Navy Department, December 3, 1941)
Consul General, Honolulu to Tokyo, November 18, 1941 (#222):
This was a lengthy report of U.S. vessels in the different Pearl Harbor areas.
(Decoded in the War Department, December 6, 1941)
Tokyo to Consul General, Honolulu, November 18, 1941 (#113):
"PLEASE REPORT ON THE FOLLOWING AREAS AS TO VESSELS ANCHORED THEREIN: AREA 'N,' PEARL HARBOR, MAMALA BAY (HONOLULU) AND THE AREAS ADJACENT THERETO. MAKE YOUR INVESTIGATIONS WITH GREAT SECRECY."
(Decoded in the War Department, December 5, 1941)
Tokyo to Consul General, Honolulu, November 20, 1941 (#111): [1]
"PLEASE INVESTIGATE COMPREHENSIBLY THE FLEET . . . BASES IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF THE HAWAIIAN MILITARY RESERVATION."
(Decoded in the War Department, December 4, 1941)
Tokyo to Consul General, Honolulu, November 29, 1941 (#122):
"WE HAVE BEEN RECEIVING REPORTS FROM YOU ON SHIP MOVEMENTS, BUT IN TILE FUTURE WILL YOU ALSO REPORT EVEN WHEN THERE ARE NO MOVEMENTS."
(Decoded in the Navy Department, December 5, 1941)
There is nothing more significant connected with the Japanese surprise attack than the foregoing decoded dispatches on the Tokyo-Honolulu circuit. They gave unmistakable evidence of the Japanese intentions to deliver such an attack upon the U.S. Fleet in Pearl Harbor.
Before September 24, the routine Honolulu ship movement reports merely served to keep Tokyo informed of the strength and composition of the U.S. Naval Forces in Hawaiian waters.
After that date, the Honolulu Consulate was making frequent reports giving the exact location of carriers, battleships, and cruisers in Pearl Harbor, and all naval movements in and out of that base. Why did Tokyo want information of this particular character? There was only one conceivable answer — to prepare the detailed plan for a surprise attack on the major units of the Fleet moored there. And the landlocked character of Pearl Harbor made only one form of attack possible — it must be delivered from the air.
After studying Tokyo dispatch #83, no military intelligence organization could fail to reach that deduction. No amount of thought can evolve any other rational purpose behind Tokyo's desire for continuing information, detailing the berthings in Pearl Harbor.
In this connection, it must be appreciated that, when a fleet moves into an area, a permanent berthing plan is prepared for each of the main bases in that area. Each vessel thus has a regularly assigned berth, which is vacant whenever she is absent. The only time that a ship in Pearl Harbor did not occupy her own berth was when she was in dry-dock or at a wharf at the Navy Yard. Consequently, the first Honolulu report of ship locations in Pearl Harbor gave Tokyo the permanent berthing plan — a fact which succeeding reports quickly confirmed.
Throughout November, Tokyo's interest in Pearl Harbor not only continued, it definitely intensified. On the 15th, Honolulu was told to step up the frequency of its "Ship in Harbor reports" to two a week. On the 29th, the dispatch told that Tokyo had been receiving a series of ship movement reports from Honolulu, but directed that thenceforth reports be made even when there were no movements. Secrecy is stressed in several of the messages. November 29 was the "deadline date," so frequently mentioned in the Japanese dispatches in the next chapter, where its significance is discussed.
These highly important November dispatches were not decoded in Washington until December 4 and 5. Nevertheless, that still gave plenty of time to relay the significant revelations of this full set of Tokyo-Honolulu dispatches to the Hawaiian Commanders.
Not the slightest hint of all this was given to Admiral Kimmel or General Short. Why was such irrefutable evidence of the coming attack so withheld? Why did Washington contribute so completely to the surprise feature of that attack? There can be only one answer — because President Roosevelt wanted it that way!
NOTES:
THE intercepted Japanese traffic, especially that on the Tokyo-Washington circuit, was particularly heavy during November, 1941. The Kurusu-Nomura negotiations were in large measure responsible for this, although other aspects of the developing Pacific crisis also played their part. Fortunately, only a reasonably small percentage of the Japanese intercepts was really significant, and thus necessary to a full understanding of the final happenings on the road to war. The dispatches which follow indicate the mounting tenseness of Tokyo's attitude toward the Washington negotiations, and the obvious certainty with which the Japanese moved toward theft secret attack after the receipt of the U.S. note of November 26.
On November 3, 1941, Ambassador Grew in Tokyo sent a seven-part message to the State Department. Certain passages of that message form an ideal introduction to this chapter, and are quoted herewith:
"NICHI NICHI (TOKYO'S LEADING NEWSPAPER) OF NOVEMBER 1ST CARRIED A BANNER HEADLINE EMPIRE FACING GREATEST CRISIS OVER AN ARTICLE ON NEED FOR PUTTING A STOP TO ECONOMIC WAR BETWEEN UNITED STATES AND JAPAN. ARTICLE AND EDITORIAL (TELEGRAPHED TO WASHINGTON ON NOVEMBER 1) REFLECTS ATTITUDE NOW PREVAILING IN THIS COUNTRY;
"THE VIEW THAT WAR IN THE FAR EAST CAN BE AVOIDED BY CONTINUATION OF TRADE EMBARGO . . . IS NOT SUPPORTED BY WHAT HAS OCCURRED;
"JAPAN WILL EVEN RISK NATIONAL HARI KARI RATHER THAN CEDE TO FOREIGN PRESSURE;
"THE PRIMARY POINT FOR DECISION WOULD APPEAR TO INVOLVE THE QUESTION AS TO WHETHER OUR NATIONAL NEEDS, POLICIES, AND OBJECTIVES JUSTIFY WAR WITH JAPAN IN THE EVENT THAT DIPLOMACY . . SHOULD FAIL;
"MY PURPOSE IS ONLY TO ASSURE AGAINST MY COUNTRY GETTING INTO WAR WITH JAPAN THROUGH ANY POSSIBLE MISCONCEPTION OF THE CAPACITY OF JAPAN TO RUSH HEAD-LONG INTO A SUICIDAL CONFLICT WITH THE UNITED STATES."
Tokyo to Embassy, Washington, November 5, 1941 (#736):
"BECAUSE OF VARIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES, IT IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY THAT ALL ARRANGEMENTS FOR THE SIGNING OF THIS AGREEMENT BE COMPLETED BY THE 25TH OF THIS MONTH. I REALIZE THAT THIS IS A DIFFICULT ORDER, BUT UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES IT IS AN UNAVOIDABLE ONE. PLEASE UNDERSTAND THIS THOROUGHLY AND TACKLE THE PROBLEM OF SAVING THE JAPANESE-UNITED STATES RELATIONS FROM FALLING INTO A CHAOTIC CONDITION. DO SO WITH GREAT DETERMINATION AND WITH UNSTINTED EFFORT, I BEG YOU."
(Decoded in the Navy Department, November 5, 1941)
Tokyo to Embassy, Washington, November 11, 1941 (#762):
"JUDGING FROM TILE PROGRESS OF THE CONVERSATIONS, THERE SEEM TO BE INDICATIONS THAT THE UNITED STATES IS STILL NOT FULLY AWARE OF THE EXCEEDING CRITICALNESS OF THE SITUATION. THE FACT REMAINS THAT THE DATE SET FORTH IN MY MESSAGE #736 IS ABSOLUTELY IMMOVABLE UNDER PRESENT CONDITIONS. IT IS A DEFINITE DEADLINE AND THEREFORE IT IS ESSENTIAL THAT A SETTLEMENT BE REACHED BY ABOUT THAT TIME. THE SESSION OF PARLIAMENT OPENS ON THE 15TH. . . . THE GOVERNMENT MUST HAVE A CLEAR PICTURE OF THINGS TO COME IN PRESENTING ITS CASE AT THE SESSION. YOU CAN SEE, THEREFORE, THAT THE SITUATION IS NEARING A CLIMAX, AND THE TIME IS INDEED GETTING SHORT."
(Decoded in the Navy Department, November 12, 1941)
Tokyo to Consul General, Hong Kong, November 14, 1941:
"SHOULD THE (WASHINGTON) NEGOTIATIONS COLLAPSE, THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATION IN WHICH THE EMPIRE WILL FIND HERSELF WILL BE ONE OF TREMENDOUS CRISIS. ACCOMPANYING THIS, THE EMPIRE S FOREIGN POLICY AS IT HAS BEEN DECIDED BY THE CABINET, INSOFAR AS IT PERTAINS TO CHINA IS:
"(A) WE WILL COMPLETELY DESTROY BRITISH AN]) AMERICAN POWER IN CHINA.
"(B) WE WILL TAKE OVER ALL ENEMY CONCESSIONS AND ENEMY IMPORTANT RIGHTS AND INTERESTS (CUSTOMS AND MINERALS, ETC.) IN CHINA.
"(C) WE WILL TAKE OVER ALL RIGHTS AND INTERESTS OWNED BY ENEMY POWERS, EVEN THOUGH THEY MIGHT HAVE CONNECTIONS WITH THE NEW CHINESE GOVERNMENT, SHOULD IT BECOME NECESSARY."
(Decoded in the Navy Department, November 26, 1941)
Tokyo to Embassy, Washington, November 15, 1941 (#775):
". . . WHATEVER THE CASE MAY BE, THE FACT REMAINS THAT THE DATE SET IN MY MESSAGE #736 IS AN ABSOLUTELY IMMOVABLE ONE. PLEASE, THEREFORE, MAKE THE UNITED STATES SEE THE LIGHT, SO AS TO MAKE POSSIBLE THE SIGNING OF THE AGREEMENT BY THAT DATE."
(Decoded in the Navy Department, November 15, 1941)
Tokyo to Kurusu, Washington, November 16, 1941:
"FOR YOUR HONOR'S INFORMATION.
"1. I HAVE READ YOUR #1090 AND YOU MAY BE SURE THAT YOU HAVE ALL MY GRATITUDE FOR THE EFFORTS YOU HAVE PUT FORTH, BUT THE FATE OF OUR EMPIRE HANGS BY A SLENDER THREAD OF A FEW DAYS, SO PLEASE FIGHT HARDER THAN YOU EVER DID BEFORE.
"2. ...IN YOUR OPINION WE OUGHT TO WAIT AND SEE WHAT TURN THE WAR TAXES AND REMAIN PATIENT. HOWEVER, I AM AWFULLY SORRY TO SAY THAT THE SITUATION RENDERS THIS OUT OF THE QUESTION. I SET THE DEADLINE FOR THE SOLUTION OF THESE NEGOTIATIONS IN MY #736 AND THERE WILL BE NO CHANGE. PLEASE TRY TO UNDERSTAND THAT. YOU SEE HOW SHORT THE TIME Is; THEREFORE, DO NOT ALLOW THE UNITED STATES TO SIDETRACK US AND DELAY THE NEGOTIATIONS ANY FURTHER. PRESS THEM FOR A SOLUTION ON THE BASIS OF OUR PROPOSALS AM) DO YOUR BEST TO BRING ABOUT AN IMMEDIATE SOLUTION."
(Decoded in the Navy Department, November 17, 1941)
Tokyo to Embassy, Washington, November 22, 1941 (#812):
"IT IS AWFULLY HARD FOR US TO CONSIDER CHANCING THE DATE WE SET IN MY #736. YOU KNOW THIS, HOWEVER, I KNOW YOU ARE WORKING HARD. STICK TO OUR FIXED POLICY AND DO YOUR BEST. SPARE NO EFFORTS AND TRY TO BRING ABOUT THE SOLUTION WE DESIRE. THERE ARE REASONS BEYOND YOUR ABILITY TO GUESS WHY WE WANTED TO SETTLE THE JAPANESE-AMERICAN RELATIONS BY THE 25TH, BUT IF WITHIN THE NEXT THREE OR FOUR DAYS YOU CAN FINISH YOUR CONVERSATIONS WITH THE AMERICANS, IF THE SIGNING CAN BE COMPLETED BY THE 29TH, LET ME WRITE IT OUT FOR YOU-TWENTY-NINTH; IF THE PERTINENT NOTES CAN BE EXCHANGED; IF WE CAN GET AN UNDERSTANDING WITH GREAT BRITAIN AND THE NETHERLANDS; AM) IN SHORT, IF EVERYTHING CAN BE FINISHED, WE HAVE DECIDED TO WAIT UNTIL THAT DATE. THIS TIME WE MEAN IT, THAT THE DEADLINE ABSOLUTELY CANNOT BE CHANGED. AFTER THAT, THINGS ARE AUTOMATICALLY GOING TO HAPPEN. PLEASE TAKE THIS INTO YOUR CAREFUL CONSIDERATION AND WORK HARDER THAN YOU EVER HAVE BEFORE. THIS, FOR THE PRESENT, IS FOR THE INFORMATION OF YOU TWO AMBASSADORS ALONE."
(Decoded in the Navy Department, November 22, 1941)
Tokyo to Embassy, Washington, November 24, 1941 (#823):
"THE TIME SET IN MY MESSAGE #812 IS IN TOKYO TIME."
(Decoded in the Navy Department, November 24, 1941)
Embassy, Washington to Tokyo, November 26, 1941 (#1180):
". . . OUR FAILURE AND HUMILIATION ARE COMPLETE. . WE MIGHT PROPOSE, FIRST, THAT PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT WIRE YOU (the Emperor) THAT FOR THE SAKE OF POSTERITY HE HOPES THAT JAPAN AND THE UNITED STATES WILL COOPERATE FOR THE MAINTENANCE OF PEACE IN THE PACIFIC."
(Decoded in the Navy Department, November 28, 1941)
Embassy, Washington to Tokyo, November 26, 1941 (#1189):
"AT 4:45 ON THE AFTERNOON OF THE 26TH, I AND AMBASSADOR KURUSU MET WITH SECRETARY HULL AND WE TALKED FOR TWO HOURS.
"HULL SAID . . . I AM SORRY TO TELL YOU THAT WE CANNOT AGREE TO IT (Japan's treaty proposal of November 20). WE FEEL COMPELLED TO PROPOSE A PLAN RECONCILING THE POINTS OF DIFFERENCE BETWEEN OUR PROPOSAL OF JUNE 21ST AND YOURS OF SEPTEMBER 25TH. SO SAYING HE PRESENTED US THE FOLLOWING PROPOSALS:
"A. ONE WHICH SEEKS OUR RECOGNITION OF HIS SO-CALLED 'FOUR PRINCIPLES.'
"B. (1) THE CONCLUSION OF A MUTUAL NON-AGGRESSION TREATY BETWEEN TOKYO, WASHINGTON, MOSCOW, THE NETHERLANDS, CHUNGKING, AND BANGKOK.
"(2) AGREEMENT BETWEEN JAPAN, THE UNITED STATES, ENGLAND, THE NETHERLANDS, CHINA, THAI ON THE INVIOLABILITY OF FRENCH INDO-CHINA AND EQUALITY OF ECONOMIC TREATMENT IN FRENCH INDO-CHINA.
"(3) THE COMPLETE EVACUATION OF JAPANESE FORCES FROM CHINA AND ALL FRENCH INDO-CHINA.
"(4) JAPAN AND THE UNITED STATES BOTH DEFINITELY PROMISE TO SUPPORT NO REGIME IN CHINA BUT THAT OF CHIANG KAI-SHEK.
"(5) THE ABOLITION OF EXTRA-TERRITORIALITY AND CONCESSIONS IN CHINA.
"(6) THE CONCLUSION OF A RECIPROCAL TRADE TREATY BETWEEN JAPAN AND THE UNITED STATES ON THE BASIS OF THE MOST FAVORED NATION TREATMENT.
"(7) THE MUTUAL RESCINDING OF JAPANESE AND AMERICAN FREEZING ORDERS.
"(8) STABILIZATION OF YEN-DOLLAR EXCHANGE.
"(9) NO MATTER WHAT SORT OF TREATIES EITHER JAPAN OR THE UNITED STATES HAS CONTRACTED WITH THIRD COUNTRIES, THEY BOTH DEFINITELY PROMISE THAT THESE TREATIES WILL NOT BE INTERPRETED AS HOSTILE TO THE OBJECTIVES OF THIS TREATY OR TO THE MAINTENANCE OF PEACE IN THE PACIFIC. (THIS IS, OF COURSE, SUPPOSED TO EMASCULATE THE THREE-POWER PACT.)"
The last paragraph is omitted here. It contained nothing but an account of the Ambassador's arguments and the Statement that the Envoys were dumbfounded by the U.S. proposals, a fact which can hardly be classed as news.
(Decoded in the War Department, November 28, 1941)
Tokyo to Embassy, Washington, November 28, 1941 (#844):
"WELL, YOU TWO AMBASSADORS HAVE EXERTED SUPER-HUMAN EFFORTS, BUT, IN SPITE OF THIS, THE UNITED STATES HAS CONE AHEAD AND PRESENTED THIS HUMILIATING PROPOSAL. THIS WAS QUITE UNEXPECTED AND EXTREMELY REGRETTABLE. THE IMPERIAL GOVERNMENT CAN BY NO MEANS USE IT AS A BASIS FOR NEGOTIATIONS. THEREFORE, WITH A REPORT OF THE VIEWS OF THE IMPERIAL GOVERNMENT WHICH I WILL SEND YOU IN TWO OR THREE DAYS, THE NEGOTIATIONS WILL BE DE FACTO RUPTURED. THIS IS INEVITABLE. HOWEVER, I DO NOT WISH YOU TO GIVE THE IMPRESSION THAT THE NEGOTIATIONS ARE BROKEN OFF, MERELY SAY TO THEM THAT YOU ARE AWAITING INSTRUCTIONS, AND THAT, ALTHOUGH THE OPINIONS OF YOUR GOVERNMENT ABE NOT CLEAR TO YOU, TO YOUR WAY OF THINKING THE IMPERIAL GOVERNMENT HAS ALWAYS MADE JUST CLAIMS AND HAS BORNE GREAT SACRIFICES FOR THE SAKE OF PEACE IN THE PACIFIC . . . SINCE THINGS HAVE COME TO THIS PASS, I CONTACTED THE MAN YOU TOLD ME TO (the Emperor) IN YOUR #1180 AND HE SAID THAT UNDER THE PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCES WHAT YOU SUGGEST IS ENTIRELY UNSUITABLE."
(Decoded in the Navy Department, November 28, 1941)
Tokyo to Embassy, Washington, November 29, 1941 (#857):
". . . IN CARRYING OUT THESE INSTRUCTIONS, PLEASE BE CAREFUL THAT THIS DOES NOT LEAD TO ANYTHING LIKE A BREAKING OFF OF THE NEGOTIATIONS."
This sentence was at the end of a message directing further conversation with the U.S. Government on the negotiations. This was merely a part of the effort to keep alive the appearance of continuing negotiations.
(Decoded in the Navy Department, November 30, 1941)
On November 27 and 30, 1941, extended trans-Pacific telephone conversations took place between Ambassador Kurusu and Mr. Yamamoto, Chief of the American Division of the Japanese Foreign Office. Significant passages of each of these exchanges were:
Yamamoto to Kurusu, November 27, 1941:
"REGARDING THE NEGOTIATIONS, DON'T BREAK THEM OFF."
(Translated in the Navy Department, November 28, 1941)
Kurusu to Yamamoto, November 30, 1941:
"ARE THE JAPANESE-AMERICAN NEGOTIATIONS TO CONTINUE?"
Yamamoto: "YES."
Kurusu: "YOU WERE VERY URGENT ABOUT THEM BEFORE, WEREN'T YOU; BUT NOW YOU WANT TO STRETCH THEM OUT. WE WILL NEED YOUR HELP. BOTH THE PREMIER AND THE FOREIGN MINISTER WILL NEED TO CHANGE THE TONE OF THEIR SPEECHES. DO YOU UNDERSTAND? PLEASE USE MORE DISCRETION."
(Translated in the Navy Department, November 30, 1941)
Tokyo to Embassy, Berlin, November 30, 1941 (#985):
Instructs the Ambassador to inform Hitler as follows:
"THE CONVERSATION BEGUN BETWEEN TOKYO AND WASHINGTON LAST APRIL . . . NOW STANDS RUPTURED — BROKEN ... SAY VERY SECRETLY TO THEM (Hitler and Von Ribbentrop) THAT THERE IS EXTREME DANGER THAT WAR MAY SUDDENLY BREAK OUT BETWEEN THE ANGLO-SAXON NATIONS AND JAPAN THROUGH SOME CLASH OF ARMS AND ADD THAT THE TIME OF THE BREAKING OUT OF WAR MAY COME QUICKER THAN ANYONE DREAMS."
These significant extracts were part of a long three-part message.
(Decoded in the Navy Department, December 1, 1941)
Tokyo to Embassy, Berlin, November 30, 1941 (#986):
This message was the second long one of the same day, and was in two parts. It gave the Japanese version of the negotiations with the United States. It stated that "A CONTINUATION OF THE NEGOTIATIONS WOULD BE DETRIMENTAL TO OUR CAUSE," and characterized certain of the American proposals of November 26 as INSULTING ... CLEARLY A TRICK. Japan concluded that the United States had decided to regard her as an enemy.
(Decoded in the Navy Department, December 1, 1941)
Tokyo to Embassy, Washington, December 1, 1941 (#865):
"THE DATE SET IN MY MESSAGE #812 HAS COME AND GONE AND THE SITUATION CONTINUES TO BE INCREASINGLY CRITICAL.
"TO PREVENT THE UNITED STATES FROM BECOMING UNDULY SUSPICIOUS WE HAVE BEEN ADVISING THE PRESS AND OTHERS THAT THOUGH THERE ARE SOME WIDE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN JAPAN AND THE UNITED STATES, THE NEGOTIATIONS ARE CONTINUING. (THE ABOVE IS FOR ONLY YOUR INFORMATION.)"
(Decoded in the Navy Department, December 1, 1941)
Throughout the Washington negotiations, Tokyo had stressed a deadline date for their completion, after which "things were automatically going to happen." Certain phrases in the intercepted dispatches strongly indicated the importance that the Japanese government attached to the conference, and left no doubt that this was Japan's last effort to reach an understanding with the United States by peaceful means, viz.: "Tackle the problem of saving the Japanese-American relations from falling into a chaotic condition"; "There seem to be indications that the United States is not fully aware of the extreme criticalness of the situation"; "The fate of our Empire hangs by a slender thread of a few days."
Automatic actions after the breakdown of such vital negotiations could only mean acts of war. Moreover, the Tokyo dispatch to the Consul General in Hong Kong plainly stated that Japan had decided upon war with the United States and Great Britain if these negotiations failed. That message was decoded on November 26, the day that Secretary Hull handed the Japanese Ambassadors the American note which so effectively terminated the Washington negotiations, as President Roosevelt clearly intended that it should.
Two days later, any lingering doubt that diplomacy had completely failed was removed for the American Government by the Tokyo dispatch which told the Japanese Ambassadors that "The Imperial Government can by no means use it [the American note] as a basis for further negotiations. Therefore, with a report of the views of the Imperial Government which I will send you in two or three days, the negotiations will be de facto ruptured." Although this was not needed, the two Tokyo dispatches to Berlin, translated on December 1, were further supporting evidence.
From November 28 on, President Roosevelt and his Washington advisers knew with certainty that war was at hand, and that the Japanese reply to the American note would formally initiate that war.
Thereafter, Tokyo, by repeatedly emphasizing the importance of maintaining the appearance of continuing negotiations, strongly evidenced that surprise was essential to those "things which were automatically going to happen." (See President Roosevelt's statement in Chapter 7.)
This accorded with the well-known Japanese practice of starting her wars with a surprise attack. In Chapter 4, we saw that Washington had been given every reason to deduce that Pearl Harbor would be the objective of that attack.
Japan had only two sound objectives in the Pacific for such an attack — the Pacific Fleet and the Panama Canal. And, for her strategic purposes in the Western Pacific, damage to the Panama Canal meant nothing in comparison to the severe crippling of the Pacific Fleet. With that Fleet based on Pearl Harbor, it is not an over-statement to say that Japan's objectives in the Pacific had been reduced to one. President Roosevelt apparently had the strategic insight to appreciate that fact when he insisted that the Fleet continue to base in Hawaii.
Admiral Kimmel was always conscious that his Fleet might be subjected to a surprise attack by the Japanese. His Fleet orders showed that. But, his big question had long been — when. If he and his senior Admirals, with whom he continually discussed the situation, had been kept abreast of the knowledge possessed by Washington and Manila, there would have been no questions in their minds in the first days of December. That has always been the crux of the Pearl Harbor story.
But there then would have been no surprise attack, and there is no telling how or when the United States would have become a participant in the war.
Not one word of the Japanese messages in Chapters 4 and 5 was ever transmitted to the Hawaiian Commanders.
THE most drastic answer to strained international relations is a declaration of war. The decisive action, short of war, is a severance of diplomatic relations. When diplomatic relations are interrupted, the ambassadors are recalled and the embassies are officially closed. Nevertheless, many members of the embassy staffs remain in residence and the diplomatic inviolability of the closed embassies is fully respected. Furthermore, the consulates continue their normal functions during such times because, by international usage, they are not part of the diplomatic organization. Secret matter in the embassies and consulates is therefore entirely safe from seizure or alien scrutiny during periods of severed diplomatic relations.
The outbreak of war presents a very different picture. The newly hostile embassies and consulates are immediately seized, and theft personnel is arrested for internment pending repatriation. When the imminence of war is recognized, a nation therefore becomes greatly concerned for the security of her secret communications and her secret correspondence, and takes steps to assure that nothing of that nature will fall into enemy hands when her diplomatic and consular posts are seized.
Thus, when a nation orders her embassies and consulates in particular countries to destroy theft codes, ciphers, code machines and files of secret correspondence, that action can mean only one thing — the close approach of war with those countries. A nation would never interrupt all possibility of secret communication with her diplomatic and consular posts in a country for any lesser reason.
In the pre-Pearl Harbor days, the Japanese regarded their Purple code as the one possessing the highest security. The system employed a secret machine for enciphering and deciphering. Only the more important of the Japanese posts were equipped to use that code — embassies, and such consulates as those in Manila, Singapore, and Batavia. Secret communications with other consulates were conducted in codes of a lower order of security.
During the critical last days of the peace, the Japanese were naturally bent upon preserving the secrecy of their war intentions. This consideration divided the transmission of their code-destruction orders into two categories; those that could be sent in the Purple Code, and those which must be sent in the less secure codes. For, during those times, the Japanese apparently did not consider the possibility that their Purple Code had been compromised.
To increase the security of their code-destruction messages to ministries and consulates not equipped with the Purple Code, Tokyo set up the special "Winds" and "Hidden Word" codes. For reasons made plain therein, the whole Winds episode is reserved for discussion in Chapter 10. The Hidden Word Code was set up by the following message:
Tokyo to Embassy, Washington, November 27, 1941 (Circular #2409. In parts complete.):
"HANDLE AS CHIEF OF OFFICE ROUTING.
"WITH INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS BECOMING MORE STRAINED, THE FOLLOWING EMERGENCY SYSTEM OF DISPATCHES, USING INGO DENPO (hidden words or misleading language telegrams) IS PLACED IN EFFECT. PLEASE STUDY THIS CAREFULLY.
"MAKE UP A TABLE WITH THE LEFT COLUMN CONTAINING THE CODE WORDS AM) THE RIGHT THE CORRESPONDING PLAIN (DECODED) TEXT. PLEASE SEE THAT THERE IS NO MISTAKE IN TRANSCRIBING THIS.
PART 1
"EXAMPLE. A MESSAGE MEANING: JAPANESE AND U.S.S.R. MILITARY FORCES HAVE CLASHED, WILL BEAD: 'HIJIKATA AND KUBOTA CLERKS HAVE BOTH BEEN ORDERED TO YOUR EMBASSY ON 15TH (BEGIN SPELL) S T O P (END SPELL).'
"IN ORDER TO DISTINGUISH THESE CABLES FROM OTHERS, THE ENGLISH WORD S T O P WILL BE ADDED AT THE END AS AN INDICATOR. THE JAPANESE WORD OWARI (END) WILL NOT BE USED."
PART 2
| Code Word | Meaning |
| "HATAKEYAMA | RELATIONS BETWEEN JAPAN AND .... HAVE BEEN SEVERED. |
| "HATTORI | RELATIONS BETWEEN JAPAN AND .... ARE NOT IN ACCORDANCE WITH EXPECTATIONS." |
PART 3
| "HIJIKATA | JAPAN'S AND .... MILITARY FORCES RAVE CLASHED. |
| "KASHIWAGI | WE ARE COMMENCING MILITARY ACTION AGAINST .... |
| "KOYANAGI | ENGLAND |
| "KUBOTA | U.S.S.R." |
PART 4
| "MINAMI | U.S.A." |
(Decoded in the Navy Department, December 2, 1941)
This message contained 53 code Words and their meanings. In the interest of brevity, most of these have been omitted. Only the code words necessary to an understanding of the example in Part 1 of the message and the "Hidden Word" dispatch received in Washington on December 7, 1941 (Chapter 8) are included.
Tokyo to Embassy, Washington, December 1, 1941 (Circular #2444):
"THE FOUR OFFICES IN LONDON, HONG KONG, SINGAPORE AND MANILA HAVE BEEN INSTRUCTED TO ABANDON THE USE OF CODE MACHINES AND TO DISPOSE OF THEM. THE MACHINE IN BATAVIA HAS BEEN RETURNED TO JAPAN. REGARDLESS OF CONTENTS OF MY CIRCULAR #2447, THE U.S. (EMBASSY) RETAINS THE MACHINES AND MACHINE CODES.
"PLEASE RELAY TO FRANCE, GERMANY, ITALY AND TURKEY FROM SWITZERLAND; AND TO BRAZIL, ARGENTINA AND MEXICO CITY FROM WASHINGTON."
(Decoded in the Navy Department, December 1, 1941)
Tokyo (Togo) to Embassy, Washington, December 2, 1941 (#867):
"1. AMONG THE TELEGRAPHIC CODES WITH WHICH YOUR OFFICE IS EQUIPPED BURN ALL BUT THOSE NOW USED WITH THE MACHINE AND ONE COPY EACH OF THE 'O' CODE (OITE) AND THE ABBREVIATED CODE (L). BURN ALSO THE VARIOUS OTHER CODES WHICH HAVE BEEN IN YOUR CUSTODY.
"2. STOP AT ONCE USING ONE CODE MACHINE AND DESTROY IT COMPLETELY.
"3. WHEN YOU HAVE FINISHED THIS, WIFE ME BACK THE ONE WORD 'HARUNA'.
"4. AT THE TIME AND IN THE MANNER YOU DEEM MOST PROPER DISPOSE OF ALL FILES OF MESSAGES COMING AND GOING AND ALL OTHER SECRET DOCUMENTS.
"5. BURN ALL THE CODES WHICH TELEGRAPH OFFICIAL KOSAKA BROUGHT YOU. HENCE THE NECESSITY OF GETTING IN CONTACT WITH MEXICO CITY MENTIONED IN MY #860 NO LONGER EXISTS."
(Decoded in the War Department, December 3, 1941)
The War and Navy Departments quickly had evidence that the Japanese code destruction was proceeding apace. On December 3, the British Admiralty told them that the Japanese Embassy in London had completed that operation. By Saturday, December 6, sixteen "Harunas" had been intercepted, including those from the consulates in New Orleans, San Francisco and Seattle.
Japanese Embassy, Berne, to Japanese Embassy, Ankara, December 2, 1941 (Tokyo Circular #2447):
"ORDERS HAVE BEEN ISSUED TO OUR DIPLOMATIC OFFICIALS IN NORTH AMERICA INCLUDING MANILA, CANADA, PANAMA, CUBA, THE SOUTH SEAS, INCLUDING TIMOR, SINORA, CHIENMAI, AND ALL OUR OFFICIALS IN BRITISH (INCLUDING OUR EMBASSY IN LONDON) AND NETHERLANDS TERRITORY TO INFORM ME UPON THE BURNING OF ALL THEIR TELEGRAPHIC CODES EXCEPT ONE COPY OF OITE AND 'L'.
"RELAY FROM BERLIN TO LISBON, HELSINKI, BUDAPEST AND VIENNA; BELAY FROM ROME TO BUCHAREST, ———;RELAY FROM BERNE TO VICHY, ANKARA, LISBON, MADRID; RELAY FROM RIO TO BUENOS AIRES, LIMA, SANTIAGO, ———; MEXICO CITY, PANAMA, BOGOTA; BELAY FROM BANGKOK TO HANOI, SAIGON..."
(Decoded in the War Department, December 6, 1941)
The final two messages of the Japanese code destruction series, sent by Tokyo early on the morning of the Pearl Harbor attack, are discussed in Chapter 8 with the other Washington happenings of December 6 and 7.
Taken in conjunction with the code destruction messages, Tokyo's instructions concerning the movements of personnel were also evidences of the imminence of war. During the summer and fall of 1941, Secretary Terasaki, an espionage expert, was in Washington to direct the creation of a Japanese spy network in Latin America. On December z, Tokyo ordered his immediate departure from the United States. The following exchange between the Washington Embassy and Tokyo resulted:
Embassy, Washington to Tokyo, December 3, 1941 (#1245):
"TERASAKI NOW IN THE MIDST OF ——— ——— ——— INTELLIGENCE WORK AT MOST IMPORTANT TIME. WOULD LIKE TO HAVE HIM STAY OVER A WHILE AND GO BY SAILING OF THE 19TH. TAKAGI ON TATSUTA MARU BUSINESS..."
(Decoded in the Navy Department, December 4, 1941)
Tokyo to Embassy, Washington, December 5, 1941 (#896):
"RE YOUR #1245: WILL YOU PLEASE HAVE TERASAKI, ANDO, YAMAMOTO, AND OTHERS LEAVE BY PLANE WITHIN THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS."
(Decoded in the Navy Department, December 6, 1941)
Commander Kramer told the Naval Court of Inquiry that official Washington had no intention of permitting Japanese Embassy personnel to leave the United States during those early days of December, 1941. In other words, the Washington authorities recognized that war was so close as to make it desirable to block the departure of Japanese diplomatic officials, but no definite, unmistakable message conveying that recognition was sent to the Hawaiian Commanders.
By December 3, the Navy Department had Tokyo Circular #2444 and Tokyo dispatch #867, and sent the four messages which appear below. In the headings of these, the following abbreviated titles will be used:
| OPNAV | Office of the Chief of Naval Operations; |
| CINCAF | Commander-in-Chief, Asiatic Fleet; |
| CINCPAC | Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet; |
| COM 14 | Commandant, 14th Naval District (Hawaiian Islands); |
| COM 16 | Commandant, 16th Naval District (Philippine Islands); |
| NAVSTA GUAM | Naval Station, Guam. |
The multiple-address system has long been a feature of Naval Communications. The addressees arc divided into two groups — those to whom the receipt of the message will mean action, and those to whom it is sent purely for information.
OPNAV, For action to: CINCAF, CINCPAC, COM 14, COM 16, December 3, 1941:
"HIGHLY RELIABLE INFORMATION HAS BEEN RECEIVED THAT CATEGORIC AND URGENT INSTRUCTIONS WERE SENT YESTERDAY TO JAPANESE DIPLOMATIC AND CONSULAR POSTS AT HONG KONG, SINGAPORE, BATAVIA, MANILA, WASHINGTON AND LONDON TO DESTROY MOST OF THEIR CODES AND CIPHERS AT ONCE AND TO BURN ALL OTHER IMPORTANT CONFIDENTIAL AND SECRET DOCUMENTS."
This message was prepared and released by the Director of Naval Intelligence. It is interesting to note that the file copy contained the following passage: "From the foregoing infer that Orange plans early action in Southeast Asia." That sentence, however, was deleted before the message was sent. Only Admiral Stark and Rear Admiral Turner could release a dispatch which contained any deductions concerning Japanese probable intentions. This order had then been in effect in the Navy Department for many months.
OPNAV, For action to: CINCAF, COM 16, December
3, 1941
For information to: CINCPAC, COM 14
COPEK
"CIRCULAR TWENTY FOUR FORTY FOUR FROM TOKYO ONE DECEMBER ORDERED LONDON, HONG KONG, SINGAPORE AND MANILA TO DESTROY PURPLE MACHINE. BATAVIA MACHINE ALREADY SENT TO TOKYO. DECEMBER SECOND WASHINGTON ALSO DIRECTED DESTROY PURPLE, ALL BUT ONE COPY OF OTHER SYSTEMS, AM) ALL SECRET DOCUMENTS. BRITISH ADMIRALTY LONDON TODAY REPORTS EMBASSY LONDON HAS COMPLIED."
Although, in accordance with naval procedure, this message was addressed to the flag officer in each instance, the Copek means it actually was from the Decrypting Unit of Naval Communications to similar units on the staffs of the four addressees. It will be noted that it was sent only for information to Admiral Kimmel's staff unit and to that of the Fourteenth Naval District. This will be discussed shortly.
Recognizing that war was imminent in the closing days of the first week of December, 1941, Washington sent the following two dispatches, as well as many similar ones to diplomatic and consular posts in Japan and in Japanese-held territories on the Asiatic mainland:
OPNAV, For action to: NAVSTA, GUAM, December
4, 1941
For information to: CINCAF, CINCPAC, COM 14, COM 16
Transmit with Deferred Precedence
"GUAM DESTROY ALL SECRET AND CONFIDENTIAL PUBLICATIONS AND OTHER CLASSIFIED MATTER EXCEPT THAT ESSENTIAL FOR CURRENT PURPOSES AND SPECIAL INTELLIGENCE RETAINING MINIMUM CRYPTOGRAPHIC CHANNELS NECESSARY FOR ESSENTIAL COMMUNICATIONS WITH CINCAF, CINCPAC, COM 14, COM 16 AND OPNAV. BE PREPARED TO DESTROY INSTANTLY IN EVENT OF EMERGENCY ALL CLASSIFIED MATTER YOU RETAIN. REPORT CRYPTO CHANNELS RETAINED."
OPNAV, For action to: CINCPAC, December 6,
1941
For information to: CINCAF
Transmit with Deferred Precedence
"IN VIEW OF THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATION AND THE EXPOSED POSITION OF OUR OUTLYING PACIFIC ISLANDS YOU MAY AUTHORIZE THE DESTRUCTION BY THEM OF SECRET AND CONFIDENTIAL DOCUMENTS NOW OR UNDER LATER CONDITIONS OF GREATER EMERGENCY. MEANS OF COMMUNICATION TO SUPPORT OUR CURRENT OPERATIONS AND SPECIAL INTELLIGENCE SHOULD OF COURSE BE MAINTAINED UNTIL THE LAST MOMENT."
These last two dispatches were matters of cognizance of the Communications Security Division of Naval Communications. In the draft of this dispatch of December 6, prepared by the Head of that Division, the context began with the phrase, "in view of the imminence of war." It was testified that the Director of Naval Communications ordered the changes which produced the final wording of the message, as set forth above. It will be noted that the words, "in view of the imminence of war," were deleted and the highly misleading expression, "now or under later conditions of greater emergency," was substituted. We have seen how information was denied to the Hawaiian Commanders during those days. It now appears that an offshoot of that doctrine of denial, during the early days of December, was avoidance of the suggestion that war was very close at hand, in messages that had to be sent into the Pacific.
According to routine Naval Communications procedure, messages are assigned one of the following precedence classifications: (1) priority, to require the promptest possible transmission and delivery; (2) routine, to assure handling free of unnecessary delays; (3) deferred, to indicate that there is no particular urgency connected with the delivery. Unless a dispatch is definitely marked to indicate priority or routine precedence, it is forwarded with deferred precedence. To prevent undue delays in the handling of deferred precedence messages, a limiting time for their delivery is usually indicated in the heading of the dispatch.
The Judge Advocate of the Naval Court of Inquiry tried to establish why Rear Admiral Noyes, as late as the afternoon of December 6, 1941, had released the last of the dispatches with a deferred precedence. The answer was very vague, but its essence seemed to be that when the witness, as Director of Naval Communications, personally ordered the sending of a message, it went out very quickly, no matter what precedence it was given. The Court showed no further interest in the incident.
Nevertheless, Rear Admiral Noyes did not begin to answer the implications which must be drawn from the precedence assigned to this dispatch, so late in the rapidly developing Pacific situation. In the first place, no matter how fast the dispatch left Washington, as a result of its particular handling there, once it got into the system, its further progress Would necessarily have been handicapped by its obvious unimportance. Not only was this a message of deferred precedence, but no limit was placed upon its deferred time of delivery.
The handling of these four code-destruction messages by the Navy Department was most unfortunate. After all the information that had been denied the Hawaiian Commanders, here was the conclusive evidence that Japan was on the verge of initiating war with the United States and Great Britain, and the transmission of that evidence to the Naval Commanders in Hawaii was badly bungled.
The first dispatch of December 3 was unfortunately worded. The destruction by the Japanese posts of "most of their codes and ciphers" meant that war was in the offing, but that the close approach to its initiation would be indicated later by a Tokyo order to destroy all secret matter. Actually, the Tokyo dispatches of December 1 and 2 had, in effect, ordered that complete destruction. The single exception was the Washington Embassy which was told to keep one set of codes and one cipher machine, clearly to enable it to receive further messages from Tokyo, including the one which would initiate the war.
The Copek dispatch of the same day was more accurately worded. It was apparently sent to assure that the Corregidor Decrypting Unit had a copy of this Magic message. That could explain why it was sent for action to the staffs of the Asiatic Commanders, and merely for information to the staffs of the Hawaiian recipients. As Admiral Kimmel did not know about the Philippine on-the-spot reception of Magic, the different addressee classifications for the Asiatic and Hawaiian Commands could easily lead to confused deductions by him.
The wording of the dispatch dated December 6 certainly conveyed no inkling that war could be expected in a matter of hours. Furthermore, the deferred preference assigned that dispatch and the one to Guam, dated December 4, carried no suggestion of urgency of execution, even as late as the eve of the Japanese attack. The natural deduction in Hawaii from the four messages, as worded and sent, must be that the Washington authorities did not consider the outbreak of war unduly close at hand.
All of which emphasizes that there should not have been any danger, at that late date, that the Hawaiian Commanders could draw erroneous conclusions from the careless wording of two dispatches, the thoughtless addressing of another, and the deferred precedence assigned for the transmission of two others. Such deductions would have been impossible if those Commanders had been receiving the most significant of the decoded intercepts on the Tokyo-Washington, Tokyo-Berlin, and Tokyo-Honolulu circuits.
AT noon on November 25, 1941, President Roosevelt met with his principal advisers in the White House. In addition to the President, Secretaries Hull, Stimson, and Knox, and General Marshall and Admiral Stark were also present. The discussion which took place at that meeting, and certain background facts concerning it, mark it as a vitally important incident in the Pearl Harbor story.
The following extracts of Secretary Stimson's testimony to the Congressional Investigation (Chapter 12) cover the most significant features of that discussion:
"The President at once brought up the relations with the Japanese. Mr. Hull said that the Japanese were poised for the attack — that they might attack at any time. The President said that the Japanese were notorious for making an attack without warning and stated that we might be attacked, say next Monday, for example.
"One problem troubled us very much. If you know your enemy is going to strike you, it is not usually wise to wait until he gets the jump on you by taking the initiative. In spite of the risk involved, however, in letting the Japanese fire the first shot, we realized that in order to have the full support of the American people it was desirable to make sure that the Japanese be the ones to do this so that there should remain no doubt in anyone's mind as to who were the aggressors."
The Stimson diary for November 25 stated this problem in these words:
"The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves. It was a difficult proposition."
There is the complete picture of the Roosevelt strategy for the initiation of the war: Japanese action was counted upon to bring an aroused and united American people into the war; a Japanese surprise attack was fully expected; if the surprise failed, the Japanese were to be maneuvered into firing the first shot; all present at the conference fully appreciated that either the surprise attack or the maneuver to assure that the Japanese fired the first shot would cause serious U.S. losses.
The maneuver to cause the Japanese to fire the first shot was definitely based upon the expectation of a surprise attack, and was in reality merely a minor refinement of President Roosevelt's plan to entice that attack. For, no shot could be fired unless the opposing forces came into tactical contact, and it is very clear that the president and his advisers were counting upon a Japanese movement into American waters to produce that contact. And, under the existing U.S.-Japanese relations, even without the knowledge of Japanese intentions supplied by Magic, there could not be the slightest doubt in the minds of any of those present at the conference that such a Japanese move must be the prelude to a surprise attack. If the surprise succeeded, the Japanese would automatically fire the first shot of the war, as President Roosevelt so earnestly desired. The so-called maneuver was therefore merely intended to cover the contingency that the advancing Japanese forces might be detected an appreciable time before they could deliver their attack. The maneuver was implemented by the simplest possible order to the Pacific Commanders — merely a statement that Washington desired, if possible, that the Japanese fire the first shot. [1]
President Roosevelt's remarks concerning the Japanese surprise attack deserve close scrutiny. Not only do they reflect his complete knowledge of Japan's invariable method of starting her modern wars, but his selection of Monday as the day of the week for the attack is most arresting. Sunday in Pearl Harbor is Monday in the Far East, and all Japanese references to the attack, both before and after the event, placed it on Monday, December 8. Through the years, there have been persistent rumors that President Roosevelt, before the event, had received secret reports of the intended Japanese attack from Far Eastern sources. His placing of the attack on Monday lends some credence to those rumors. Unless such reports had caused him to associate Monday with the coming attack, why did he not conform to Army and Navy estimates and place it on Sunday?
The truth of those rumors has actually been publicly established for over two years, although that fact only recently became known to this author.
On May 17, 1951, the New York Daily News and many other papers, to which the column is syndicated, carried a feature article by its Washington reporter, Mr. John O'Donnell, which told of various Far Eastern police and intelligence reports which were then reposing under close guard on Capitol Hill in Washington. Among these documents were the Japanese secret police reports which were surrendered to General MacArthur in Tokyo in September, 1945, and the confession of the famous Russian spy, Dr. Richard Sorge, who bad organized and directed the operations of a widespread spy ring in Japan, until his arrest by the Japanese on October 18, 1941.
The article in the New York Daily News had very interesting comments on the police and intelligence reports, but our present concern centers in the Sorge confession and the secret Japanese police reports. Before his execution in early 1942, Dr. Sorge made a complete 32,000-word confession of his activities to his Japanese captors. This confession was forwarded to the Pentagon in Washington by General MacArthur, so that the account of the Sorge activities are to be found in the secret files in our national capital in both the Sorge confession and the Japanese secret police documents.
The following is a verbatim extract from Mr. O'Donnell's article in the New York Daily News of May 17, 1951:
"When the spy's confession was sent here, somebody in the Pentagon deleted from the original the damning statement by Sorge that he had informed the Kremlin in October, 1941, that the Japs intended to attack Pearl Harbor within 60 days and that he had received thanks for his report and the notice that Washington — Roosevelt, Marshall, Adm. Stark, et al — had been advised of the Japanese intentions. There is no record that this information was acknowledged here. But the (Japanese) police documents make it clear that Stalin & Co. had this accurate information and passed it back to us in return for our information about the impending attack by Germany on Russia."
In reply to a direct question, Mr. O'Donnell says,
"Before writing the column, the complete record of Sorge's confession had been made available to me although I was never in possession — except for the time required for reading the documents." It will be noted that Mr. O'Donnell positively states that the "complete record of the Sorge confession" was available to him before be wrote the article. That means both documents — the 32,000-word Sorge confession and the police document which related to the Sorge activities and confession. This statement is especially important because certain portions of the Sorge confession had been deleted from the file copy in the Pentagon, obviously for the purpose of preserving the secret of Pearl Harbor and President Roosevelt's part therein from the knowledge of anyone who might see that file copy."
We thus now know that President Roosevelt was warned at least twice of the Japanese intended attack, by Ambassador Grew in January, 1941, and by Sorge, via the Kremlin, in October, 1941. This, coupled with the Washington silence to the Hawaiian Commanders concerning these intelligence reports, eloquently testifies to the fact that President Roosevelt wanted the Japanese attack. Secretary Stimson's testimony to the Congressional Committee goes far to support this deduction, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter.
The reader is now ready to weigh the pale character of the information contained in the so-called War-Warning Messages, sent to the Hawaiian Commanders on November 27, 1941, and the consequent defects of those messages as portrayers of the situation then actually known to President Roosevelt and his Washington advisers.
NOTES:
CRITICS of Admiral Kimmel and defendants of the Washington Administration magnify the significance of a Navy Department dispatch of November 27, because it contained the sentence, "This dispatch is to be considered a war warning." They would have us believe that this one message counterbalanced the withholding of the mass of information which, as we have seen, made the Japanese surprise attack possible. The message read:
"THIS DISPATCH IS TO BE CONSIDERED A WAR WARNING. NEGOTIATIONS WITH JAPAN LOOKING TOWARD STABILIZATION OF CONDITIONS IN THE PACIFIC HAVE CEASED AND AN AGGRESSIVE MOVE BY JAPAN IS EXPECTED WITHIN THE NEXT FEW DAYS. THE NUMBER AND EQUIPMENT OF JAPANESE TROOPS AND THE ORGANIZATIONS OF NAVAL TASK FORCES INDICATES AN AMPHIBIOUS EXPEDITION AGAINST EITHER THE PHILIPPINES, THAI, OR KRA PENINSULA, OR POSSIBLY BORNEO. EXECUTE AN APPROPRIATE DEFENSIVE DEPLOYMENT PREPARATORY TO CARRYING OUT THE TASKS ASSIGNED IN WPL 46. INFORM DISTRICT AND ARMY AUTHORITIES. A SIMILAR WARNING IS BEING SENT BY THE WAR DEPARTMENT. SPENAVO INFORM BRITISH. CONTINENTAL DISTRICTS, GUAM, SAMOA TAKE MEASURES AGAINST SABOTAGE."
This dispatch was slightly more definite than the two preceding dispatches sent on October 16 and November 24, especially as the contents of the two former messages had been quickly neutralized by follow-up letters from Admiral Stark. It did not, however, begin to give the complete picture.
The Navy Department dispatch of November 27 and a similar one from the War Department to General Short were sent, on that day, in obedience to a direct order from President Roosevelt which was issued when the American note of November 26 was delivered to the Japanese Ambassadors. Shortly after that delivery, Secretary Hull had informed the heads of the Army and the Navy that diplomatic negotiations had failed, and that further action must be the responsibility of the Armed Forces. The two messages of November 27 to the Hawaiian Commanders would have been greatly strengthened if this quotation from the Secretary of State had been included! But that would have made it too evident to the historians of the future that the American note had been deliberately drafted to end all chance of further negotiation.
A study of the Navy dispatch leads to the conclusion that its wording was carefully chosen. For Admiral Hart, commander-in-Chief of the Asiatic Fleet, it was an adequate message, despite its lack of technical language. He was told that Japan was about to expand her Far Eastern war and that areas, within the limits of his command, would come under attack. The Philippines were definitely mentioned as a possible Japanese objective. Furthermore, Admiral Hart had a thorough understanding of the developing diplomatic tension between Japan and the United States, as the Corregidor Decrypting Unit kept him informed of the outgoing diplomatic messages from Tokyo to Washington and Berlin.
At the same time, Admiral Kimmel was informed that the war would spread, but to localities far removed from his Fleet. Nowhere in the message was there an intimation that the war might come to Hawaii. Predictions of operations distant from Hawaii characterized every communication to the Admiral which carried a suggestion of war with Japan.
During the Congressional Investigation, when the text of this dispatch was published, one Boston commentator characterized it as a "masterpiece of double talk," For Admiral Kimmel, this description fits it perfectly. For other Commanders, it conveyed a sufficiently accurate picture. It was indeed a masterpiece!
The War Department sent a similar dispatch to General Short, except that it was weaker than the Navy one in its depiction of the status of the negotiations, as that passage in the War Department message read: "Negotiations with Japan appear to be terminated with only the barest possibility of resumption." The Hawaiian Army Commander reacted as Admiral Kimmel did to the Navy message. Again there was no suggestion of a possible overseas attack upon Hawaii, and so the General ordered an alert against sabotage. In this type of alert, planes and exposed equipment are gathered in close groupings, so that a small guard can supply the necessary protection against local marauders. This close assemblage of material makes this alert most vulnerable to air attack, because it ensures the maximum possible effect from each well-placed bomb.
On November 28, General Short reported this action to the War Department, and thereby definitely transferred the responsibility for the inadequate Hawaiian "alert" to the Army Chief of Staff. This report clearly created a very embarrassing situation for the War Department as, for the ensuing nine days, it was faced with the urgent duty of ordering a change in the dispositions of the Hawaiian Command. But, if this had been done, the Hawaiian Commanders would immediately have recognized that Washington took a far graver view of the Pacific situation and possible eventualities in their area than the messages of November 27 had led them to believe.
One must infer that, faced with this dilemma, General Marshall adhered to the policy of silence, as from November 28 to December 7, General Short's message rested in the War Department, unanswered. And, when the attack was delivered, the Hawaiian Army planes were closely grouped for the slaughter. Only a positive directive could have kept the soldier. General Marshall, silent in such a situation, and the directive could only have come from President Roosevelt.
Before the Joint Congressional Committee, Admiral Kimmel emphasized the weaknesses of the Navy message in these words:
"The statement in the Navy Department dispatch to me to the effect that the negotiations had ceased on November 27th was a pale reflection of actual events; so partial a statement as to be misleading. The parties had not merely stopped talking. They were at swordpoints. So far as Japan was concerned, the talking which went on after November 26th was play-acting. It was a stratagem to conceal a blow which Japan was preparing to deliver. The stratagem did not fool the Navy Department. The Navy Department knew the scheme. The Pacific Fleet was exposed to this Japanese stratagem because the Navy Department did not pass on its knowledge of the Japanese trick."
How justified those strictures were! On November 27, when the two messages were sent, President Roosevelt and his Washington advisers knew that: the American note had terminated the negotiations beyond all shadow of a doubt; Tokyo had told Hong Kong, on November 14, the failure of the negotiations meant war with the United States and Great Britain; the deadline date which would mark the initiation of war operations was only two days ahead; Tokyo had evidenced a keen and continuing interest in the exact location of the principal U.S. vessels inside Pearl Harbor.
The fact that, by December 2, the War and Navy Departments had sent no amplifying messages to the Hawaiian Commands strongly substantiates that the dispatches of November 27 were written primarily for history and that their ambiguity was deliberate. For, by that time, the Washington recipients of Magic knew that: the American note had definitely terminated the negotiations; the appearance of negotiation was to be maintained by the Ambassadors, obviously to cloak a contemplated surprise attack; Berlin had been told by Tokyo that war with the Anglo-Saxon nations would come quicker than anyone imagined.
The outstanding defects of the November 27 messages as war warnings were: they were not couched in technical language; they were not supplemented by orders from the War and Navy Departments directing the actions preliminary to war, which were prescribed in the existing War Plans. Without those orders or the knowledge which Magic alone could supply, those messages could mean little, if anything, to the Hawaiian Commanders.
By November 28, at the latest, the following measures should have been taken: the War and Navy Departments should have ordered the Commanding General of the Hawaiian Department and the Commandant of the Fourteenth Naval District to execute the Joint Army-Navy Coastal Frontier Defense Plan for the Hawaiian area, except those provisions which would be too apparent to or would affect the civilian population; the Navy Department should have issued the Mobilization Order, prescribed by the War Plans, to the Naval Establishment, or at least to the Pacific Fleet in Hawaiian waters. This would have placed the Hawaiian Commands on a war basis, but would not have authorized acts of war.
At the same time, the Army and Navy Commands in Hawaii should have been unified. The need for this in the event of war had long been recognized. It could be accomplished, at any time, by order of the President. It was ordered immediately after the Japanese attack, and remained in effect throughout the war.
There was another unnatural lapse on the part of the Navy Department. The Chief of Naval Operations, by law, is responsible for the war readiness of the Naval Establishment. Vitally important features of that readiness are the locations and dispositions of the various fleets in anticipation of the first impact of war. By November 28, it was clearly apparent to the High Command in Washington that the Pacific Fleet should keep the sea until the issue of peace or war with Japan had been definitely decided. Admiral Stark did not issue such an order. Furthermore, after the imminence of war became unmistakable, he made no attempt to acquaint himself with the steps that had been taken in that fleet to meet the outbreak of the war.
Once again, it is impossible to believe that Admiral Stark willingly failed to perform his full duty in these matters. He certainly knew the duties and responsibilities of his office. As he publicly said, all he did during those times was on order of higher authority, in other words, the President of the United States.
The glaring character of these failures is emphasized by the fact that, in earlier Pacific emergencies of far lesser intensity, both Departments were prompt to issue alert and mobilization orders, as the following dispatches indicate:
War Department to Hawaiian Command, June 17, 1940:
"IMMEDIATELY ALERT COMPLETE DEFENSIVE ORGANIZATION TO DEAL WITH POSSIBLE TRANS-PACIFIC RAID MAINTAIN ALERT UNTIL FUNNIER ORDERS."
Naval Operations to Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet, January 21, 1941:
"IF THIS ESTIMATE PROVES CORRECT I CONTEMPLATE ORDERING MOBILIZATION ACCORDING TO RAINBOW 3 WITH FOLLOWING MODIFICATIONS"
The Mobilization Order is the final prewar step, which places the entire Naval Establishment on a war footing. The more it anticipates the event, the more ready the Navy will be when war comes. It requires that the crews of all ships be raised as quickly as possible to the strengths provided in the war complements — by far its most important provision (see Appendix).
The neglect of the War and Navy Departments, between November 28 and December 7, to order the prewar dispositions required by the War Plans could have been caused only by the deliberate intent to keep Admiral Kimmel and General Short in ignorance of the true Pacific situation. Unaccompanied by alert and mobilization orders, the dispatches of November 27 were little more than "general information" messages for the Hawaiian Commands.
During that time, Admiral Stark was faced with one other very trying situation.
On November 28, the carrier Enterprise left Pearl Harbor in a Task Force to ferry planes to Wake Island. On December 5, the Lexington left on a similar mission to Midway. If the Fleet had proceeded to sea after November 28, it would thus have carried the totally inadequate air support which one carrier could supply, as the only other carrier, then in the Pacific, the Saratoga, was on the West Coast, having just completed a Navy Yard overhaul. After December 5, the Fleet would have been totally without sea-borne air support. Under either of these two conditions, contact with a Japanese Carrier Task Force could only have meant its total destruction through repeated air attacks. Its only course of action at sea would have been to retire into the area of the sea and air approaches to Hawaii from the West Coast, waters which a Japanese force upon a surprise attack mission would most certainly avoid.
Admiral Kimmel reported the departure of the Enterprise and the contemplated employment of the Lexington to the Chief of Naval Operations — clear evidence that he did not appreciate the imminence of war. Under the conditions known to him, it thus became Admiral Stark's bounden duty to order the immediate recall of the Enterprise and the cancellation of the Lexington's mission. Any naval officer free to act would have done so. Admiral Stark did nothing. This is one more powerful piece of evidence that his decisions during that time were inhibited by orders from President Roosevelt.
We come now to the final acts in the dramatic withholding of information from Admiral Kimmel and General Short, those during the period from December 1 to December 7, 1941.
Students of Japanese military history had long entertained the belief that Japan's surprise attack to initiate a war with a western nation would probably be delivered on a Saturday or Sunday because, on those days, during peacetime, the greatest number of officers and men are habitually absent from theft ships and stations on weekend liberty. As early as April 1, 1941, the following message was sent by Naval Operations to the Commandants of all Shore Stations:
"PERSONNEL OF YOUR INTELLIGENCE SERVICE SHOULD BE ADVISED THAT BECAUSE OF THE FACT THAT FAST EXPERIENCE SHOWS THE AXIS POWERS OFTEN BEGIN ACTIVITIES ON SATURDAYS AND SUNDAYS OR ON A NATIONAL HOLIDAY OF THE COUNTRY CONCERNED, THEY SHOULD TAKE STEPS ON SUCH DAYS TO SEE THAT PROPER WATCHES AND PRECAUTIONS ARE IN EFFECT."
Why this was not addressed to the Fleet Commanders and why it should be confined to personnel of the Intelligence Services is difficult to understand, despite the fact that the message was originated by the Director of Naval Intelligence. In any event, the thought was perfectly clear.
Many in Washington had expected that Japan would attack on the 30th of November, because that was the first Sunday after November 29, the "deadline date." When that day passed without incident, the next Sunday was December 7. And during that fateful week, the evidence in Washington of the coming Japanese war mounted rapidly.
The reader is already familiar with the essential Magic messages, received on or before December 5. The Japanese messages of December 6 and 7 are reproduced and discussed later in this chapter.
The events of that week provide the keystone to our arch of evidence regarding the significance of the denial of Magic to Admiral Kimmel and General Short. They dispose of any lingering possibility that this was due to oversight, and thus prove conclusively that the denial was deliberate. They disclose the persistence with which the high Army and Navy Commands in Washington adhered to this policy of silence, so completely at variance with military practice.
The chronologic presentation which follows deals first with three brief but significant happenings and then arrives at the extended accounts of December 6 and 7.
December 1
Commander McCollum prepared a memorandum digest of the Japanese situation which he considered should be sent to the outlying naval commands, especially those in Hawaii. This was discussed by Admiral Stark with all his principal advisers and with the Commander also present. It was decided that no message based upon the memorandum would be sent by the Navy Department.
December 4
The Japanese code-destruction messages caused Commander McCollum to draft a proposed dispatch summarizing the U.S.-Japanese situation for transmission to the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet, which contained the phrase, "war between Japan and the United States is imminent." Captain Wilkinson directed the Commander to consult with Rear Admiral Turner. The latter opposed the sending of the message, significantly basing that opposition solely on the "War-Warning Dispatch" of November 27, and after giving that message to the Commander to read, asked him if he still thought his message was necessary. He replied that he did. Admiral Turner then said that if it was sent, it would have to be heavily deleted, and proceeded to indicate the passages that he was unwilling to see transmitted. Commander McCollum took the emasculated message back to Captain Wilkinson, and left it with him, after recounting what had happened in Admiral Turner's office. The dispatch was never sent.
December 5
On December 5, Colonel Sadtler, Signal Corps, U.S. Army, received a telephone message from Rear Admiral Noyes that an Execute of the Winds Code had teen received. This report and the other Japanese code-destruction dispatches convinced the Colonel that the outbreak of war was close at hand. He consequently prepared a succinct message, which read about as follows: "War with Japan imminent; eliminate all possibility of another Port Arthur." This reference was to the Japanese surprise attack that started the Russo-Japanese War, an incident well known to all students of military history. Knowing that only General Marshall and Brigadier General Gerow in the War Department could authorize the sending of such a dispatch, Colonel Sadtler took his message to the latter in an attempt to have it approved. General Gerow dismissed the Colonel with a fiat refusal to consider the suggestion. The Colonel then took the matter to Colonel Bedell Smith, Senior Secretary on General Marshall's staff. When Colonel Smith learned that General Gerow had refused to consider sending the message, he did the same. That ended the incident.
December 6
The Japanese Ministry in Budapest reported to Tokyo that the American Minister had, on that day, presented the Hungarian Government with a British Communiqué to the effect that a state of war would break out on the 7th. This poorly worded Japanese dispatch could only mean war involving Japan. Great Britain was then already at war with Hungary, an ally of Germany, which was the reason that the American Minister was handling the diplomatic affairs of the British Government in Budapest.
Ambassador Winant from London also reported to Washington that a large Japanese amphibious force had been sighted off Cambodia Point headed for the Kra Peninsula and distant 14 hours' steaming therefrom. Every government concerned, including the United States, thus positively knew, on that Saturday, that the Pacific War would be initiated on the next day, Sunday, December 7.
Saturday, December 6, in Washington
The following account of the events of that day in our national capital is a mixture of known fact and deduction. Every effort will be made to keep each incident plainly in its proper category.
The so-called Japanese Pilot Message was received during the forenoon and was ready for distribution by mid-afternoon in both the War and Navy Departments. This message read:
Tokyo to Embassy, Washington, December 6, 1941 (#901):
"(1) TILE GOVERNMENT HAS DELIBERATED DEEPLY ON THE AMERICAN PROPOSAL OF THE 26TH OF NOVEMBER AND AS A RESULT WE HAVE DRAWN UP A MEMORANDUM FOR THE UNITED STATES CONTAINED IN MY SEPARATE MESSAGE #902 (IN ENGLISH).
"(2) THIS SEPARATE MESSAGE IS A VERY LONG ONE. I WILL SEND IT IN 14 PARTS AND I IMAGINE YOU WILL RECEIVE IT TOMORROW. HOWEVER, I AM NOT SURE. THE SITUATION IS EXTREMELY DELICATE, AND WHEN YOU RECEIVE IT I WANT YOU TO PLEASE KEEP IT SECRET FOR THE TIME BEING.
"(3) CONCERNING THE TIME OF PRESENTING THE MEMORANDUM TO THE UNITED STATES, I WILL WIRE YOU IN A SEPARATE MESSAGE. HOWEVER, I WANT YOU IN THE MEANTIME TO PUT IT IN NICELY DRAFTED FORM AND MAKE EVERY PREPARATION TO PRESENT IT TO THE AMERICANS JUST AS SOON AS YOU RECEIVE INSTRUCTIONS."
(Decoded in the War Department before 3:00 P.M., December 6, 1941)
Two features of this message were particularly noteworthy: the American-Japanese situation was characterized as "extremely delicate"; the 14-part message was to be delivered to the Washington Government at a specially designated time, and this timing was so important that it was to be made the subject of a separate message.
The recipients of Magic in Washington had known for over a week that the Japanese reply to the American note of November 26 would be a declaration of war. The 14-part message was that answer, hence definitely a declaration of war. Japan had started her thee previous wars — with China in 1894, with Russia in 1904, and her attack upon German — held Tsingtao in 1914 — with surprise attacks synchronized almost to the minute with the deliveries of her declarations of war.
The next day was Sunday, the day of the week upon which Japan was expected to deliver her surprise attack if she should ever decide to initiate a war with the United States. A Japanese amphibious force was known to be in position to make a dawn attack upon the Kra Peninsula on the next day. During the earlier days of the week, the Japanese code-destruction messages made the imminence of war a certainty. The receipt of the Pilot Message made it practically certain that Japan would start the war on the next day, Sunday, December 7, 1941.
By mid-afternoon on that Saturday, official Washington had followed Japan's every diplomatic move for days, as she prepared for her proverbial method of initiating wars. It also then knew that Magic was soon to provide information of the two items needed to complete tie routine — the context of the declaration of war, and the time of its delivery.
Furthermore, due to fortuitous delays in the processing of four dispatches on the Tokyo-Honolulu circuit, the recipients of Magic were reminded on Thursday, again on Friday, and again on Saturday, the three days before the attack, that Tokyo's known interest in the exact location of U.S. ships in Pearl Harbor had not only continued, but had intensified. Was a nation, about to be subjected to an attempted (!) surprise attack as the first act of war, ever before so fortunate!
The Washington silence which followed the receipt of the Pilot Message was the most vital key to tie true Pearl Harbor story. War within 24 hours, initiated by a surprise attack which, according to all the evidence, would be delivered upon the U.S. Fleet in Hawaii, stared General Marshall and Admiral Stark in the face from that moment onward, and they made no move during 21 of the 22 hours which intervened before the attack to inform Admiral Kimmel and General Short. Nothing but a positive Presidential order could have so muzzled them after the receipt of the Pilot Message. The later Japanese messages and the continuing absence of warning to the Hawaiian Commanders, discussed in the remainder of this chapter, merely add support and emphasis to this inescapable fact.
Colonel Bratton began the War Department deliveries of the Pilot Message on Saturday at 3:00 P.M. That means that the five other Magic recipients on the War Department list saw that significant message on that afternoon, as it is highly unlikely that any of them had left their offices so early in the day, in those critical times, Even if one of the recipients did happen to be absent, it would cause little delay in the delivery to him. During those days, the principal subordinates always knew the whereabouts of their immediate seniors when the latter were not in the War Department.
The testimony concerning the Navy's handling of the Pilot Message was decidedly vague. One fact, however, is certain. As the Army unit was processing all Magic received on that day up to the time of Colonel Bratton's distribution of the Pilot Message, this means that seven finished copies were in the Navy Department at about 3:00 P.M. Although Commander Kramer, at the time of the investigation, had no remembrance of the deliveries, Captain Wilkinson saw the message before he left his office at 6:00 P.M. and understood that it "was brought to him in the normal course of events in connection with Magic." It is difficult to conceive of any appreciable delay in the Navy Department's distribution. The message foretold the coming of the long-awaited reply to the American note of November 26 and its timed de livery, matters of deep interest to President Roosevelt. The first thought consequently would have been to rush it to the White House, and that would have induced the almost simultaneous deliveries to the other recipients, as the information would also be most important to Admiral Stark. We must therefore conclude that the Navy distribution of the Pilot Message was made between 3:00 P.M. and 6:00 P.M.
During the afternoon, therefore, the recipients of Magic knew that one of the most important state communications in American history was about to arrive in Washington. Their natural reactions should have been a keen desire to learn its tenor at the earliest possible moment and to see the whole message as soon as it was ready. But, we are about to record an attitude of apparent apathy in high military-naval circles toward the whole matter, an apathy that has never, in all history, had a counterpart at a time of such import to a nation.
Thirteen parts of the main message, Tokyo #902, arrived in the Navy Department between 11:45 A.M. and 2:51 P.M. As it was in coded English, its decode came out of the Purple machine in that language. The translation to complete the processing was therefore concerned solely with Japanese procedure signs, punctuation, etc., and the preparation of the finished copies of the early decodes began shortly after 3:00 P.M. Despite the fact that it was the Army's day to handle the Japanese intercepts, the Navy unit processed 11 of the 13 parts. Parts 9 and 10 only were sent to the War Department for their decoding and minor translation. The full 13 parts were ready for distribution in the Navy Department by 9:00 P.M.
Tokyo delayed the transmission of the full message by withholding Part 14 until early Sunday morning. This indicates the care which the Japanese exercised throughout in their endeavor to keep their intentions secret until the last possible moment.
Large sections of the 13-part message were devoted to a review of the diplomatic negotiations as seen through Japanese eyes. These were written for history, and have no other effective significance. However, certain ex tracts of the 13 parts received on Saturday unmistakably indicated that they were part of a Declaration of War. These are quoted herewith:
Tokyo to Embassy, Washington, December 6, 1941 (#902):
(PART 2 OF 14)
"HOWEVER, BOTH THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN HAVE RESORTED TO EVERY POSSIBLE MEASURE TO ASSIST THE CHUNGKING REGIME SO AS TO OBSTRUCT THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A GENERAL PEACE BETWEEN JAPAN AND CHINA. INTERFERING WITH JAPAN'S CONSTRUCTIVE ENDEAVORS TO WARD THE STABILIZATION OF EAST ASIA, EXERTING PRESSURE ON THE NETHERLANDS EAST INDIES, OR MENACING FRENCH INDO-CHINA, THEY HAVE ATTEMPTED TO FRUSTRATE JAPAN'S ASPIRATIONS TO REALIZE THE IDEAL OF COMMON PROSPERITY IN COOPERATION WITH THESE REGIONS. FURTHER MORE, WHEN JAPAN, IN ACCORDANCE WITH ITS PROTOCOL WITH FRANCE, TOOK MEASURES OF JOINT DEFENSE WITH FRENCH INDO-CHINA, BOTH THE AMERICAN AND BRITISH GOVERNMENTS WILLFULLY MISINTERPRETED IT AS A THREAT TO THEIR POSSESSIONS AND INDUCING THE NETHERLANDS GOVERNMENT TO FOLLOW SUIT, THEY ENFORCED THE ASSET-FREEZING ORDER, THUS SEVERING ECONOMIC RELATIONS WITH JAPAN. WHILE MANIFESTING THUS AN OBVIOUSLY HOSTILE ATTITUDE, THESE COUNTRIES HAVE STRENGTHENED THEIR MILITARY PREPARATIONS PERFECTING AN ENCIRCLEMENT OF JAPAN, AND BROUGHT ABOUT A SITUATION WHICH ENDANGERS THE VERY EXISTENCE OF THE EMPIRE."
(PART 9 OF 14)
"THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT, OBSESSED WITH ITS OWN VIEWS AND OPINIONS, MAY BE SAID TO BE SCHEMING FOR THE EXTENSION OF THE WAR. WHILE IT SEEKS, ON THE ONE HAND, TO SECURE ITS REAR BY STABILIZING THE PACIFIC AREA, IT IS ENGAGED, ON THE OTHER HAND, IN AIDING GREAT BRITAIN AND PREPARING TO ATTACK, IN THE NAME OF SELF DEFENSE, GERMANY AND ITALY, TWO POWERS THAT ARE STRIVING TO ESTABLISH A NEW ORDER IN EUROPE. . IT IS EXERCISING IN CONJUNCTION WITH GREAT BRITAIN AND OTHER NATIONS, PRESSURE BY ECONOMIC POWER. RECOURSE TO SUCH PRESSURE AS THE MEANS OF DEALING WITH INTER NATIONAL RELATIONS SHOULD BE CONDEMNED AS IT IS AT TIMES MORE INHUMAN THAN MILITARY PRESSURE."
(PART 10 OF 14)
"IT IS A FACT OF HISTORY THAT COUNTRIES OF EAST ASIA FOR THE PAST HUNDRED YEARS OR MORE HAVE BEEN COMPELLED TO OBSERVE THE STATUS QUO UNDER THE ANGLO-AMERICAN POLICY OF IMPERIALISTIC EXPLOITATION AND TO SACRIFICE THEMSELVES TO THE PROSPERITY OF THE TWO NATIONS. THE JAPANESE GOVERNMENT CANNOT TOLERATE THE PERPETUATION OF SUCH A SITUATION."
(PART 13 OF 14)
"THE (American) PROPOSAL MENACES THE EMPIRE'S EXISTENCE ITSELF AND DISPARAGES ITS HONOR AND PRESTIGE. THEREFORE, VIEWED IN ITS ENTIRETY, THE JAPANESE GOVERNMENT REGRETS THAT IT CANNOT ACCEPT THE PROPOSAL AS A BASIS OF NEGOTIATION."
(Processed in War and Navy Departments by 9:00 P.M., December 6, 1941)
The above quotations were filled with fighting words. In Part 2 and again in Part 13, the United States is accused of action which threatens the existence of the Empire. In Part g, she is charged with the intention to attack Germany and Italy, and under the Tripartite Treaty, such an attack must at once bring Japan into the war. Again in the same Part, the United States is condemned for exerting inhuman economic pressure upon Japan. In Part 13, all idea of further negotiation is rejected. What could Part 14 add, when it arrived, to Washington's knowledge of what Japan intended to do? Such allegations in a communiqué‚ between nations could have only one meaning — war.
On the witness stand, neither General Marshall nor Admiral Stark could remember anything concerning his actions or movements on that Saturday. Although the veil of ignorance which shrouds their day has never been lifted, a few meager facts concerning the evening of each have come to light.
In his last appearance before the Joint Congressional Committee, the General testified that Mrs. Marshall re called to him that they had accepted no social invitations between November 1 and December 7, because she was convalescing from an accident in which she had suffered three broken ribs. He was therefore then convinced that he was at home throughout that Saturday evening and night. He also positively stated that he did not see President Roosevelt, that evening, nor talk to him on the telephone. This slight improvement of memory did not extend to his actions during the afternoon.
Captain Krick, U.S.N., the final witness before the Joint Congressional Committee, reconstructed much of Admiral Stark's Saturday evening. The Captain and his wife were the Starks' guests at dinner and at the National Theatre. After the performance, the party re turned to the Stark residence, where the Kricks remained for about 20 minutes.
On that evening, Admiral Stark arrived home about 7:00 P.M., ostensibly from the Navy Department. Before leaving for the theatre, the Admiral gave a house servant a memorandum containing the telephone number of the National Theatre. On his return, the Admiral was in formed by the servant that the White House had called during his absence, and he went to a study on the second floor, where there was a private telephone to the White House. It thus appears that President Roosevelt and Admiral Stark conversed over the telephone that Saturday night.
It is impossible to determine from the available evidence whether the important recipients of Magic saw any of the individual parts of the long message as these were successively completed during the afternoon.
According to his later testimony, Colonel Bratton told each of the recipients when he delivered the Pilot Message that he would keep in touch with the long Japanese message as the various parts became available. That was the natural reaction of a subordinate to his responsibilities to those seniors in connection with the receipt of the long-awaited answer to the American note of November 26.
If Admiral Stark remained in his office until after 6:00 P.M., as it appears that he did, it would be most surprising if he did not see many parts of the long message during the late afternoon. Several of these came to Captain McCollum's attention as soon as they were processed, and his professional training guarantees that he would show them at once to his immediate senior, Captain Wilkinson, and then to Admiral Stark and Rear Admiral Turner.
Captain Wilkinson told the Hewitt Investigation on June 5, 1945, that he had seen several of the individual parts of the message before he left his office at 6:00 P.M. on December 6, 1941. On December 17, 1945, before the Joint Congressional Committee he reversed himself and said that he did not see any of these during that afternoon. Captain McCollum's testimony on this point makes Captain Wilkinson's first remembrance on the witness stand seem the more likely.
There are many arresting features connected with the War and Navy Department's distribution of the 13-part message on Saturday night.
Colonel Bratton apparently never had any intention of making deliveries to Secretary Stimson and Generals Marshall, Gerow and Miles on that night, despite the fact that such night deliveries were his long-established practice and General Marshall was available at his home. The Colonel left one copy at the State Department for Secretary Hull. He finally contacted General Miles by telephone and reported to him what he had done. The General told him to make the remaining deliveries on Sunday morning.
Colonel Bratton's handling of the message was most surprising. He told the Joint Congressional Committee that it was a purely diplomatic message which did not hold particular significance for the Army, in view of the many such messages which had previously been received — a surprising appraisal by an experienced intelligence officer, unless he was repeating the reason which had been given to him, by direction of the three Generals, to explain why he was not to make his usual night deliveries to them on that Saturday. It is not conceivable that an officer of experience would consider delaying the delivery of such a vitally important message to the Army Chief of Staff upon his own responsibility.
The Navy Department distribution followed the normal procedure. Shortly before Commander Kramer left the Navy Department, he tried to contact Admirals Stark and Turner by telephone, but was unsuccessful. He commenced his delivery round shortly after 9:00 P.M. with the 13 parts of message #902. In succession, he delivered copies to the White House, to Secretary Knox, and finally to Captain Wilkinson. The latter was entertaining Brigadier General Miles and Captain Beardall, and all three officers read the message. The Commander reported to Captain Wilkinson that he could not get in contact with Admiral Stark and Rear Admiral Turner. The Captain ordered him to make the deliveries to those two officers on the following forenoon. It is difficult to understand why Admiral Stark's servant did not inform the Commander over the telephone that the Admiral was at the theatre. That would have enabled him to de liver the Admiral's copy at about 11:30 P.M.
Before Captain Beardall, the President's Aide, left the Navy Department at about 5:30 P.M., he knew that the 14-part message was coming in. He consequently ordered Lieutenant Schultz to wait in a small office near the White House mailroom for the delivery of this Magic. When Lieutenant Schultz gave the message to President Roosevelt, he was in his study with Mr. Hopkins. After reading the 13 parts, he looked up and said, "This means war." He wanted to get Admiral Stark on the telephone but was told that the Admiral was at the theatre. There was no mention of any other telephone call. Nothing was said about a warning to the Fleet during the time that Lieutenant Schultz was with the President.
We have seen that President Roosevelt almost certainly talked with Admiral Stark after the latter's return from the theatre. It is significant that President Roosevelt, having just read a message which to him meant war, gave the Admiral no orders to send a warning to the Hawaiian Commanders. He considered it necessary to send a message on November 26, when the American note, terminating the Washington negotiations, was handed to the Japanese Ambassadors. Why did he not order a similar message to be sent when he had definite proof that the American note had forced Japan to war? What more positive proof could there be that he did not want Admiral Kimmel and General Short to be fore warned on that Saturday night?
The most arresting feature of the non-delivery of the 13-part message to Generals Marshall and Gerow and Admirals Stark and Turner was the fact that these were the only four officers in the War and Navy Departments combined, who were authorized to send messages to the outlying commands, which contained evaluations of Japanese intentions.
In that connection, it must be noted that Brigadier General Miles ordered Colonel Bratton to delay the de livery of the 13-part message to General Marshall and Brigadier General Gerow until Sunday morning, and that Captain Wilkinson gave an identical order to Commander Kramer concerning the deliveries to Admiral Stark and Rear Admiral Turner. There are only two possible explanations that are conceivable from a military standpoint. Either the Directors of Military and Naval Intelligence knew that the four officers in question had already seen the significant parts of that message or they had previously been instructed that those seniors did not want to be given the message on that Saturday night. Otherwise, a message which "meant war" to the President of the United States was withheld from the Chief of Staff of the Army and the Chief of Naval operations solely upon the initiative of their subordinates. Such decisions on the same night by two juniors, no matter what their rank, would be one of the amazing happenings of military history — so amazing as to be al most unbelievable.
With no actual knowledge of the movements of General Marshall and Admiral Stark, it will never be known whether or not they conferred with the President during that afternoon. It would be most surprising if they did not. With the knowledge that the Japanese Declaration of War was about to be received, the Chief Executive would surely want to meet with the Heads of his Army and Navy. The late Saturday-night telephone conversation between the President and Admiral Stark, after the former had seen the Japanese communication, probably added nothing to what had already been said earlier in the day.
It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the top officers of the Army and Navy in Washington avoided the formal delivery to them of the Japanese 13-part message on Saturday evening and night. It could later be most difficult to explain to a wondering country why the outlying commands were not informed. There is a handy reason for every human decision. In this case, their sub ordinates could be told that they were fully conversant with the diplomatic situation — an unquestionable fact — and the delivery of one more Japanese diplomatic dispatch was therefore unnecessary on that night.
And so that last critical day passed and no word was sent to the Hawaiian Commanders. The Asiatic Commanders, on the other hand, through their Decrypting Unit on Corregidor, knew everything about the situation that Washington did. A nation, on the verge of war and facing a surprise attack upon its main fleet, and no last-minute warning to the Commander of that Fleet! A unique happening without parallel in history!
In this connection, there was an interesting happening in the Commandant's office of the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard, on the afternoon of December 9, 1941. Secretary Knox and his Aide, Captain Beatty, had flown to Pearl Harbor immediately after the attack, and these two, Admiral Kimmel, Rear Admiral Bloch, arid the writer were present while facts connected with the surprise attack were under discussion. Suddenly, the Secretary turned to Admiral Kimmel, and asked, "But what happened to the dispatch we sent you from Washington on the night of December 6th?" Admiral Kimmel replied that he had received no such message, either before or after the attack. In evident surprise, the Secretary turned to Captain Beatty for corroboration or explanation. Momentarily, the Captain's face was a study in dismay. He was so overcome with confusion that he never did answer the Secretary's question. Why? He obviously knew that no message had been sent to Admiral Kimmel by the Washington authorities on December 6. As Aide to the Secretary, the Captain was in a position to pick up many of the inside happenings. Did he know about the almost complete denial of information to the Hawaiian Commanders, while the Purple machine and the Decrypting Unit on Corregidor were keeping the Asiatic Commanders in complete touch with the developing political situation? Or was he merely embarrassed be cause his boss had trodden so close to undesirable disclosures as far as Washington was concerned? We will never know, but such embarrassment on the part of a senior officer is an unusual happening, especially on the part of one who knew his way around as well as did Captain Beatty. Were we close to some very real disclosures that Tuesday afternoon? In any event, Admiral Kimmel never succeeded in reopening the episode with the Secretary.
Sunday, December 7, in Washington
Between 4 A.M. and 6 A.M., the messages whose texts are set forth or indicated below were received in the Navy Department, where they were decoded and then sent to the War Department for the completion of their processing. The later handling of this Magic forms part of the narrative of this eventful day.
The last installment of Japanese Message #902, dated December 7, 1941, read:
(PART 14 OF 14)
"OBVIOUSLY IT IS THE INTENTION OF THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT TO CONSPIRE WITH GREAT BRITAIN AND OTHER COUNTRIES TO OBSTRUCT JAPAN'S EFFORTS TOWARD THE ESTABLISHMENT OF PEACE THROUGH THE CREATION OF A NEW ORDER IN EAST ASIA, AND ESPECIALLY TO PRESERVE ANGLO-AMERICAN RIGHTS AND INTERESTS BY KEEPING JAPAN AND CHINA AT WAR. THIS INTENTION HAS BEEN REVEALED CLEARLY DURING THE COURSE OF THE PRESENT NEGOTIATIONS. THUS THE EARNEST HOPE OF THE JAPANESE GOVERNMENT TO ADJUST JAPANESE-AMERICAN RELATIONS AND TO PRESERVE AND PROMOTE THE PEACE OF THE PACIFIC THROUGH COOPERATION WITH THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT HAS FINALLY BEEN LOST.
"THE JAPANESE GOVERNMENT REGRETS TO HAVE TO NOTIFY HEREBY THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT THAT IN VIEW OF THE ATTITUDE OF THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT IT CAN NOT BUT CONSIDER THAT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO BEACH AN AGREEMENT THROUGH FURTHER NEGOTIATIONS."
The text of two later dispatches, the first of which was known as the time-of-delivery message, was as follows:
Tokyo to Embassy, Washington, December 7, 1941 (#907):
"VERY IMPORTANT. RE MY #902. WILL THE AMBASSADORS PLEASE SUBMIT TO THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT (IF POSSIBLE TO THE SECRETARY OF STATE) OUR REPLY TO THE UNITED STATES AT 1:00 P.M. ON THE 7TH, YOUR TIME."
Tokyo to Embassy, Washington, December 7, 1941 (#910):
"AFTER DECIPHERING PART 14 OF MY #902 AND ALSO MY #907, #908, AND #909, PLEASE DESTROY AT ONCE THE REMAINING CIPHER MACHINE AND ALL MACHINE CODES. DISPOSE IN LIKE MANNER ALL SECRET DOCUMENTS."
Dispatches #908 and #909 contained messages of commendation for the Ambassadors and the members of the Embassy staff, respectively, and thus clearly indicated that their work in Washington was finished, a fact which was confirmed by the complete destruction of codes and secret documents ordered in Message #910.
Some officers, later on the witness stand, maintained that Tokyo Message #902 was not necessarily a Declaration of War. This argument is difficult to understand. Part 14 fully sustained the belligerent tone of the most Significant parts of the message received on Saturday. What could Japan have meant when she said to the United States that she had finally lost all hope of preserving peace in the Pacific and she considered further negotiations futile? What could the carefully timed de livery of the message have meant but war? What possible purpose could there have been behind such timing of a mere interruption of diplomatic relations? Further more, most of the officers in question were recipients of Magic, and knew on November 28 from Tokyo Dispatch #844 that the Japanese regarded the Washington conference as a complete failure, and that Tokyo had told the Consul General in Hong Kong on November 14 that such failure meant war with the Anglo-Saxon powers. It is remarkable how often important witnesses overlooked or forgot vital items of information which should have been indelibly impressed upon their minds, because that information was associated with tremendous events in which those witnesses were very prominent actors.
The last warning to the Japanese posts in Canada, Cuba, and the United States was the following message in the Hidden Words Code set up by Tokyo Circular #2409 (Chapter 6):
Tokyo to Consul General, Panama, December 7, 1941 (Circular #2494):
URGENT 92494 "KOYANAGI" RIJIYORI SEIRINOTUGOO ARUNITUKI "HATTORI" "MINAMI" KIENBUNKO SETURITU KIKINO KYOKAINGAKU SIKYUU DENPOO ARITASS S T O P — TOGO.
Distribution: Minister, Ottawa; and the following consulates: Panama; Havana; Honolulu; New York; Vancouver; San Francisco; Portland, Oregon; Seattle; New Orleans; Chicago; Los Angeles. (Decoded in the Navy Department, by 10:00 A.M., December 7, 1941)
The significant words are within quotes above, and the translation reads: "Relations between Japan and England and the United States are not in accordance with expectation." It is interesting to note the use of the code word hattori, as late as December 7, instead of either: kashiwagi, "we are commencing military action against......"; hatakeyama, "relations between Japan and ...... have been severed. This last attempt at deception could not then have had any effect upon the recipients of Magic.
When the meaning of this message was reported to the President and others, on the morning of December 7 the significance of minami was overlooked, and as a result, this message appeared to refer only to Anglo Japanese relations. This oversight, however, was immaterial as Washington then had ample evidence that Japan also intended war upon the United States.
It would be natural to expect that Admiral Stark and General Marshall would arrive in their offices very early on that Sunday morning. No matter what they had been told on Saturday, they would want to see the full reply to the American note of November 26, whose arrival was foretold by the Pilot Message, as soon as possible. They would want to be available and ready for any immediate action which might become necessary. Further more, Sunday was recognized as the most critical day of the week during highly strained relations with one of the Axis powers.
Admiral Stark arrived in his office at 9:25 A.M. and was immediately shown the full 14-part message, which had been available in the Navy Department for an hour. Captain Wilkinson then recommended that a warning be sent to the Pacific Fleet, but the Admiral did not consider that necessary. Even when he was shown the time-of-delivery message, at about 10:20, and was again advised to inform Admiral Kimmel of the implications of the situation, he still adhered to his decision of silence.
By 11:00 A.M., the Navy Department's distribution of all the Japanese dispatches received during that Sunday forenoon and of all available other Magic had been completed. President Roosevelt received his deliveries as promptly as did Admiral Stark. After the President's personal interest in a message to the Pacific Commands on November 26, his silence on that subject when faced with the significant messages of December 6 and 7, which meant to him that war had arrived, must again be noted.
Nothing that had come to General Marshall's attention on Saturday, or prior thereto, caused him to vary his normal Sunday routine on that fateful December 7. He started the day with his usual Sunday-morning horseback ride through the Virginia countryside.
Colonel Bratton received the War Department copies of Part 14 of the long message shortly after 8:30 A.M., and of the time-of-delivery dispatch about 9:00 A.M. Convinced that the latter meant a Japanese surprise attack somewhere in the Pacific, at or about 1:00 P.M., Washington time, he immediately attempted to get in touch with General Marshall. Unable to do so on account of the morning ride, he instructed the General's orderly that he had an urgent message that the General should see as soon as possible. The orderly said he would start at once in search of the General, as he knew where he usually rode. The General called the Colonel at 10:25, but did not want the messages brought to his quarters, as he was leaving shortly for the War Department, and would see them there after his arrival. General Marshall reached his office at 11:25.
Generals Gerow and Miles and Colonel Bratton followed the Chief of Staff into his office. The latter immediately commenced to read the 14-part message, a copy of which was lying on his desk. Colonel Bratton tried to show him the far more important time-of-delivery message, but the General would not be diverted until he had completed his perusal of the long message. And time was fleeting!
When the General finally saw the other message, all the officers present agreed that it indicated a Japanese attack upon U.S. Forces somewhere in the Pacific, at or about 1:00 P.M. What a time to reach that conclusion! Three hours sooner would have given time for a real air defense of Pearl Harbor, with all planes in the air in stead of being grouped closely together on the ground waiting for the slaughter.
The General then drafted a message to the Commanding Generals, U.S. Forces in the Far East, Caribbean Defense Command, Hawaiian Department, and Fourth Army. It read:
"JAPANESE ARE PRESENTING AT ONE P.M. EASTERN TIME TODAY WHAT AMOUNTS TO AN ULTIMATUM. ALSO THEY ARE UNDER ORDERS TO DESTROY THEIR CODE MA CHINES IMMEDIATELY. JUST WHAT SIGNIFICANCE THE HOUR SET MAY HAVE WE DO NOT KNOW BUT BE ON THE ALERT ACCORDINGLY. INFORM NAVAL AUTHORITIES OF THIS COMMUNICATION. . . . MARSHALL."
The General telephoned Admiral Stark that he was doing this, and asked if the Navy desired its Commanders included for information. At first, the Admiral said that he did not consider that to be necessary, but almost immediately, called back and asked that the Naval Commanders be so included.
The message was ready for encoding at 11:58 A.M. It was sent by Western Union to San Francisco, and by RCA commercial radio to Honolulu. It reached General Short's headquarters six hours after the Japanese attack, and Admiral Kimmel had it two hours later.
If General Marshall had used the trans-Pacific telephone, General Short and Admiral Kimmel would probably have had the message thirty or forty minutes before the attack began. That would have had little, if any, effect. Probably the only improvement that could have been made over the conditions which actually existed would have been that the crews of the ships would have been at their battle stations before the attack, which would have increased the anti-aircraft fire during the first fifteen minutes of the bombing. There would not have been sufficient time to man the planes, warm them up, and get them in the air. Nor could the mobile Army anti-aircraft batteries have reached their as signed positions at Pearl Harbor.
It was later explained that General Marshall did not use the trans-Pacific telephone with the scrambler attachment because the Army Communications experts did not consider that method sufficiently secure for such a message. This is difficult to understand. President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, during those times, talked to each other over the trans-Atlantic telephone, and guarded as their conversations undoubtedly were, much that they said was certainly not for German or Japanese ears.
The actions of Admiral Stark and General Marshall, on that Sunday morning, seem astounding. The final denial of information to the Hawaiian Commanders by the Washington authorities was an amazing happening, but judgment on Stark and Marshall should be reserved until the fundamental facts of the case can be reviewed and analyzed. Hence the following attempt at simple rationalization.
Everyone in Washington and London, acquainted with Magic, was convinced that Japan would initiate war with the Anglo-Saxon nations on that day. The British Government had so informed the Hungarian Government the day before. It was no accident that Mr. Churchill had Ambassador Winant and Mr. Averell Harriman as his guests at his country home when he received word of the Pearl Harbor attack. President Roosevelt, Admiral Stark and General Marshall were as conversant with the situation as was the British Prime Minister.
Admiral Stark arrived at his office decidedly too late for a day earmarked for such momentous events. That tardiness, however, made no difference. Once there, he twice refused to send any word to Hawaii: at 9:25, when faced with a message that meant war to the President and which later was an ultimatum to the Army Chief of Staff; at 10:20, when handed the time-of-delivery message which strongly indicated a surprise attack on the Pacific Fleet in Hawaiian waters to all those who were familiar with Japanese military history.
General Marshall held himself incommunicado, and thus avoided the formal delivery to him of the declaration of war and time-of-delivery messages until he reached his office at 11:25, too late for effective action.
If the significant meaning of these messages had been sent to the Hawaiian Commanders between 9:00 and 10:00 A.M., Washington time, three to four hours be fore the attack, by Navy radio or trans-Pacific telephone, the reception of the Japanese attack would have been a far different affair. The Army and Navy anti aircraft batteries would have been ready for action and, far more important, the defensive air forces would have been in the air. Very few, if any, of the large ships would have been able to clear the harbor, but with fighter protection, the losses would have been reduced tremendously.
This seems to say that if Admiral Stark had sent such a dispatch soon after he saw the long message, or if General Marshall had arrived at his office at 9:00 A.M., had seen the two messages which Colonel Bratton had for him at the time, and had reacted as he did after 11:25, the Japanese would have had a far less successful morning at Pearl Harbor. But the rationalization has not yet been carried far enough to permit of any final conclusions.
If the warning message had been sent to the Hawaiian Commanders, three hours before the attack, picture the Island of Oahu, commencing at 4:30 A.M. — telephone messages recalling personnel from their homes passing through centrals containing a goodly percentage of Japanese operators; roads to Pearl Harbor filled with Army guns, troop trucks, and other impedimenta; all roads crowded with officers and men returning to their stations; intensive activity at every Army post and Naval station; plane engines roaring at every Air station; ships raising steam and testing safety valves. The Japanese spies would have appreciated the meaning at once, and would have flashed the word to the Admiral in Command of the attacking forces. With all chance of surprise gone, the decision might well have been to cancel the attack. [1]
And the possibility of causing the cancellation of the surprise attack must have been the sole reason for not sending word to Hawaii on that Sunday morning. One short dispatch would not have increased the chance that the Japanese would deduce that their codes had been compromised — the Japanese Commander's reaction to the loss of the element of surprise would most probably have been that his force had been sighted, sometime during the night. One short definite dispatch would not have unduly overloaded the Washington-Pearl Harbor circuit, nor have confused Admiral Kimmel. The two principal Army and Navy reasons, later offered in explanation of the months of denial of information to Hawaii, therefore, could not possibly apply to the denial during the forenoon of Sunday, December 7.
Another astonishing feature connected with this last denial was that the time-of-delivery message definitely established that Pearl Harbor would be the scene of the attack. Added to the earlier evidence, there was no other plausible deduction. We have seen that there were only two attractive objectives for a Japanese surprise attack in the Pacific — the Fleet in Pearl Harbor and the Panama Canal. One o'clock in Washington was noon in Panama. On the other hand, it was 7:30 in Hawaii, the exact time that the planes would reach their objectives, based upon the assumption of a launching area about 150 miles from Pearl Harbor and a morning twilight take-off. Furthermore, 7:30 was the time that the crews of American ships were habitually piped to breakfast. An attack upon Pearl Harbor, shortly after that time, would thus conform in every particular to the accepted technique of those days for a surprise attack by carrier-based planes.
To deliver a mid-day attack on Panama, the carriers would have had to advance to the launching area during six hours of daylight through the crowded focal waters of the western approaches to the Canal — an operation that would never be considered in connection with a surprise attack.
It is difficult to believe that these inescapable facts were completely overlooked in the continuous conference in Admiral Stark's office during that forenoon.
There was never any military reason for preserving to the Japanese the opportunity of a surprise attack through the denial of information to the Hawaiian Commanders. Free to act, it is an absolute certainty that both Admiral Stark and General Marshall would have done everything in their power to prevent such an attack. And yet, on the morning of December 7, Washington refused to send one short message to Hawaii in time to cushion the effects of the Japanese attack!
That is the most revealing fact of the entire Pearl Harbor story. There is only one conceivable reason for it — nothing must be done to prejudice the chances of the attack, even at the last moment. Japan was about to bring war to the United States, and President Roosevelt did not intend that any American action should cause them to change their plans at the last minute.
It may surprise the reader to be told that none of this reasoning is intended as criticism of the principal actors.
General Marshall and Admiral Stark, as heads of the Army and Navy, could do nothing throughout but obey the orders of the Nation's Commander-in-Chief, unless they preferred to ask to be relieved from their posts of duty. In that case, it would have devolved upon their successors to carry out the orders. In this connection, it must be understood that officers of the Army and Navy are trained throughout their professional lives to obey implicitly every lawful order, no matter how distasteful it may be to them. Rigid adherence to this maxim is vital to that cohesion of action which is the primary requisite of the military art.
Those untutored in the demands of war will undoubtedly be shocked at the thought of deliberately accepting the ship and personnel losses that a surprise attack was Certain to entail. That viewpoint loses sight of the fact that armies and navies exist to perform any action demanded of them in the interests of their country. During the British evacuation at Dunkirk, Prime Minister Churchill had orders issued to the garrison at Calais to hold that position to the last man. That meant that every man was to give his life in that defense. The Churchill memoirs tell how soul-trying that decision was for him. But an early crumbling of the southern flank would have meant a far greater loss of life on the beaches at Dunkirk. It is an inescapable fact that the Commander in war is dealing with human lives. His great responsibility is to expend them to the best advantage. A brutal thought, but one of the fundamental facts of war!
The Pearl Harbor attack brought a thoroughly aroused United States into the war, and thereby assured the complete defeat of the Axis powers. The isolationism which then gripped the country would always have been a strong deterrent to a Congressional declaration of war. Also, such an initiation of the war would have badly handicapped the later national effort, due to the divided sentiments of the people regarding the necessity for fighting. If this is a fair appraisal of President Roosevelt's line of reasoning, as it seems to be, his decision to entice the Japanese to deliver a surprise attack upon the Fleet in Pearl Harbor must be accepted as thoroughly sound from his standpoint, despite the losses which resulted. [2]
NOTES:
The foregoing is a brief paraphrase of Honolulu Consul General Kita's dispatch to Tokyo #245, dated December 3, 1941. This information was not available to the U.S. authorities prior to the Pearl Harbor attack, as it was not decoded in the Navy Department until December 11, 1941.
During the writer's tenure of duty as the Commandant of the Fust Naval District, in the late days of World War II, a leading doctor of Boston told him that, on December 7, 1941, a prominent American, very close to the Roosevelt administration, entered a Boston hospital (The New England Baptist) for an operation on the following day. Early the next morning, under the influence of pre-operational medication, he suddenly attempted to get out of bed, exclaiming, "I have to get out of here. Everything happened just as we expected, but our losses were terrible."
DURING 1944, the Pearl Harbor secret became very important politically. This was so because Mr. Roosevelt was seeking his fourth election to the Presidency, and Mr. John T. Flynn's pamphlet, The Truth About Pearl Harbor, had encouraged the Republicans to seek the political advantages to be gained by agitating the subject as much as possible, while the Democrats used every conceivable stratagem to suppress it. They wanted the subject kept quiescent until after the national elections at least, and until the end of the war, if possible. A Congressional Investigation of Pearl Harbor was always inevitable, but this would necessarily be a public affair whose developments were not easy to foresee, so the Democratic board of strategy sought by every conceivable means to postpone it as long as possible.
Their delaying tactics to that end were: (1) the Congressional Act which ordered the two Service in inquiries; (2) the Marshall letters to forestall the use of the Pearl Harbor story by Governor Dewey during his election campaign; (3) the use of Republican members of the House Naval Affairs Committee to prevent any move of their party for a Congressional Pearl Harbor investigation during the continuance of the war.
The Act of Congress Which Directed the Two Service Inquiries
On June 13, 1944, the President approved an Act of Congress that ordered the Secretaries of War and Navy to investigate the Pearl Harbor attack (Chapter 12). This was the first important step to prevent a public inquiry into the matter at that time, and the Democratic-controlled Congress had significantly taken that action. For, there was little prospect that a Congressional investigation would be ordered while the Service inquiries were in session, and those inquiries were held behind closed doors. The public received no inkling of the results of these secret inquiries until August 29, 1945, when the Secretaries of War and Navy simultaneously issued very meager statements of the findings and opinions of the two investigations, which carried no suggestion of the true Pearl Harbor story.
The reason given for the Congressional Act was that it was conceived to forestall the statute of limitations, which after December 7, 1944, would prevent the court-martial trials of officers of the Army and Navy believed to be guilty of serious derelictions of duty. Many members of Congress undoubtedly voted for the Act for that reason, but those interested in preserving the Pearl Harbor secret, the Democratic board of strategy, would never willingly have seen any officer brought to trial by General Court-Martial. The rights of the defense in such a trial would always have given an astute lawyer the opportunity to break the Pearl Harbor story wide open — a risk that President Roosevelt and his close advisers would always want to avoid, if at all possible.
General Marshall's Letters to Governor Dewey
During the last two months of the Presidential campaign of 1944, there were persistent rumors that Governor Dewey planned to use one of his closing speeches to make some dramatic disclosures concerning the Pearl Harbor disaster. As the repetition of the military-naval features of that defeat could then have no decisive political effects, this could only mean that he intended to establish President Roosevelt's personal share in the responsibility for that event.
The method used by the members of the Democratic board of strategy to prevent the Republican candidate from taking this action evidenced their serious concern regarding what could have been said about the President in connection with Pearl Harbor. The wartime prestige of the Commander of the Army was utilized to stop Governor Dewey from bringing the Pearl Harbor story into the campaign.
General Marshall wrote two letters to the Republican candidate on this subject. The first of these was delivered in Oklahoma City by a trusted messenger, and requested the recipient not to read beyond the first page, unless he did so with the understanding that he would maintain secrecy regarding the letter and its contents. Governor Dewey refused to be blindly bound by such a stipulation and returned the letter with its significant pages unread.
The General then wrote a second letter, which made no attempt to bind the Governor to secrecy regarding it. The salient features of this letter were: (1) Governor Dewey was requested not to use the Pearl Harbor story during the campaign, as this action would be detrimental to the nation's war effort; (2) it stated that Admiral King had seen the letter, and fully agreed; (3) in place of the former request for secrecy, it said that President Roosevelt had no knowledge of the letter.
It can, at once, be seen that this letter was the most drastic means that could be employed at the time to suppress the story. To disregard such advice from these officers could be treading dangerously close to the path of disloyalty. And that was the view that Governor Dewey took. He told his campaign manager that, no matter what he might think of the opinion, a private citizen must accept it from such a source in time of war.
A brief analysis of the letter proves most interesting. When the Commanders of the Army and the Navy agree that a particular action will harm the nation's war effort, they must mean that certain military aspects will be adversely affected, because the military is their particular province. As there was no reason for secrecy regarding the American strategy or tactics at Pearl Harbor, the only military features whose public discussion might affect the war effort were: the American naval losses; the breaking of the Japanese codes.
By 1944, the American losses at Pearl Harbor had long ceased to affect the Pacific operations. Our Navy was then immeasurably superior to that of Japan, and our forces were everywhere on the offensive in the Pacific war.
It would be no news to Japan to learn that her codes had been broken before Pearl Harbor. Washington had two intercepted dispatches in April, 1941, from Berlin to Tokyo stating that the United States was reading the Japanese messages. In July, 1942, the Chicago Tribune carried a feature article which attributed the American victory at Midway to the breaking of the Japanese codes. Our high command soon had unmistakable evidence that this information had reached Tokyo. So, one more reference to broken Japanese codes could cause no concern to General Marshall and Admiral King in the last year of the war.
In 1944, therefore, there was no military necessity for the suppressing of the Pearl Harbor story, unless the two Commanders meant that the defeat of President Roosevelt would adversely affect the nation's war effort. If that was what was meant, a more forthright approach would have been to ask Governor Dewey to withdraw from the campaign.
The statement that President Roosevelt did not know of the letter was its most arresting feature. The Democratic board of strategy clearly recognized the political risk which the letter represented, and were doing what they could to minimize that risk. If Governor Dewey refused to be deterred by the letter, and not only told his version of the Pearl Harbor story, but also of the receipt of this letter, the written communication could become a terrific political boomerang.
President Roosevelt was a consummate politician, and no important step in his political campaigns was ever taken without his knowledge and consent. It is inconceivable that the strategy employed to stop Governor Dewey's use of the Pearl Harbor story, with its attendant risks, was undertaken without the President's approval of its general features. It is equally certain that General Marshall, who saw the President almost daily, would not consider taking such a dangerous political step entirely upon his own responsibility. He would make sure in advance that his contemplated action had the approval of the Democratic board of strategy.
We can therefore conclude that President Roosevelt approved the broad plan to stop Governor Dewey on the Pearl Harbor story, but that the detailed method of approach to the Governor was concocted by the General irk conference with the President's principal campaign advisers. Thus, it could have been literally true that President Roosevelt did not know of the letter.
This was an important step in the campaign to keep President Roosevelt's intimate connection with the Pearl Harbor catastrophe from the knowledge of the American public.
Members of the House Naval Affairs Committee Are Used To Prevent Congressional Investigation During Continuance of the War
Having preserved the Pearl Harbor secret through most of 1944, the Democratic board of strategy sought to continue this security for the story at least until the end of the war.
After the conclusion of the Naval Court of Inquiry and after the Record of its Proceedings had passed over the desk of Rear Admiral Thomas L. Gatch, the Judge Advocate General of the Navy, that officer was called into consultation by Secretary of the Navy Forrestal. The purpose of this conference was to consider ways and means of preventing a Congressional Investigation until after the war. Admiral Gatch suggested that this could best be accomplished by enlisting the help of influential Republican Congressmen. The choice of these was left to the Admiral, and he selected the following three members of the House Naval Affairs Committee: Bates of Massachusetts, Maas of Minnesota, and Mott of Oregon. Mr. Maas could not be present when the conference was held, but Admiral Gatch says, "I told Bates and Mott everything that I knew about Pearl Harbor, and I think I knew everything about it, told them why I was telling them, and told them why we couldn't have an investigation while we were fighting the Japs, and asked them to head it off." And they did, concludes the Admiral. [1]
The last step in the campaign to keep the true Pearl Harbor story from public knowledge was the Congressional Investigation which, as we shall soon see, successfully maintained the secret.
NOTES:
THE Winds episode never would have attained the importance which it acquired in the Pearl Harbor story, if it were not for the changes of testimony and other incidents concerning it which developed mainly during the Hewitt Inquiry, and the undue emphasis given to it in the Congressional Investigation — as discussed in this chapter.
Once Washington and London knew, from the Tokyo dispatches of December 1 and 2, 1941 (Tokyo Circular #2444 and Tokyo dispatch to Embassy, Washington #867, Chapter 6), that the Japanese diplomatic and consular posts in American and British territories had been ordered to destroy their codes and secret files, no further evidence was needed to convince the two Anglo-Saxon Governments that Japan was on the verge of initiating the war. The receipt of the Winds execute on December 4 was thus merely additional corroboration that Japan so intended.
Prior to the Hewitt Inquiry, the testimony unquestionably established that a Winds execute, involving the United States, was received in the Navy Department on December 4, 1941, In fact, the authenticity of that execute was not challenged until much later, and during the three days intervening before the attack, there was nothing to detract from its value as corroborative intelligence. From the purely military standpoint, that is the essential and outstanding fact of the entire Winds incident.
As already stated in Chapter 6, the Winds and Hidden Words codes were set up by Tokyo to increase the security of code-destruction messages to ministries and consulates, which were not equipped to handle the Purple code. The Hidden Word episode has already been fully discussed. The Winds code was established by the following two messages:
Tokyo to Embassy, Washington, November 18, 1941 (Circular #2353):
"REGARDING THE BROADCAST OF A SPECIAL MESSAGE IN AN EMERGENCY. IN CASE OF EMERGENCY (DANGER OF CUTTING OFF OUR DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS) AND THE CUTTING OF INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS, THE FOLLOWING WARNING WILL BE ADDED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAILY JAPANESE LANGUAGE SHORT WAVE NEWS BROADCAST.
"(1) IN CASE OF JAPAN-U.S. RELATIONS: HIGASHI NO KAZE AME. [2]
"(2) JAPAN-U.S.S.R. RELATIONS: KITANO KAZE KUMORI. [3]
"(3) JAPAN-BRITISH RELATIONS: NISHI NO KAZE HARE [4]
"THIS SIGNAL WILL BE GIVEN IN THE MIDDLE AND AT THE END OF A WEATHER FORECAST AND EACH SENTENCE WILL BE REPEATED TWICE. WHEN THIS IS HEARD, PLEASE DESTROY ALL CODE PAPERS, ETC. THIS IS AS YET TO BE A COMPLETELY SECRET ARRANGEMENT.
"FORWARD AS URGENT INTELLIGENCE."
(Decoded in the Navy Department, November 28, 1941)
The last F.C.C. intercept (page 141) is the only extant copy of an authentic Winds Code execute. It will be noted how carefully its wording ties it to the provisions of Circular #2353, especially the very necessary identification of the single phrase as a "weather forecast."
Tokyo to Embassy, Washington, November 19, 1941 (Circular #2354):
"WHEN OUR DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS ARE BECOMING DANGEROUS, WE WILL ADD THE FOLLOWING AT THE BEGINNING AND END OF OUR GENERAL INTELLIGENCE BROADCASTS:
"(1) IF IT IS JAPAN-U.S. RELATIONS, 'HIGASHI'
"(2) JAPAN-RUSSIA RELATIONS, 'KITA'
"(3) JAPAN-BRITISH RELATIONS (INCLUDING THAI, MALAYA, AND N.E.I.) 'NISHI'
"THE ABOVE WILL BE REPEATED FIVE TIMES AND INCLUDED AT BEGINNING AND END.
"RELAY TO RIO DE JANEIRO, BUENOS AIRES, MEXICO CITY, SAN FRANCISCO."
(Decoded in the Navy Department, November 26, 1941)
The long delay in the processing of these two dispatches was, in all probability, due to the fact that they were not sent in the Purple Code, to which priority was then being given by both the Army and Navy Decrypting Units.
As soon as the contents of these two messages were known in Washington, the following steps were taken to intercept the execute of the Winds Code: Naval high-power radio stations were informed and ordered to monitor the various Japanese broadcasts; similar instructions were issued to Army radio stations in San Francisco and Hawaii; at the request of the War Department, the Federal Communications Commission's intercept stations were alerted to guard the required broadcast frequencies.
It should be appreciated that the broadcasts mentioned in these two dispatches were entirely different systems. The code set up in #2353 was designed for use in a daily Tokyo schedule of high-frequency voice broadcasts, while the code words in #2354 were to be inserted in a daily Tokyo high-frequency schedule, transmitted by key in Morse Code for the benefit of the personnel in Japanese diplomatic and consular posts.
At the same time that arrangements were made to monitor the Japanese broadcasts for them, cards containing the English translation of the three Japanese phrases and their decoded meanings were prepared in the Navy Department, and were distributed to the recipients of Magic. This was part of a special method which was set up in that Department for reporting the receipt of the Winds execute. The execute, when received, was to be delivered to the Director of Naval Communications, Rear Admiral Noyes, who made himself responsible for the dissemination of this information. The purpose of the cards was to permit this to be done by carefully phrased telephone messages.
There appears to have been no logical reason for this lone departure from the routine procedure for the delivery of Magic, and it apparently led to many mistakes in the handling of the Winds execute.
The story of the Winds execute in the testimony before the Naval Court of Inquiry and the Army Pearl Harbor Board is set forth in the, following paragraphs.
About 8:30 A.M., on December 4, Lieutenant Commander Kramer followed the Communications Watch Officer into Commander Safford's office, with the remark, "Here it is." The remark was intended to convey that the teletype copy of a message, which the Watch Officer had in his hand, was an execute of the Winds Code. Commander Kramer told the Court that the execute contained the Japanese phrase, "Higashi No Kaze Ame" — East Wind, Rain — which meant war or a break in diplomatic relations with the United States.
Commander Safford followed the Watch Officer out of his office, presumably to witness the delivery to Rear Admiral Noyes.
The Admiral made at least two telephone reports of the receipt of the Winds execute; to Rear Admiral Turner and to Colonel Sadtler, acting Chief Signal Officer, War Department. Admiral Stark also was given this information, according to Admiral Noyes' testimony before the Naval Court. Admiral Stark did not remember the incident when he testified.
Colonel Sadtler at once reported the receipt of the execute to Brigadier General Miles and Colonel Bratton. When it developed that he did not know to which countries the execute referred, he was ordered to find out. Over the phone, Admiral Noyes was not certain, but thought that the execute indicated a break with Great Britain. Asked to verify this, he replied that he did not then have time, as he was expected in Admiral Stark's office for a conference.
When this conversation was reported to General Miles, he decided that the code-destruction messages, already received, made Japanese war intentions perfectly clear, and the exact meaning of the Winds execute consequently did not matter — the obvious conclusion.
Rear Admiral Ingersoll, the Assistant Chief of Naval Operations, told the Naval Court he was informed of the receipt of the Winds execute by an officer who had in his hand a copy of a message which that officer definitely regarded as the execute. It will be noted that Admiral Noyes informed Admiral Turner, but that Admiral Ingersoll received his report through other channels. The reason for this was that the last named officer was not one of the seven recipients of Magic on the Navy Department's distribution list, whereas Admiral Turner was.
It appears that the delivery of the Winds execute by the Director of Naval Communications led to innumerable errors: no copies were sent to the War Department; the two Naval Intelligence recipients of Magic, Captain Wilkinson and Commander McCollum, were not informed of the receipt of the execute; there is a strong probability that no copy of the execute was ever delivered to the Navy Department files. Captain Safford testified that he saw a copy in the files about mid-December, when documentary data was being assembled for the Roberts Commission. No one else saw a file copy, then or later. There was definitely no copy in the files during the inquiries from mid-1944 to the end of the Congressional Investigation.
As a result of its monitoring for the Winds execute, the Federal Communications Commission reported to the War and Navy Departments the following translations of intercepts heard on Japanese-language voice broadcasts:
Weather Messages from Tokyo Station JVW3, 2200 GMT, December 4, 1941:
"TOKYO TODAY NORTH WIND SLIGHTLY STRONGER MAY BECOME CLOUDY TOMORROW SLIGHTLY CLOUDY AND FINE WEATHER.
"KANAGAWA PREFECTURE TODAY NORTH WIND CLOUDY FROM AFTERNOON MORE CLOUDS.
"CHIBA PREFECTURE TODAY NORTH WIND CLEAR MAY BECOME SLIGHTLY CLOUDY OCEAN SURFACE CALM."
(Reported to the Navy Department, 9:05 P.M. EST, December 4, 1941)
Weather Message from Tokyo Station JVW3, 2130 GMT, December 5, 1941:
"TODAY NORTH WIND MORNING CLOUDY AFTERNOON CLEAR BEGIN CLOUDY EVENING. TOMORROW NORTH WIND AND LATER FROM THE SOUTH." (Repeated three times.)
(Reported to Colonel Bratton at his home, 7:05 P.M. EST, December 5, 1941)
Weather Message in Broadcast from Tokyo Station JLG4, 0002 GMT, December 8, 1941; Repeated from Station JGJ, 0035 GMT, December 8, 1941:
"THIS IS THE MIDDLE OF THE NEWS BUT TODAY SPECIALLY AT THIS POINT I WILL GIVE THE WEATHER FORECAST:
"WEST WIND CLEAR: [5] WEST WIND CLEAR."
(Entire message repeated twice on both broadcasts.) (Reported to Lt. Col. Dusenbury at his home, 8:00 P.M. EST, December 7, 1941)
Neither of the two intercepts of December 4 and 5 appears to be a Winds execute, although there is some slight doubt about the second one. The Winds Code did not provide for negative information; there was no way of saying that there would be no break with a particular country. The December message was repeated three times in the middle of the broadcast, and there was an alternation of cloudy and clear skies, while the North Wind was going to shift to the South. This might have been an attempt to reverse the meaning of North Wind Cloudy, to inform Japanese diplomatic posts that there would be no break with Russia.
The last of the three messages reported by the F. C. C. was unquestionably an execute of the Winds Code, despite the fact that its broadcasts were made several hours after the Pearl Harbor attack. For, 0002, December 8, Greenwich time, is 1:32 P.M., December 7, Hawaiian time.
The two late broadcasts of that message, however, were eminently logical. The world then had news of the Pearl Harbor attack, and knew that the United States and Japan were at war. But the phrase, Nishi No Kaze Hare, meant war between Great Britain and Japan, and this was the final effort to get that code-destruction message to any Japanese post in British territory which had missed the earlier orders.
Now, a look at the salient features of the Winds testimony before the Hewitt Inquiry and the Joint Congressional Committee, and the changes in that testimony from that previously given to earlier investigations.
There was no essential variation in the evidence of two witnesses. Admiral Ingersoll again stated that the Winds execute had been reported to him. Before the Joint Congressional Committee, Captain Safford, as on all his other appearances as a witness, was positive that a Winds execute, involving the United States, had been received on the morning of December 4.
Before Admiral Hewitt and the Joint Congressional Committee, Captain Kramer testified that he was then convinced that the Winds execute was received on December 5, and referred to Anglo-Japanese relations, but not to U.S.-Japanese relations. In his earlier account before the Naval Court of Inquiry, he placed the receipt of the Winds execute on December 4, and stated unequivocally that the teletype copy contained the Japanese phrase, "Higashi No Kaze Ame," which meant war or a break in Japanese relations with the United States.
Admiral Turner did not testify before the Hewitt Inquiry. His evidence before the Joint Congressional Committee on the receipt of the Winds execute was radically different from that which he had previously given to the Naval Court of Inquiry. According to his earlier account, Rear Admiral Noyes had reported to him that a Winds execute had been received. In answer to further questioning, he stated that he knew that this execute meant a break in relations or more probably war between Japan and the United States.
Before the later Congressional Investigation, Admiral Turner testified that Rear Admiral Noyes called him on the telephone, on December 5, and said, "The first weather report has come in" and that its text was, "North Wind Clear." The two Admirals agreed that there was something wrong with this message. The nearest approach to it in the Winds Code was "North Wind Cloudy," which meant a break with Russia. Admiral Turner thought that this supposed Winds execute could possibly have been a paraphrase of the Federal Communications Commission's intercept of December 4 or that of December 5.
At this point, it is logical to inquire what caused these radical changes in important earlier testimony concerning the receipt of a Winds execute.
During his cross-examination before the Joint Congressional Committee, Admiral Turner explained his changed testimony in these words: "Up until the time that I returned to San Francisco about two months ago, I thought the entire thing in that Winds message was authentic and they had merely made a mistake about that 'North Wind so-and-so.' On talking to some of the officers, who had gone into it, in San Francisco, why, they said it had been found out later that it was a false broadcast picked out of the ordinary news, but it was news to me at the time."
In other words, Admiral Turner's evidence before the Naval Court of Inquiry was his own remembrance of the Winds incident, while his later testimony before the Joint Congressional Committee was essentially the repetition of conversations in San Francisco which had caused him to revise his own memories of the incident. The officers must have been most persuasive because: Admiral Turner is not a person whose mind can be easily changed; there were no extant copies of the Winds execute nor any other documentary evidence with which to buttress the arguments that did cause his altered remembrance of the event.
Captain Kramer, during his testimony before the Joint Congressional Committee, said that he had several talks with the Counsel of the Hewitt Inquiry, prior to his appearance as a witness before the Admiral. The subjects of these discussions were the discrepancies between his testimony and that of others before the Naval Court of Inquiry. These conflicts could only have concerned the Winds incident, as the remainder of Captain Kramer's former evidence dealt with his duties in connection with the handling of Magic. As we have seen, his account of the receipt of the Winds execute varied in the Hewitt Inquiry and the Congressional Investigation from that which he gave before the Naval Court.
Captain Safford underwent an identical experience, prior to the first of his three appearances before the Hewitt Inquiry. The Captain concluded that the purpose of his preliminary talks with the Counsel was to cause him to change or modify his former testimony concerning the Winds execute. This deduction caused him, immediately following each such meeting, to record certain of the Counsel's remarks and his impression of them. The reading of these memoranda formed a part of his testimony before the Joint Congressional Committee.
One extract read:
"His purpose seemed to be to refute the testimony (before earlier investigations) that was unfavorable to any one in Washington, to beguile 'hostile witnesses' into changing their stories, and to introduce an element of doubt where he could not effect a reversal of testimony."
The memoranda also attributed the following statements to the Counsel during the course of their three conferences:
"You are the only one who seems to have seen the Winds execute message;
"How could the Winds execute have been heard on the east coast of the United States and not at places nearer Japan?
"It is doubtful if there ever was a Winds execute message;
"It is no reflection on your mentality to have your memory play you tricks — after such a long period;
"Numerous witnesses that you have named have denied all knowledge of a Winds execute message."
According to his memorandum, at the conclusion of his testimony, Captain Safford asked Admiral Hewitt, off the record, if there was still any doubt in the latter's mind that a broadcast of the Winds execute had been made, and that this was received in the War and Navy Departments. Before the Admiral could reply, the Counsel said, "Of course, I am not conducting the case, and I do not know what Admiral Hewitt has decided, but to me it is very doubtful that the so-called Winds execute message was ever sent." Admiral Hewitt then added that there was no evidence of a Winds execute except Captain Safford's unsupported testimony, and he thought that the Captain was confusing another message containing the name of a wind with the one he was expecting to receive.
Admiral Hewitt's statement, that there was no other evidence to support Captain Safford's testimony concerning the receipt of a Winds execute, was most surprising. Actually, if Admiral Noyes could have been persuaded that his negative evidence before the Naval Court regarding that receipt was in error, all conflict of testimony on that point before that body would have disappeared.
Three important witnesses on the Winds episode in the Naval Court of Inquiry did not testify before the Hewitt Inquiry — Admirals Turner, Ingersoll and Noyes. Admiral Turner was not available, as he was in the midst of the war in the western Pacific. Admiral Ingersoll, on duty in San Francisco, was apparently not summoned because of a lack of interest in a repetition of his former evidence. Admiral Noyes was not called because the Inquiry was so satisfied with his testimony before the Naval Court, that a verbatim transcript of that testimony was incorporated in its Record of Proceedings by the mere process of copying it from the recorded hearings of that earlier inquiry. A truly remarkable procedure, and a strong indication of the bias of the Hewitt Inquiry.
Rear Admiral Noyes could have been a useful witness. On December 4, when he reported the receipt of the Winds execute to Admiral Stark and Rear Admiral Turner, he must have been satisfied that the execute was genuine. The following line of questioning was inescapable. As he made himself responsible for its delivery, what had he done about reporting the message to the President and the Secretary of the Navy? Why did he fail to report the message to Captain Wilkinson and Commander McCollum, two recipients of Magic who never heard of the execute? Did he send the copy of the Winds execute to be filed with the other Magic, and if not, what disposal did he make of it? When and how did he discover that this execute was not genuine? Why did he not have copies of the message delivered to the War Department, in accordance with long-established procedure?
It is an inescapable fact that the best evidence concerning the receipt of the Winds execute was the original testimony given before the Naval Court of Inquiry and the Army Pearl Harbor Board. That represented the best remembrance of each witness, before doubts were planted in his mind by the arguments of others.
By mid-1945, many features of the Winds episode could help to shake the confidence of a witness in his earlier testimony, such as: the lapse of time since its occurrence; the confusion caused by the F.C.C. reports of the North Winds broadcasts of December 4 and 5, and of the genuine Winds execute of December 7, hours after the attack; faulty distribution of the Winds execute on December 4, due to the failure to follow the established procedure for the distribution of Magic; the absence of a copy of the Winds execute in the Magic files.
After the two Service investigations, in the summer and early fall of 1944, persistent rumors were circulated that a Japanese code had been broken and that as a result, it had been known in Washington that war with Japan was imminent, but that this information had never been transmitted to the Hawaiian Commanders. Even after the Congressional Investigation, there was no popular appreciation of the complete breakdown of the Japanese diplomatic codes, Washington's resultant pre-knowledge of Japan's every intention, and the denial of that information to the Hawaiian Commanders.
The guardians of the Pearl Harbor secret consequently appear to have recognized the threat that the Winds episode could be to that secret, and between late 1944 and the convening of the Congressional Investigation, a campaign seems to have been waged to orient the evidence on the Winds episode so as to discredit all idea of the receipt of a genuine Winds execute. The testimony before the later inquiries, especially that of the Joint Congressional Committee, strongly supports that deduction. In this connection, one answer of Admiral Ingersoll is noteworthy. A Senator asked him, "You never knew until after (the) attack that that was not a genuine Winds message?" He replied, "I do not know that I ever knew until some time after the Court of Inquiry last year, that that was not a genuine message. I believed it was." The frankness of this answer precludes the thought that the Admiral had any suspicion of the campaign. The significance of this incident lies in the timing of his discovery that the execute was not genuine.
The fact that Admirals Ingersoll and Turner believed until 1944 or later that the execute of the Winds Code reported to them on December 4, 1941 was authentic means that the execute was treated as authentic in the Navy Department during the only period that mattered, December 4-7, 1941. For, Admiral Turner was the officer in that Department charged with the responsibility for sending the information obtained from such intercepts to the outlying commands, and Admiral Ingersoll, as Admiral Stark's principal assistant, would, as a matter of normal procedure, check to assure that any action which he considered necessary as a result of the receipt of the intercept had been taken.
The Majority Report of the Joint Congressional Committee totally overlooked these facts when it devoted its entire Appendix E to discrediting the receipt of an authentic Winds execute — a fitting climax to the undue laboring of the Winds episode throughout the Congressional Investigation, apparently for no good reason except for the possible effect upon public opinion.
It must be appreciated that a postwar Congressional Investigation was always inevitable. That would be in answer to popular demand and would be an open hearing. All previous inquiries had been secret. With the press and general public alive to the possible disclosures of the Winds episode, this incident could conceivably break the Pearl Harbor secret wide open.
When the Joint Congressional Committee convened in November, the affirmative evidence concerning the receipt of a genuine Winds execute had been reduced to the testimony of Captain Safford plus the fact that the receipt of an execute had been reported to Admiral Ingersoll. All other testimony before that body cast serious doubt upon the receipt of a genuine execute involving the United States. Cross-examination developed the conflict between this evidence and that given by the same witnesses before earlier inquiries, but the general effect of this appears to have been negligible.
The Winds testimony before the Joint Congressional Committee was so satisfactory to the Administration forces that it was prolonged beyond all necessity and without any regard for a due sense of proportion.
Captain Safford, the one witness who continued to insist that a genuine Winds execute involving the United States had been received on December 4, was subjected to an unbelievably harsh cross-examination. At one point, his private correspondence was offered in evidence, and certain remarks therein concerning Admiral Stark produced a line of questioning whose main purpose appeared to be to humiliate the Captain, by publicly developing his critical inmost thoughts regarding his senior officer. Finally, in great embarrassment, the Captain remained mute in the face of a particularly pointed question, and his hazing on this subject was discontinued.
Many witnesses were put on the stand merely to testify that they had never heard of a Winds execute. Dispatches from the British and Dutch Governments were introduced to show that none of the stations of those countries had heard a Winds execute. Testimony that Manila never intercepted such a message was also produced.
The American authorities in Tokyo were asked to investigate the Winds episode from the Japanese end, and the resulting evidence was introduced, although it was decidedly tainted. When first questioned the Japanese had never heard of a Winds Code setup. Confronted with Circulars #2353 and #2354, they then stated that no execute had ever been sent, despite documentary evidence that one was sent on December 7, Washington time. A search of the Tokyo files was not conclusive, as during the latter half of August, 1945, the Japanese had started to burn their secret files, and many had been destroyed before an order from the Emperor stopped the operation.
Why was the Winds episode thus so labored and exaggerated before the Joint Congressional Committee?
There seems to be only one logical answer. The Administration forces were saying to the American people, "Here is the evidence of the falsity of the rumor regarding the broken Japanese Code which was to produce such dramatic disclosures of the story behind the Pearl Harbor story. There was never anything to the supposed incident. If your suspicions are again aroused, remember the exploded myth of the Winds episode."
And through all this, there is no gainsaying the fact that the best evidence concerning the execute of the Winds Code was that presented before the Service investigations, when the witnesses were giving their testimony based upon their own undiluted memories.
In conclusion, we must stress again that the main importance of the Winds Code and its execute to the Pearl Harbor story lies in the orientation of testimony concerning it, which occurred between October, 1944, and November, 1945, and in the undue emphasis that was placed upon the discrediting of the whole incident in the proceedings and in the Majority Report of the Joint Congressional Committee.
NOTES:
SINCE the Pearl Harbor attack, there have been eight investigations of that catastrophe. These are herein identified and briefly discussed.
The Roberts Commission, December 18, 1941, to January 23, 1942, was convened by order of the President, to ascertain and report the facts relating to the Japanese attacks upon Pearl Harbor, especially to determine whether any derelictions of duty or errors of judgment on the part of U.S. Army or Navy personnel had contributed to the enemy successes. The members of the Commission were: Associate Justice Roberts, U.S. Supreme Court; Admiral Standley, U.S.N. Ret.; Rear Admiral Reeves, U.S.N. Ret.; Major General McCoy, U.S.A. Ret.; Brigadier General McNarney, U.S.A.
The Commission functioned primarily as a fact-finding body. Such interested parties as Admiral Kimmel and General Short were not allowed the benefit of counsel, and were not permitted to hear the testimony of any other witnesses. They thus had no chance to cross-examine witnesses, and had no knowledge of any of the evidence before the Commission, other than their own.
The only really effective proceedings of the Commission were those held in Hawaii. The sessions in Washington were primarily to obtain background information to aid the Hawaiian hearings. Not only did the Roberts Commission thus Concern itself entirely with the happenings in Hawaii to the exclusion of what occurred in Washington, but one of the incidents in Connection with its proceedings in Hawaii is worthy of close scrutiny.
The stenographic staff hired by the Roberts Commission was unbelievably inept. When Admiral Kimmel's recorded testimony was submitted to him for verification, it was found to be filled with errors and at times was completely unintelligible. Documents from which the Admiral had read were not properly identified, and large sections of such testimony were often found to be entirely omitted. Furthermore, the questions and answers were frequently so badly garbled as to make no sense. Admiral Kimmel and the author spent two days and nights in an attempt to restore a modicum of accuracy to the record of this testimony.
When this work was completed to the best of their ability, the author took the corrections to Mr. Walter Bruce Howe, the Recorder of the Commission, who quickly reported that Justice Roberts would permit no changes in the stenographic record of Admiral Kimmel's testimony. As that record was completely inaccurate, this decision was incomprehensible. So, the author next took the matter up with Admiral Standley, a member of the Commission, and was told that no change would be permitted in the transcript of Admiral Kimmel's testimony, but that notations of the errors therein would be placed in an Appendix to the Record of Proceedings of the Commission.
The futility of this handling was at once brought to Admiral Standley's attention. No reader would refer, every paragraph or so, to a distant Appendix, nor undertake the arduous task of reconstructing Admiral Kimmel's testimony. The fact was stressed that Admiral Kimmel had no desire to change his original testimony in any way, but merely wanted it truthfully reproduced. Admiral Standley repeated that nothing further could be done about it, as Justice Roberts would not alter his decision. The author then said that what Admiral Kimmel was asking was the common procedure in the case of errors in the recorded testimony before military courts, and asked why, unless the Commission was in effect a one-man body, its four Service members could not overrule the Chairman's decision in this matter of the correction of Admiral Kimmel's testimony.
Then occurred the arresting feature of the whole incident. Admiral Standley remained silent for several moments, staring at the author, and then said, "Admiral Kimmel and you are under no illusions about what is going to happen to him as a result of this investigation, are you?" The answer was no, but Admiral Kimmel would still like the record of his testimony to be an accurate reproduction of what he had said and done during his time as a witness. There the matter rested.
It cannot be controverted that the Commission violated fundamental principles of justice, when it investigated the conduct of the Hawaiian Commands without according their Commanders the legal rights of defendants or interested parties. That denial did not deter the Commission from charging Admiral Kimmel and General Short with the following derelictions of duty: failing to confer respecting the warnings and orders received on or after November 27; not adapting and using the existing plans to meet the emergency.
These charges appear to have been drawn principally for public consumption. They are legally defective, in that they do not specify what "orders and warnings" in the first instance, nor what "plans" in the second. The Hawaiian Commanders did confer on the War and Navy Department messages of November 27. After that date, the only messages of any significance sent to Hawaii were the code-destruction dispatches.
As we have already seen, the pertinent plans that were not placed in effect during that critical period were: the declaration of an M day, which would have implemented the mobilization features of the war plans; the Joint Army-Navy Coastal Frontier Defense Plans, especially those for Hawaii and the Panama Canal Zone; the unification of the Hawaiian Commands. The placing of those plans and command arrangements in effect was the immediate responsibility of the War Plans Divisions of the War and Navy Departments, under the direct supervision of General Marshall and Admiral Stark.
The Roberts Commission found that the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy and General Marshall and Admiral Stark had fulfilled their obligations in connection with the Pearl Harbor attack.
This means that the discharge of their every duty and responsibility relating to that attack was free of any taint of neglect or blame of any character. So much of that opinion as relates to the Secretaries was sound. If the Commission had made a full investigation, it is difficult to see how they could have cleared Admiral Stark and General Marshall of responsibility for the wholesale denial of information to Hawaii and for the failures noted in the second preceding paragraph, unless it deduced and accepted the fact that the officers were obeying the orders of their Commander-in-Chief in these matters.
The opinions of the Commission set forth in the preceding paragraph, coupled with the charges against the Hawaiian Commanders, were most important. By placing all the blame upon Admiral Kimmel and General Short, the prestige of the Washington Administration was fully preserved in the public mind. Popular confidence in President Roosevelt and his principal government assistants was psychologically essential to the successful prosecution of the war.
We shall shortly see that the Army Pearl Harbor Board and the Naval Court of Inquiry took diametrically opposite views from that of the Roberts Commission — the Army Board regarding the conduct of General Marshall and the Naval Court concerning that of Admiral Stark and Admiral Kimmel.
The Hart Inquiry, February 12 to June 15, 1944, was ordered by the Navy Department to take evidence pertinent to the Pearl Harbor attack in order to guard against the possible loss of important testimony through hazards of wartime service. It was a one-member inquiry, conducted by Admiral Hart, U.S.N. Ret.
Ostensibly to forestall the statute of limitations, which, if it became effective, would prevent the trial by court-martial of officers of the Army and the Navy considered to be guilty of serious derelictions of duty, Congress passed an Act, approved June 13, 1944, which directed the Secretaries of War and Navy to investigate the Pearl Harbor catastrophe, and to commence proceedings against such persons as the facts might justify. The Army Pearl Harbor Board and the Naval Court of Inquiry were convened in compliance with that Act.
The Army Pearl Harbor Board, July 20 to October 20, 1944, was directed to ascertain and report the facts relating to the Pearl Harbor attack, and to make such recommendations as it deemed proper. The members of the Board were Lieutenant General Grunert, U.S.A., Major General Russell, U.S.A., and Major General Frank, U.S.A.
The opinions of this Board concerning the responsibilities of three General Officers are worthy of close attention. Paraphrased for brevity and a better popular understanding, they were as follows:
General Marshall failed in his relations to the Hawaiian Department by: (1) not keeping its Commanding General fully advised of the growing tenseness of the Japanese situation; (2) not replying to General Short's "sabotage alert" report of November 27, which clearly indicated that the Hawaiian Commander had misconstrued the Department's warning message of that date; (3) not forwarding to General Short, on the evening of December 6 and during the early morning of December 7, the critical information indicating a break with Japan, though there was ample time to do so; (4) not determining the state of readiness of the Hawaiian Command, between November 27 and December 7, 1941, despite the impending threat of war;
Major General Gerow, Chief of the War Plans Division, War Department, failed in his duties in the following particulars: (1) not keeping the Commanding General, Hawaiian Department, adequately informed on the impending war situation, through failure to supply him with the substance of the Magic traffic; (2) not sending to General Short, on November 27, a clear and concise directive, instead of approving the confusing message which was sent; (3) not realizing that General Short's state of readiness report of November 27 was not intended to affirm a readiness for war, and consequently failing to correct the Hawaiian sabotage alert; (4) not taking steps to implement the existing joint plans and agreements between the Army and Navy to insure the functioning of the two services in the manner contemplated;
Lieutenant General Short failed in his duties in the following particulars: (1) not placing his command in a state of readiness for war after a war warning, for, despite the incomplete and confusing character of his information, it was sufficient to warn him of the tenseness of the American-Japanese relations and the imminence of hostilities; (2) not attempting to reach an agreement with the responsible naval commanders for the implementation of the Joint Army-Navy Coastal Frontier Defense Plan; (3) not informing himself of the effectiveness of the Navy distant reconnaissance; (4) not replacing inefficient staff officers.
It seems that the Board was needlessly hard upon General Short. His unanswered report of his sabotage alert definitely told the War Department, ten days before the attack, that he did not begin to appreciate the tenseness of the American-Japanese situation. General Short enjoyed a high professional reputation and his failure to appreciate the situation is proof positive that he did not have sufficient information, despite the Board's assertion to the contrary. The implementation of the Joint Plan would not occur to an officer who thought that a sabotage alert was an adequate disposition of his forces. Furthermore, as the Board found, the implementation of those plans was the direct responsibility of Brigadier General Gerow. Also, an officer who considered a sabotage alert adequate to the situation would not be concerned with the character of the Navy's long-distance scouting.
If the War Department authorities had corrected General Short's sabotage alert, as it was their duty to do, the Hawaiian Commands would have been fully alerted for war.
The Naval Court of Inquiry, July 24 to October 19, 1944, was ordered to inquire into all the circumstances connected with the Japanese Pearl Harbor attack, to determine all the facts of the case, to state whether any person or persons in the Naval service had committed any offenses or had incurred any serious blame, and to recommend what further action should be taken. The members of the Court were: Admiral Murfin, U.S.N. Ret., Admiral Kalbfus, U.S.N. Ret., Vice Admiral Andrews, U.S.N., Ret.
In its opinions, the Court cleared Admiral Kimmel of blame, but it charged that Admiral Stark did not display sound judgment when he failed to cause to be transmitted to Admiral Kimmel, during the critical period from November 27 to December 7, information regarding the Japanese situation; did not, on December 7, communicate to the Pacific Fleet Commander the receipt of a message which indicated that a break in diplomatic relations was imminent, and that an attack in the Hawaiian area might be expected soon.
As in the case of the Roberts Commission, the Court again took no cognizance of the Washington failures, on or about November 27, to: announce an M day; arrange with the Army to have the Joint Army-Navy Coastal Frontier Defense Plans for all Pacific Commands placed in effect; take similar steps to accomplish the unification of the Hawaiian Commands. We have just seen that the Army Pearl Harbor Board did not overlook those failures in the case of General Gerow.
At this point, it is necessary to digress momentarily. The apparent criticisms of the performance of duty by high-ranking officers of the War and Navy Departments must be examined at once to determine the justice of those criticisms.
In any attempt to rationalize concerning the behavior of the Washington High Commands, the primary consideration is the military character of the officers in question. First, only officers of high reputation are chosen to fill the top positions of the Army and Navy. Secondly, the officers to fill the positions in the next echelon of command are also selected with care. All senior officers in Washington in late 1941 were graduates of the War College of their respective Services.
There are two other powerful arguments which support this line of reasoning. The apparent lapses of efficiency in late 1941 covered a very brief period in the careers of the officers concerned. And, not only did the officers bring reputations of a high order to their Washington duties but, during the war which followed, most of them demonstrated marked professional ability, and many of them rose to the topmost ranks. Continuing violations of the fundamental principles of the Art of War on their own initiative by such officers would be astounding. Unless we accept that their actions were controlled by motivating orders from President Roosevelt, the simultaneous ineffective conduct of the affairs of the Army and Navy in Washington, during the month preceding the attack, and especially during the first days of December, is absolutely incomprehensible.
There is no doubt that the opinions of the Army Pearl Harbor Board and the Naval Court of Inquiry were a serious threat to the preservation of the Pearl Harbor secret. The most severe criticisms contained in those opinions centered upon Army and Navy personnel in Washington — Generals Marshall and Gerow in the Army, and Admiral Stark in the Navy. This was getting perilously close to the Commander-in-Chief, President Roosevelt.
In accordance with the legal procedure of both the Army and the Navy, the final action upon such inquiries is vested in the Secretaries of War and Navy. The reaction to the situation by both Departments was identical. Both decided to delay their final judgments upon the two Service investigations, and to order further inquiries to supplement the evidence set forth in their proceedings. This was the official explanation by each Department for convening the Clausen Investigation, in one instance, and the Hewitt Inquiry in the other.
Although both these investigations traveled widely and heard a great deal of testimony, it does not appear that either uncovered any particularly significant new evidence. They did, however, develop some decided revisions of earlier testimony, and these later versions were the ones subsequently heard by the Joint Congressional Committee.
The Clausen Investigation, November 23, 1944, to September 12, 1945, was ordered by the War Department to supplement the investigation of the Army Pearl Harbor Board by continuing the examination of witnesses until the facts concerning the Pearl Harbor catastrophe were made as clear as possible, and until the testimony of every witness in possession of material facts could be obtained. This was a one-man investigation, conducted by Lieutenant Colonel Clausen, U.S.A.
The Hewitt Inquiry, May 14 to July 11, 1945, was ordered by the Navy Department to continue the investigation until the testimony of every witness in possession of material facts could be obtained and all possible evidence exhausted. Admiral Hewitt, with the assistance of a legal adviser, conducted the Inquiry.
It has always been obvious that the War and Navy Departments were not satisfied with the findings and opinions of the Army Pearl Harbor Board and the Naval Court of Inquiry. It will be noted how the orders to the later investigations, set forth above, suggest that those findings and opinions were based upon insufficient evidence.
The evidence taken by Colonel Clausen was entirely in the form of affidavits. This was an ideal procedure for eliminating or reducing conflicts of testimony. The preparation of Colonel Bratton's affidavit was an excellent example. Before the Army Pearl Harbor Board, he named three officers with whom, on the night of December 6, 1941, he had left copies of the 13-part message for delivery to Generals Marshall, Gerow and Miles. These alleged recipients were all General Officers when they testified before Colonel Clausen, and each denied that he had received such a delivery on the night in question. These statements were shown to Colonel Bratton before he prepared the final draft of his own affidavit, and this then differed radically from his earlier testimony before the Army Board, and unmistakably evidenced the effects of the contrary evidence which he had just seen. His testimony before the Clausen Inquiry was later repeated before the Joint Congressional Committee.
Colonel Bratton told the Congressional Investigation that Colonel Clausen did not attempt to influence him in any way during the preparation of his affidavit. Nevertheless, the subjection of a witness to a preponderance of contrary evidence just prior to his giving of his own testimony must weaken his confidence in his memory of past events, especially when he is trying to project his mind back over a span of four years.
We discussed the Winds episode testimony before the Hewitt Inquiry in the preceding chapter. There was another incident before that Inquiry which merits special attention. Shown copies of two Japanese dispatches, Vice Admiral Wilkinson was asked if he had previously seen them. He replied that he had seen one during the afternoon of Saturday, December 6, 1941, and several parts of the long message as it was coming in during that same time. Before he could proceed further, the Counsel quickly interjected, "Admiral, will you identify the messages for the record." The witness stated in effect that they were the Pilot and the 14-part messages. Where upon, the Counsel immediately directed the examination into other channels.
Why did the Hewitt Inquiry fail to develop whether or not the former Director of Naval Intelligence had shown any of the parts of the long message to Admiral Stark on that fateful Saturday afternoon? That Inquiry knew that nothing had come to light concerning Admiral Stark's doings on that day, and its orders required that all possible evidence be fully developed.
Six months later, before the Joint Congressional Committee, the Vice Admiral testified that he did not see any part of the long message on Saturday, December 6, until the 13 parts were delivered to him at his home at about 11:00 P.M., that night.
When Admiral Kimmel heard of the contemplated Hewitt Inquiry, he officially requested the Navy Department that he be accorded the right of an interested party to be present with counsel during the hearings, to listen to the testimony, and to cross-examine the witnesses. That request was refused.
Based upon both the Proceedings of the Naval Court of Inquiry and the evidence obtained by Admiral Hewitt, the Secretary of the Navy, on August 29, 1945, made public the following conclusion: "Then Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Admiral Harold B. Stark, particularly during the period from 27 November to 7 December, 1941, failed to demonstrate the superior judgment necessary to exercising command commensurate with their rank and assigned duties."
This conclusion sustained the opinion of the Naval Court of Inquiry in the case of Admiral Stark, but reversed the opinion of that body concerning the conduct of Admiral Kimmel. From a standpoint of justice and fair play, it is most regrettable that the Navy Department denied Admiral Kimmel the rights of an interested party before the Hewitt Inquiry.
On the same day, August 29, 1945, the report of the Secretary of War on the Proceedings of the Army Pearl Harbor Board, supplemented by the evidence obtained by the Clausen Inquiry, was made public. The highlights of this report were as follows:
Noting that the Army Pearl Harbor Board had criticized General Marshall for the shortcomings of the General Staff, it characterized this criticism as unjustified, and said of that officer that "throughout this matter he acted with his usual great skill, energy and efficiency"; Stating at one point that the War Plans Division erred in not sending General Short more information, it later said that this and other criticisms were not of sufficient import to imply "any general inefficiency in a Staff which was performing the heaviest duties with great ability." This laudatory view, however, was strongly contradicted by the final conclusion, which expressed substantial, but not complete, accord with the opinions of the Army Pearl Harbor Board concerning the responsibilities and errors of the War Plans division;
It found that General Short had been given ample information to warn him to alert his command against a surprise air attack by Japan. As the General had been relieved from a Command status on January 11, 1942, for his errors of judgment, this action was considered to be sufficient;
It limits the Magic known to the War Department, prior to December 6, which was not passed on to General Short, to the following: the Tokyo messages which set the "deadline date" for the completion of the negotiations in Washington; the code-destruction messages of December 1 and 2; Honolulu Consulate reports of ship movements and dispositions in Pearl Harbor; the messages which set up the Winds Code;
It minimized the Honolulu reports to Tokyo on the location of the ships inside Pearl Harbor with this completely erroneous statement: "Other somewhat similar (!) information was being given Tokyo by Japanese Consulates in other ports";
It identifies the vitally important Japanese messages received on December 6 and during the morning of December 7, stresses that General Marshall saw none of these until he reached his office on Sunday morning and that he then acted upon them at once; but it gives no thought to the fact that 11:25 AM, was a remarkable time of day for the Chief of Staff to become first available for action in a time of such international tension.
This simultaneous action by the two Secretaries restored to the Pearl Harbor secret the security it had enjoyed for nearly four years as a result of the findings of the Roberts Commission. The War Department report reaffirmed that, as far as the Army was concerned, practically all the blame for the disaster rested with General Short. On the Navy side of the picture, a little ground was lost, as Admiral Stark was made to share the responsibility with Admiral Kimmel.
The War and Navy Departments took one other very important step for the preservation of the Pearl Harbor secret. The Proceedings of both the Army Pearl Harbor Board and those of the Naval Court of Inquiry continued to be classed as secret. That there was then no military justification for that action at once becomes apparent when we remember that all Japanese resistance had ceased by August 29, 1945, and it was then only four days until the formal surrender of Japan on board the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay, for which all arrangements had then been completed.
The Clarke Investigation, September 14 to 16, 1944, and July 13 to August 4, 1945, was first ordered by the War Department to investigate the handling of Top Secret communications by the Military Intelligence Division in the days preceding the Pearl Harbor attack. In July, 1945, the Investigation was ordered to reconvene to determine the facts concerning certain testimony before the Hewitt Inquiry to the effect that certain file copies in the War Department secret archives had been destroyed by orders of General Marshall. No evidence was adduced to support that anything of this character had happened at any time.
The Joint Congressional Committee, November 15, 1945, to May 31, 1946, was convened in accordance with a Concurrent Resolution of Congress, to make a full investigation of the events and circumstances connected with the Japanese Pearl Harbor attack, and to report the results to Congress with such recommendations as it deemed advisable. Its membership consisted of six Democrats and four Republicans, as follows: Senators Barkley (D), George (D), Lucas (D), Brewster (R), and Ferguson (R); Representatives Cooper (D), Clark (D), Murphy (D), Gearhart (K), and Keefe (R). The legal staff consisted of a General Counsel and three Assistants.
This public investigation was convened in response to a recognized popular demand for the full facts concerning the disaster, as there was a prevalent belief that much of the story had been withheld. And it may be added that never will belief be closer to the truth, until the two become one.
There can be no doubt that many members of Congress knew or strongly suspected that the full Pearl Harbor story would intimately involve the Nation's Commander-in-Chief, President Roosevelt. The Democratic majority on the Joint Committee recognized that this would have a strongly adverse effect upon their party's future fortunes. Consequently, their strategy was to bury the true Pearl Harbor story under a mass of evidence that would forever preserve its secret.
If that secret has been brought to the surface, it is not the fault of that strategy, as the following figures concerning the Records of the Proceedings of the Joint Congressional Committee will attest: 11 volumes of Evidence; 10 volumes of Exhibits; 17 volumes of Hearings of the earlier investigations; 1 volume containing the Findings and Opinions of the Roberts Commission, the Army Pearl Harbor Board, the Naval Court of Inquiry, and the Hewitt Inquiry; 1 volume covering the Report of the Joint Committee and the Minority Views of Senators Brewster and Ferguson.
The method by which the 17 volumes containing the evidence of the earlier Pearl Harbor inquiries were buried in this mass of verbiage is most significant. They were introduced as Exhibits #143 to #149, inclusive, on February 7, 1946, when the Congressional Hearings had been in progress for nearly three mouths. Even then, these Exhibits were not complete records of the Proceedings of those earlier investigations, as they did not contain the Findings and Opinions. These were withheld from the subject matter of the above Exhibits, and appear in Volume of the Report of the Hearings of the Joint Committee. Their secret classification was thus maintained until after the conclusion of the Congressional Investigation, when the entire 40-volume Report of the Hearings was released for public distribution.
Every feature of this handling was contrary to accepted legal practice. Commencing with its second day and throughout the Joint Committee Hearings, frequent references were made to the subject matter of the earlier investigations in the examination of the witnesses. In each instance, the entire Proceedings of the earlier Inquiry should have been introduced as an Exhibit before the first question based upon the contents of that record was asked.
This procedure certainly contributed to the safeguarding of the Pearl Harbor secret. Although the Evidence of the earlier investigations was no longer secret matter after February 7, 1946, when it became part of the record of those public hearings, that fact probably never registered with the general public, who had then lost interest in those proceedings. The Opinions of the Naval Court of Inquiry and the Army Pearl Harbor Board, which placed the burden of responsibility for the disaster upon the Army and Navy authorities in Washington, brought the matter uncomfortably close to the Nation's Commander-in-Chief. Withheld as they were until buried in the 40-volume Report of the Joint Committee Hearings, it is doubtful if they have ever received even passing public attention.
The legal staff was manifestly guided by the wishes of the Democratic majority in its examination of the witnesses. They rarely protested irrelevant evidence, accepted without challenge palpably evasive answers, and avoided or handled with careful adroitness trends of testimony which could have endangered the carefully guarded secret.
The Republican minority did its best to uncover the true story of the Pearl Harbor disaster, but met with no success. Senator Ferguson was the principal Republican cross-examiner, but unfortunately did not prove too adept in the role. He labored a line of questioning long after it was apparent that it was leading nowhere. He missed most of his best cues. Representative Keefe was the keenest Republican questioner of witnesses, but he rarely conducted an examination of any great length.
Two significant steps in the safeguarding of the secret were: (1) the refusal of the Majority Members of the Joint Congressional Committee to take the necessary legal action to have the sections of Secretary Stimson's diary covering December 4, 5, and 6 introduced into the Hearings as documentary evidence, as requested by certain Minority Members; (2) preservation from public knowledge of all matter contained in the Navy Department's so-called White House file for the period immediately preceding the Japanese attack.
Secretary Stimson was not strong enough physically to appear as a witness before the Congressional Investigation, and his testimony consisted of two depositions, with an appendix to the first of these which included selected extracts from the Secretary's diary. Many of the answers in his depositions were obviously based upon entries in that diary, and strict adherence to legal procedure would have required that the entire diary be included in the Record of Hearings as an Exhibit. These answers make it apparent that the diary was a very complete record of the author's doings and thinking during the momentous period preceding the Pearl Harbor attack. It is reasonable to conclude that if all the members of the Joint Congressional Committee had been animated by a desire to get all the facts concerning the Japanese attack, legal action, if necessary, would have been taken to assure the introduction of Secretary Stimson's diary into the Proceedings of that Body.
During the pre-Pearl Harbor period, President Roosevelt sent many important messages via Naval Communications channels. The record of these dispatches is designated in the Navy Department as the White House file, and has been held as ultra-secret matter. Consequently, this file was never submitted to the Congressional Investigation. One cannot avoid the strong suspicion that little of the Pearl Harbor secret would remain if the contents of this White House file should ever become public knowledge.
Most of the officers, who had been on duty in Washington in late 1941, proved to be eminently satisfactory witnesses from the Democratic standpoint. Under the guidance of the Committee Counsel, their evidence flowed smoothly and, frequently, endlessly onward. Under Republican cross-examination, their answers became distinctly evasive whenever the questions tended to lead them too close to dangerous disclosures.
The greatest single deterrent to the complete unfolding of the Pearl Harbor story was the effect that the lapse of time had had upon the memories of important witnesses. In certain cases, this resulted in their complete inability to recall a significant event, and in some instances, a whole chain of events. In other cases, the remembrance of pre-Pearl Harbor happenings were radically different before the Joint Congressional Committee from what they had been before earlier investigations.
Fortunately, the mass of evidence before the Joint Congressional Committee does not concern the story behind the Pearl Harbor disaster. The withholding of information from the Hawaiian Commanders and the reasons given on the witness stand for that fateful decision are the keys to that secret. What follows is therefore confined to testimony bearing on that denial and certain related happenings.
An appreciation of a few salient facts is necessary to an understanding of the ensuing discussion.
The argument advanced by many witnesses, that Admiral Kimmel and General Short had sufficient information to deduce the actual situation, is neither a valid nor a reasonable defense for the denial. The facts of the case completely defeat that defense. If those Commanders had had the knowledge from Magic possessed by the War and Navy Departments, their commands would not have been surprised; they were surprised. The withholding of such vital, authentic intelligence from commanders in the field was a violation of the fundamental principles of the Art of War.
Two groups in Washington, one Army and the other Navy, composed of highly trained, highly intelligent officers, outstanding in their respective services, thus simultaneously offended against the basic Art of their professions during a certain critical period of time. Why? In the answer to that question lies the solution of the riddle of Pearl Harbor.
The direct examination of the witnesses by the Committee Counsel never attempted to develop that answer. The cross-examiners made repeated efforts to orient the testimony closer to the true story, but were never successful.
On the witness stand, both Admiral Stark and General Marshall stated that Magic was withheld from Admiral Kimmel and General Short because the number of decoded Japanese dispatches was so great that their transmission would merely serve to confuse those Commanders. That explanation should have been sharply challenged. It was never an all-or-nothing proposition. Only the particularly significant messages should have been sent. The selection contained in Chapters 4 and 5 herein, plus a short report of the Saturday receipt of the Declaration of War and its prospective timed delivery to the U.S. Government, would have been ample. This would have averaged considerably less than one message per day.
General Miles told the Joint Committee that Magic was not sent to Hawaii because Japan might break the American codes, and thus discover that their own had been compromised. The explanation could have been broken down on two counts: the highly secure Naval code could have been used to transmit these messages for the Army; deliveries could have been made by officer-messengers, employing commercial air transportation.
Rear Admiral Turner testified that he "thought" the Hawaiian Commanders were receiving Magic, and that this understanding on his part was the result of talks he had had with Rear Admiral Noyes. As Admiral Turner was responsible for all Magic sent by the Navy Department to the outlying commands after April, 1941, he knew that the Hawaiian Commanders had received none of that information from that source, between mid-August and December 7, 1941. The only other means by which Hawaii could obtain Magic was to intercept and decode it on the spot, and Admiral Noyes well knew that the commands at that mid-Pacific base did not have the requisite facilities to do that. It is difficult to understand how he could have failed to make that fact clear to Admiral Turner. Neither of the officers was questioned to develop how the misunderstanding could have arisen.
Referring again to the testimony of Major General Miles: at one point he was asked if the Tokyo dispatch of September 24, requiring the Honolulu Consulate to report the exact location of American ships in Pearl Harbor, did not indicate that the Japanese were planning a surprise air attack upon those ships in that base, replied, "Yes, after the event." This was a very critical moment on the witness stand for the General. If he had replied in an unqualified affirmative, the inevitable questioning would necessarily have greatly imperiled the Pearl Harbor secret.
If this dispatch did not strongly suggest a surprise attack upon Pearl Harbor to any trained military mind whose owner saw it, the powers of human deduction have reached the vanishing point, the art of the detective has becoming a thing of the past, and military Intelligence services are utterly useless.
This answer should immediately have elicited the following line of questions. What possible use could be made of such information if it were not to be used as the basis for planning a surprise air attack? Did not this dispatch, at once, recall to the Military Intelligence Division Ambassador Grew's message of January 27 regarding a Japanese surprise attack upon Pearl Harbor? In the event that the surprise element should fail in such an operation, would not the Japanese surface forces be subjected to heavy punishment from land-based air attacks? Would not that risk demand the prospects of large returns, which would restrict the attack to highly important objectives? Were not objectives of that character in the Pacific limited to the Fleet in Pearl Harbor and the Panama Canal? For the strategy of a war whose main theatre was the western Pacific, did not the crippling of the U.S. Pacific Fleet so far outweigh damage to the Panama Canal as practically to reduce the Japanese attack objectives to one — that Fleet?
On the witness stand, neither General Marshall nor Admiral Stark had any remembrance whatever of Saturday, December 6, 1941. Nothing could have been more unfortunate for the development of the true Pearl Harbor story. When the Pilot Message told that the answer to the American note of November 26 was about to be received in the Japanese Embassy, and that its delivery was to be carefully timed, these facts, coupled with the Magic of the past week, completed the picture. The coming Japanese answer was a Declaration of War and its delivery, in accordance with the known Japanese technique for starting her wars, was to be synchronized with a surprise attack.
The natural reaction of the nation's Commander-in-Chief to this news would be to summon the heads of the Army and Navy to a last-minute conference. If this did happen, we can only conclude from the subsequent events that the President emphasized that no word to the Hawaiian Commanders was to leave Washington before about noon the next day, Sunday, December 7.
Later evidence developed that General Marshall was at his home on that Saturday night and that Admiral Stark went to the theatre, but still neither had any personal remembrance of these facts.
Colonel Bratton's later testimony concerning his delivery of Magic on the night of Saturday, December 6, differed radically from that which he first gave. Before the Army Pearl Harbor Board, he stated that he delivered copies of the 13-part message to night-duty officers in the War Department offices of Generals Marshall, Gerow, and Miles. He told the Clausen Investigation and the Joint Congressional Committee that his former testimony was in error, as the only distribution he made on that night was to the State Department for Secretary Hull.
In either case, the procedure was a distinct departure from his long-established custom for night deliveries to Generals Marshall and Gerow. Considerations of urgency naturally divided the War Department recipients of Magic into two classes: those who were empowered to act on the information; those who were not. While it did not make any difference whether those in the latter group saw a message during the night, or not until the next morning, the Chief of Staff and the War Plans Director, who comprised the first group, were always shown important messages as quickly as possible, day or night.
The failure to deliver the 13-part message to Generals Marshall and Gerow on that important Saturday night was greatly emphasized by the early hour of the delivery, 9:00 and the fact that the Chief of Staff was available at his home to accept the delivery. The night-duty officer in General Gerow's office undoubtedly knew where he could be reached, if he was not also at home. The most astounding feature of the whole incident was Colonel Bratton's explanation for not making those two deliveries on that night — he did not consider that action necessary because this was "just one more diplomatic dispatch." There is nothing more surprising connected with the Congressional Investigation than the fact that this explanation was allowed to stand unchallenged. Any lawyer, uninhibited by restrictive instructions, could have torn it to shreds. Why the Republican cross-examination did not do so will always remain a mystery.
Colonel Bratton's earlier testimony and his knowledge as a highly experienced intelligence officer would have caused him many difficult moments under the following line of questioning. Was he not aware of the Japanese technique of starting her wars with a surprise attack, synchronized with a declaration of war? Had not the Japanese code-destruction messages told him war was at hand? As he had told the Pearl Harbor Board that such an attack had been expected on November 30, the first Sunday after the deadline date, did not the arrival of the long message on the following Saturday and the fact that its timed delivery had been foretold in the Pilot Message mark this dispatch as a declaration of war, synchronized with a surprise attack scheduled for the next day? If not, could he state any other acceptable reason for its timed delivery? Furthermore, what could the message mean but war, when it stated that American action had threatened Japan's very existence and had subjected her to inhuman treatment, that she could no longer tolerate western exploitation of the Far East, that the United States was planning war against her prospective allies, Germany and Italy, and that she did not consider that there was any possibility of further negotiations? Was his appraisal of the lack of importance of the 13-part message based upon, or influenced by, orders or instructions from Generals Marshall and Gerow, either direct or through a staff officer, to the effect that the two Generals were not interested in the further night deliveries of Japanese diplomatic dispatches?
Unless the affirmative answer to that last question is the true explanation of Colonel Bratton's decision to withhold the 13-part message from General Marshall until Sunday morning, that action is absolutely incomprehensible to a military mind. It is unthinkable that, in a time of such intense crisis, any subordinate, upon his own initiative, would decide to deny to the Army Chief of Staff, for a period of twelve crucial hours or more, knowledge of one of the most important communications in U.S. history.
As Captain Kramer testified that he was unable to contact Admiral Stark on the night of Saturday, December 6, he could well have been asked these questions, but was not. When he called the Admiral's home, was the telephone answered? If it was, did he endeavor to ascertain the Admiral's whereabouts? What was he told?
From the evidence of the last witness before the Joint Committee, we know that Admiral Stark attended the theatre on that night, and gave the house servant a memorandum containing the name of the theatre and its telephone number, as he was leaving his home. If Captain Kramer had been given this information, when he phoned, he would have known that he could deliver the 13-part message to the Admiral at about 11:30 on that night. What information he received, if any, we will now never know.
Although Lieutenant Commander Kramer did not deliver the 13-part message to Rear Admiral Turner on the night of Saturday, December 6, the latter did see a copy during that night, and was told that Rear Admiral Ingersoll and Captain Wilkinson had also seen it. Admiral Turner stated to the Joint Congressional Committee that he considered the deliveries to these two other officers relieved him of the responsibility for taking any action on the message. It is surprising that he was not closely questioned regarding this particular testimony. Since April, 1941, he was the only officer under Admiral Stark authorized to transmit information of this character to the outlying commands. One would therefore expect that the examination would immediately seek full enlightenment as to why the witness had felt no personal responsibility at the time for informing Admiral Kimmel that Washington had received a copy of the Japanese Declaration of War. The thought was never developed while Admiral Turner was a witness.
While the complete inability of both Admiral Stark and General Marshall to recollect any of the events of Saturday made it impossible to question either officer on the witness stand concerning that day, the failure to inquire more minutely into the motivating reasons for their surprising actions on the morning of Sunday, December 7, is the most arresting feature of the entire Congressional Investigation.
Although the Admiral certainly knew of Japan's technique for starting her wars, he twice during that morning refused to accept the advice of his juniors that he inform Admiral Kimmel that the Declaration of War had been received in Washington and that its delivery to the U.S. Government was to be carefully timed. Even when he knew the exact time of delivery, the probable time of the surprise attack, he adhered to his decision of silence. None of the Admiral's explanations for his previous withholding of Magic from Hawaii applied in this situation. He knew that war was less than three hours away, when he made his final decision not to tell Admiral Kimmel.
According to Colonel Bratton's testimony concerning the delivery of the Pilot Message, General Marshall knew at 3:00 P.M. on Saturday that the answer to the American note of November 26 was about to be received, and that its delivery was to be carefully timed. While he did not remember that fact on the witness stand, three and four years later, he certainly could not forget it overnight. This made it mandatory that he arrive in his office at a very early hour on Sunday morning, instead of at 11:25, when he did arrive. The fact that he had not seen the 13-part message during Saturday night made his early availability in the War Department all the more urgent. Omit everything that occurred on Saturday, and the critical developments in U.S.-Japanese affairs would still have demanded that the Army Chief of Staff arm himself with the earliest possible knowledge of the night's happenings on Sunday morning.
Both Admiral Stark and General Marshall, on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, therefore failed to live up to the responsibilities of their high offices. Why? Every dictate of their training and experience demanded a radically different line of conduct on the part of each. The only possible answer is that they were acting under positive orders from their President to send no message to Hawaii before noon on that day, and they adopted decidedly different methods of complying with their orders, Admiral Stark faced the vital Japanese messages and simply refused to take action. With slightly more finesse, General Marshall avoided contact with the messages until the period of enjoined silence had elapsed.
Here, once again, was a definite key to the whole Pearl Harbor riddle. Both officers on the witness stand would have been subjected to an exhaustive examination concerning their actions on that Sunday morning by any lawyer of experience who was determined to do his best to develop the entire truth of the matter. Neither of the officers was subjected to such an examination.
The Report of the Joint Congressional Committee and the Minority Views of Senators Ferguson and Brewster cover 573 printed pages. As the significant evidence, pertinent to the development of the true Pearl Harbor story, has already been adequately discussed, further consideration of that evidence from the standpoint of its effect upon the Joint Committee can contribute nothing further, and would merely be redundant. A brief review of the Majority and Minority Conclusions is desirable, as these so accurately portray the attitudes of those subdivisions of the Joint Committee.
In passing, it is noted that the Majority submitted a number of Recommendations which deal exclusively with alleged deficiencies of our Military and Naval Establishments, which that Majority considered the Congressional Investigation had revealed. Most of these Recommendations lose their validity when the decisive control, which President Roosevelt exercised over the Washington actions of the Army and Navy during the pre-Pearl Harbor period, is appreciated and accepted.
The Majority Conclusions, which are paraphrased for brevity, were as follows:
1. The Pearl Harbor attack was an unprovoked act of aggression by Japan;
2. The attack was well planned and skillfully executed by more powerful forces than it was thought Japan could employ in a single tactical adventure at such a distance and under such circumstances;
3. U.S. policies and actions provided no justifiable provocation for the attack;
4. The Committee found no evidence to support charges that the President and the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy did anything to provoke, incite or coerce Japan into attacking, in order that a declaration of war might more easily be obtained from the Congress;
5. The President, the Secretary of State and other High Officials made every possible effort to avert war with Japan;
6. The disaster was due to the failure of the Army and Navy to institute measures to detect approaching hostile forces, to effect a state of readiness commensurate with the imminence of war, and to employ every facility at their command to repel the Japanese;
7. The Japanese attack surprised virtually everyone despite the fact that: officers in Washington and Hawaii were conscious of the dangers from air attacks; the possibility of such an attack upon Pearl Harbor was realized; the imminence of war was generally appreciated;
8. The Hawaiian Commands failed to make the dispositions required by the warnings they received from Washington, other information they had, and a due appreciation of the significance of certain intelligence communicated to them;
9. The errors made by the Hawaiian Commanders were errors of judgment and not derelictions of duty;
10. The War Plans Division of the War Department failed to discharge its direct responsibility when it did not warn General Short that his sabotage alert was not responsive to the original directive;
11. The Intelligence arid War Plans Divisions of the War and Navy Departments failed: to appraise the significance of the Tokyo-Honolulu dispatches concerning the Pearl Harbor berthing plan and to transmit this information to the Hawaiian Commanders; to recognize that the time-of-delivery message meant Japanese military action somewhere at 1:00 P.M., and to send word to all outlying Pacific commands, "as General Marshall attempted to do immediately upon seeing it";
12. The War and Navy Departments were not sufficiently alerted on December 6 and 7, 1941, in view of the imminence of war.
These conclusions clearly express the intent which animated the Democratic Majority throughout the investigation — to allay forever all Suspicion that President Roosevelt and his civilian administration were in any way connected with the Pearl Harbor disaster. The exoneration of the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy was sound. They constantly advised with the President, but he made the decisions.
Conclusions 1, 2, and 3: the Japanese Attack
There is no question that the attack was an act of aggression. Whether or not it was unprovoked will be discussed shortly in connection with the consideration of President Roosevelt's responsibilities. It must be agreed that the attack was well planned and skillfully executed, but no naval strategist will agree that the strength of the forces was greater than it was thought that Japan would employ in such an operation. The large risks involved demanded large results if the attack succeeded, and only a powerful force could promise the accomplishment of such results.
The thought of greater Japanese strength than expected was an obvious apology for the Fleet losses, for the benefit of those who are still not convinced that President Roosevelt had no responsibility in connection with the Japanese attack. It is interesting to note the clear intimation that American thought had been given to the surprise attack before the event, and had been carried so far as to estimate the forces that Japan would use. How does the Democratic Majority square this with Conclusion 7, which states that the attack surprised virtually everyone?
Conclusions 4 and 5: President Roosevelt and the Inception of the War
We are here told that the President did nothing to invite the attack; in fact, did everything to avert it. The evidence is overwhelming that he did very deliberately invite the Japanese attack (see Chapter 2). The attempt to throttle their economic life through complete stoppage of their trade in concert with Great Britain and the Netherlands, and the demands in the American note of November 26, 1941, that Japan accept absolute defeat in China and surrender to the economic encirclement through withdrawal of her forces from French Indo-China, were the most drastic steps that President Roosevelt could take toward war.
During the fall of 1941, Mr. Churchill and President Roosevelt were in constant communication with each other. At Newfoundland in early August, they spent hours in close consultation. With the exception of Mr. Harry Hopkins, there was probably no one during those times in closer touch with President Roosevelt's thinking regarding the European War and the possibility of war with Japan. On January 27, 1942, the British Prime Minister said to the House of Commons, "But as time has passed, the United States, under the leadership of President Roosevelt, from reasons of its own interests and safety, but also out of a chivalrous regard for the cause of freedom and democracy, has drawn ever closer to the confines of the struggle. . . . The probability since the Atlantic Conference, at which I discussed these matters with President Roosevelt, that the United States, even if not herself attacked, would come into the war in the Far East, and thus make victory sure, seemed to allay some of the anxieties."
The testimony of Mr. Churchill and a myriad of other evidence completely contradicts Conclusions 4 and of the Majority Report.
Conclusions 6 to 12: Strictures Against the Army and Navy
If President Roosevelt had no responsibility for matters in connection with the Pearl Harbor attack, all blame for the mistakes which were apparently made must fall upon the Army and Navy. As the President was in complete control of the whole situation, the Army and Navy in Washington were merely obeying orders, and the Hawaiian Commanders were the victims of those orders. Further consideration of these seven Conclusions in the Majority Report would therefore serve no purpose.
The Minority Opinions of Senators Ferguson and Brewster criticized President Roosevelt for failing to take "quick and instant executive action on Saturday night, December 6th and Sunday morning, December 7th."
Their over-all Opinion was summarized as follows: "The failure of Pearl Harbor to be fully alerted and prepared for defense rested upon the proper discharge of two sets of interdependent responsibilities: (1) the responsibilities of high authorities in Washington; (2) the responsibilities of the Commanders in the field in charge of the fleet and naval base."
The following were charged with failure to meet their responsibilities in connection with Pearl Harbor: President Roosevelt, Secretary Stimson, Secretary Knox, General Marshall, Admiral Stark, Major General Gerow, Major General Short, Rear Admiral Kimmel.
Once again, we can only repeat our frequent comment that a full realization of President Roosevelt's connection with the Pearl Harbor disaster would cause a decided modification of the views concerning the responsibilities of the officials and officers named in the above Opinion.
And so ended the Hearings of the Joint Congressional Committee, the last act in the attempt to preserve the Pearl Harbor Secret.
Actually, the ships in Hawaii, during 1940 and 1941, with their crews at peacetime strengths, were hollow shells as far as readiness for all-out battle was concerned. There were two main reasons for this, viz.: (1) the available men in peacetime have to be stationed and trained in those battle duties which demand a high order of technical skill; (2) the lower-deck ammunition parties, and other lower-deck battle stations in the same category, are largely skeletonized in peacetime, because handling powder and shell from the magazines and shellrooms to the power hoists, which deliver the ammunition to the vicinity of the guns, requires physical endurance but very little skill, so that recruits can quickly be made proficient in those duties. This meant that the rate of fire required for success in battle could not possibly be met until the crews of these ships were raised to their war complements — a very slow process, unless the ships retired to their West Coast mobilization ports, either upon the issuance of the Mobilization Order or of orders to augment the ships' crews to war-complement strengths. The number required by each type of ship to accomplish this was: battleships, 700 to 800; heavy cruisers, 350 to 400; light cruisers, 275 to 300; destroyers, 75 to 100.
None of these considerations particularly affected the rate of anti-aircraft fire on December 7, 1941, because with the ships in harbor, the turret and broadside batteries could not possibly go into action, so that the crews for these guns could be used to augment the anti-aircraft ammunition parties. At sea, however, all batteries must be ready for instant action, whenever there is the slightest prospect of contact with the enemy, and that contingency must be considered ever-present in any active theatre of operations.