10 “IT WAS CUSTOMARY AND EXPECTED”
The war in the Pacific was ending more quickly than anyone had anticipated.
The first atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Three days later, a second atomic weapon destroyed Nagasaki. That same day, August 9, the Russians invaded Manchuria, and the Japanese Supreme Council for the Conduct of the War convened to discuss the severity of the situation facing Japan. The Russian invasion of Manchuria was of greater concern to the Council, because the enormity of the disaster caused by the atomic bomb at Hiroshima had not yet been grasped by the Japanese government. The military members of the Supreme Council still argued that Japan should resist the Allies until the bitter end. They wanted a fight to the death. This threw the Council into a stalemate. The civilian members who wanted to sue for peace were not strong enough to override the military presence.
The issue—whether to continue fighting or surrender—went to Emperor Hirohito, the only person capable of facing down the military and making such a decision stick. On August 10, the Emperor decreed that Japan would surrender according to the Potsdam declaration.
It took another four days for the surrender terms to be negotiated and transmitted. Meanwhile, the Emperor survived a coup against his decision to surrender by hard-line Army officers who tried to seize control of the Imperial Palace. They failed, and many of the rebels committed ritual suicide. On August 15, the Emperor broadcast the notice of surrender to the Japanese people.
I cannot describe the sense of euphoria that swept through the Pentagon. It was such an awesome feeling of relief, of sheer, unadulterated joy that the moral questions about dropping the atomic bombs were swept aside.
The war was over!
That was all that mattered.
My wife, Virginia, had come to the Pentagon for a party on the evening the surrender was announced. I cannot for the life of me recall now why, or for whom, the original party was being held. We were all overwhelmed by the emotions of the moment. One thing I knew, however, was that as soon as I could complete my investigation for the Secretary, I would ask for the relief he had promised me and we’d go back to California as quickly as possible.
It’s odd, in a way, how the human mind turns from a complex task such as a war and immediately begins thinking about something else. I guess it’s because future pastures are always more inviting. But I was still in uniform, and there was work to be done.
As a result, I found myself in Boston on August 16, taking the affidavit of Maj. Gen. Sherman Miles, who, in the run-up to Pearl Harbor, had been the head of Army intelligence (G-2) in Washington. At the moment, Miles was the Commanding General of the First Service Command, and there was almost a sense of déjà vu in taking down his words literally only hours after the surrender of Japan.
That didn’t mean I wasn’t going to be jolted by what Miles would tell me, because while I expected something of the nature of what he was going to say, I had no idea just how forthright he would be about it.
First of all, Miles said he wanted to correct his testimony before the Army Pearl Harbor Board. He acknowledged that he had avoided making any statements during that testimony “concerning details of information and intelligence which I had derived from Top Secret sources then called ‘Magic,’ or any intimation that such sources existed.”
In other words, the head of Army intelligence was telling me that notwithstanding the implications of perjury, he had deliberately misled the Army Board. If that didn’t help throw the Board’s findings into Boston Harbor, nothing would. But why had he done it?
As Miles explained to me, Brig. Gen. Russell A. Osmun and Col. Carter W. Clarke (my old nemesis) told him not to reveal anything about Magic to the Army Board. According to Miles, Osmun and Clarke said that these instructions came from no less a personage than the Chief of Staff, General Marshall, the very person who was ultimately judged—and found wanting—by the Board. Said Miles in his laconic fashion about the orders he had received: “Accordingly, I obeyed that instruction.”
I was flabbergasted when Miles told me this. He had been a brigadier at the time. He was G-2, the head of intelligence. He was in a position to go into anybody’s office and say: “Listen to me! I disagree. What you’re doing is wrong.” But he didn’t do it.
Although I hate to admit it, I probably would have agreed with him. But I don’t think he should have done it the way he did. I recalled that when Miles testified to the Army Board, he’d give that little secretive smile, along with his bland, false denials, and I’d think that something wasn’t right here. I had no idea then what was right or wrong, because even though I was a member of the Army Board, I hadn’t been told and did not know about the existence of Magic.
Now, if there was any reason for Congress to be angry at Marshall, Miles had just given it to me. Marshall had blocked information from a congressionally appointed committee, a board that should have been vested with the power to hear Top Secret information that was known to other members of the Army. Marshall shortchanged me. He shortchanged the Army Board. He shortchanged Congress. He also severely damaged his reputation.
I was not happy to have this problem dumped in my lap.
After the war, when Congress began to dig into Pearl Harbor for itself, Congress made the mistake of not assiduously studying my affidavits. The big furor in Congress was over where General Marshall had been on the evening of December 6, 1941. Because he could not recall his exact whereabouts, the congressmen were out to blame him for Pearl Harbor for the wrong reasons. They took the position ipso facto that he was not on duty, ready to read and take action on the thirteen-part Japanese message that had been intercepted that evening.
Of course, Marshall could have answered his critics so easily by saying: “Well, we all make mistakes about time and place, but my best recollection, after checking with my wife, my aides and everybody else, is that I was home that evening.” But he never did that. Who misadvised him? I regret now that I never asked, but that was not the point of my investigation.
I’ll discuss the legal ramifications of the question later on. What I want to point out here is that by focusing on Marshall’s whereabouts on the evening of December 6, Congress missed the real issue: Marshall had ordered his subordinates to lie to the Army Board, and they had complied.
Now, Marshall’s reasons for this shocking deception were based on a claim of national security. He believed, and so did many others in the military and civilian command structure of the time, that the secret of Magic should be protected at all costs. The decision to tell the public that we had broken the Magic codes was made by the United States Congress during its investigation of Pearl Harbor after the war. It was Congress that blew the whistle on our code-breaking capabilities. The Army and Navy were in agreement on this and were totally opposed to letting this secret ever become public. So were the British. They didn’t allow word of how they had cracked the German Enigma codes to become public knowledge until twenty-five or so years later.
If Congress had calmly, coolly debated the matter and concluded that the news of our breaking the Japanese codes was of vital national interest, its action would be understandable. But I concluded that Congress wanted to make the secret about Magic public knowledge mainly for purely partisan gain. Certain Republican members of Congress hoped that by uprooting the tree that bore the Magic fruit, they could place the blame for Pearl Harbor on Washington, discredit the Roosevelt era, vilify and destroy the continuing career of Marshall, and throw our new Democratic President, Truman, out of office.
But I am getting ahead of myself. I will discuss the ramifications of these issues later, when I find myself testifying before Congress. Let me return to the affidavit of General Miles, who had just admitted to me that he had been ordered to mislead the Army Pearl Harbor Board and had done so.
Continuing his testimony, Miles stated that his comments before the Army Board should be reconsidered on the basis of his newly acknowledged falsehoods. Now he wished to change his story. He affirmed that in the months preceding Pearl Harbor, the intercepts of the Japanese diplomatic codes had been available to both the Navy and the Army. He also affirmed the actions of Bratton and his subordinates according to the testimony they had given me. (In other words, he also confirmed that Bratton had misinformed the Board.) He affirmed that the intercepts had been given to the proper recipients in locked briefcases, and that after the intercepts were returned to G-2, they and all receipts for them were burned. No records were kept of what material was delivered or to whom. In fact, said Miles: “I do not think that any such records were made at the time.”
I reviewed with Miles the file of intercepts that I carried in my bomb pouch. He thought that before December 7, he had seen all the messages in my exhibit, with one exception. So, without equivocation, Miles acknowledged to me that as the head of Army intelligence, he had seen the Magic decrypts in their entirety.
My question, then, became: How had he interpreted the intercepts that related to the reports made by the Japanese Consul in Hawaii and the inquiries from Tokyo about ship movements at Pearl Harbor? Also, there was the dividing of Pearl Harbor into a series of grids or districts to aid such reporting that I had discussed earlier with General Gerow.
Miles replied that this was “primarily of Naval interest and what might have been expected.” He pointed out, correctly, that the Japanese were following the movements of our major ships in various ports as best they could, just “as we were doing as regard to their ships.” Miles continued: “Since I knew the Navy was getting the messages mentioned also, they [the Pearl Harbor ship movement messages] did not leave any impression on my mind which has endured for four years [of war].”
Miles clarified what I had long been thinking. He had been reading Magic on the basis of what it meant to the Army. He knew the Navy was reading the intercepts on the basis of what was best for the Navy. Given that the defense of Pearl Harbor was based on the concept of mutual cooperation—or codependency, as I called it—no one appeared to have been taking an overview of the Magic decrypts and asking the fateful questions: What does this mean in overall terms? How do you in the Navy read this? How do you in the Army read this? What do all these decrypts mean when taken as a whole?
I felt a surge of excitement, but I held it in check. Miles had just confirmed what MacArthur had told me earlier. There was a crying need for a centralized intelligence service.
We continued. Miles said that he knew of the Joint Action Agreement of the so-called ABCD (American-British-Chinese-Dutch) Bloc, about which so much has been written, often with inflammatory comments. But Miles did not believe that this agreement had any real binding effect on American military policy. Why? For the simple reason that Congress never ratified it. Our allies might have “hoped” that the American Navy would come to their defense if the Japanese had crossed a certain line in the Pacific without first declaring war on America. But since Congress had never so said—that we should uphold the ABCD Joint Action Agreement—the issue was moot from the military’s view.
We then tackled the question of the thirteen-part Japanese intercept of the evening of December 6. Miles acknowledged that he was aware of this intercept, “because I was dining at the home of my opposite number in the Navy, Admiral Wilkinson.” The thirteen-part decrypt was carried to Wilkinson’s home by Admiral Beardall, the President’s aide. Wilkinson had read the thirteen-part message, then handed it to Miles.
Now I had confirmation that the heads of intelligence for both the Army and the Navy had read the all-important thirteen-part decrypt on the evening of December 6. Yet, neither of them had seen anything as sinister in the message as had the President, who said it meant war.
Miles told me he did not believe the thirteen-part message to be important enough to warrant his telephoning Marshall at his quarters to check whether or not the Chief of Staff had seen the material. He hadn’t, as I knew.
This means that despite the failures of Bratton and Dusenbury to deliver the thirteen-part message (or fourteen-part message, as Dusenbury claimed it to be) to its proper recipients that evening, the chief of the Army’s intelligence had, by chance, seen the material, and it had failed to move him to take action.
Why had Miles been so complacent about the matter? As he explained it to me (and his thinking is important), “It was my belief in the period preceding 7 December 1941 that the Navy was intercepting, decrypting, decoding and translating this material, consisting of Japanese diplomatic and consular messages at Hawaii for use in connection with the fleet.…” (Emphasis added)
Why was Miles so sure of this?
“I was given so to understand by Naval sources, but I do not recall who told me,” he said.
I could accept this.
Given that Admiral Turner, the head of the all-powerful War Plans Division, also mistakenly believed that the Navy at Pearl Harbor was breaking and reading the Purple codes, why shouldn’t Miles make the same error?
I made a mental tick that here was yet another reason to establish a centralized intelligence agency.
Switching gears on Miles, I asked him if he remembered the conversations he was alleged to have held with Bratton and Sadtler about the possible interception of a broadcast from Tokyo that would have executed the Winds Code.
Miles couldn’t recall the meeting clearly. But he acknowledged that it might have been the catalyst for message number 519 of December 5 to Hawaii, instructing the G-2 there to contact Commander Rochefort about the Winds Code. Miles was more positive when it came to the so-called broadcast that would have executed the Winds Code. He said: “In the event of the receipt of such a message, I was prepared to transmit it immediately to the Chief of Staff [Marshall] and to WPD [War Plans Division].” Miles also set up a special alert for the broadcast via the Far Eastern Section of G-2. He remembered that several broadcasts were intercepted that appeared at first to be the vital one. On further analysis, however, they were found “not to be authentic.”
I no longer had any doubt as to whether or not the Army had exhausted all its resources in trying to intercept the execute message for the Winds Code. I concluded that everything that could have been done had been done. The fact that several intercepts at first appeared to be what everyone was searching for, but later proved to be false leads, explained satisfactorily why, even today, there are those who believe that a Winds Code broadcast was intercepted before the attack. The facts show otherwise.
Another vital point on which I needed Miles’s memory was that of his first meeting with Marshall on the morning of Sunday, December 7.
Miles pinned the hour at “about 11 A.M.”
I then asked him how aware he had been about the possibility of a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
Miles drew his shoulders erect and replied in a cold, general’s voice that he would like to refer me to his service in the Hawaiian Department as G-3 (Operations Officer) from 1929 to 1932. During those years, Miles prepared and distributed a General Staff Study that “emphasized the advantage which an attack on Oahu, particularly by surprise, might give Japan.” The simulated attack, as programmed by Miles, called for an unknown enemy to attack with little or no warning. It was supposed to be “out of the blue,” said Miles. “I remember one situation we war-gamed, that of an attack ‘out of the blue’ on Sunday morning.”
So if General Short had forgotten that his command would have been most vulnerable to surprise attack “out of the blue” on a Sunday morning, General Miles wanted to make sure the record showed that he, at least, had never forgotten.
To make sure that Miles really believed this, I asked him whether or not it was correct military practice for Short to have changed his SOP and acted contrary to the estimates of the War Department, such as those sent to Short before the attack, without consulting or reporting to the War Department.
Again Miles drew himself up, but even higher this time.
“The Commanding General was responsible for the successful execution of his mission,” Miles said. “He could not act contrary to War Department estimates of the situation, but at his own risk.… Custom and doctrine of command would require him to report his action and the reasons therefore promptly to his superiors.”
Continued Miles: “In my opinion, the messages sent by the War Department to Gen. Short prior to 7 December 1941, especially the one dated 27 November 1941, were definitive directives that a war alert was required by the situation, and there was an immediate threat from without as well as danger from sabotage.”
And so, without the slightest equivocation, the former intelligence chief of the U.S. Army said that Short had to bear the blame for Pearl Harbor.
One final matter: I had learned from Commander Sonnett that a member of the Army’s code-breaking team had testified to Admiral Hewitt’s board that General Marshall had ordered certain records of Army G-2 destroyed. This was in reference to the so-called Winds Code broadcast that had not been intercepted. There were those who still believed that at least one of the preliminary intercepts that Miles had mentioned was, in truth, the real broadcast, or the execute message. It just goes to show how the mistaken story persisted.
I asked Miles if any records pertaining to this issue were destroyed. “To my knowledge,” replied Miles, “no records of G-2, War Department, pertinent to Pearl Harbor were ever ordered destroyed by General Marshall or any other person.” Miles was also positive that the Army had never destroyed any records related to Pearl Harbor that were derogatory to the Army. As he put it, if the records had been ordered burned, he would have known about it.
I doubt the debate will ever end about whether or not the Winds Code broadcast was intercepted. The issue is too attractive to those who believe in conspiracy theories, or insist that the Roosevelt administration maneuvered us into a war with Japan. They will never drop the bit from their teeth. Their theories are simply that: theories, on which they make money. When faced with sworn testimony, their theories collapse. In other words, I believed Miles. In the end, he had confessed his sins and told me the truth.
It was more than fifty years ago that I took that affidavit from Miles. When I pick it up today and read it over, I get even angrier than I was when I took it. When Miles testified before the Army Pearl Harbor Board, I had a hunch he was lying, because he looked like the cat that had swallowed the canary. He was asked several times by the generals on the Board, who knew better from having been alerted about Magic by Marshall: “Now, you’re sure you didn’t have any other means of intelligence available to you?”
Miles would pause in his testimony, and you could almost read his mind that, yes, there was a source, but he wasn’t going to reveal it. So, what was the charade about?
You see, Miles’s affidavit to me was a terrible indictment of Marshall.
Let’s put it this way. Secretary Stimson assures Congress that he is going to convene the Army Board according to the instructions of the joint resolution of Congress. He convenes the Board and is faced with the fact that the officers in his Army have agreed not to testify truthfully. It’s a conspiracy to commit perjury on the parts of Marshall and Miles, even if in the name of national security. I don’t condone what Marshall did, but I can understand why he did it. His explanation is simple, direct. But, according to the law of the land, he was wrong, and I told him so later on.
Anyway, the time had come for me to take the testimony of the Chief of Staff, George C. Marshall.
We met alone in Marshall’s office. It was a large one, comparable in size to that of Secretary Stimson. Marshall was tall and slim, a fast talker who liked helpers fast on their feet and who used words precisely. (He had told me earlier that he hated conversing with Secretary of State Hull; Hull spoke so slowly and ponderously he drove Marshall frantic.) One of the things that worried Marshall about my investigation, or any investigation into Pearl Harbor for that matter, was that so many people made statements based on what Marshall called their “backsight.” This was his way of saying that people tended to show how smart they were by virtue of their hindsight. I believe he made a real effort when he spoke to me to say precisely what he had thought at the time Pearl Harbor occurred without resorting to “backsight.” He just seemed to possess that rare type of integrity.
The first issue we covered in his affidavit was what Marshall had said to the General Officers of the Army Board when he asked them to meet him in secret before his first round of testimony. This secret meeting had lasted fifty-seven minutes on August 7, 1944. Marshall acknowledged to me that he had told the General Officers, while hiding it from the Board and the people, the Recorders and the Congress, “about the character of information that had been derived before 7 December from Top Secret sources called ‘Magic.’” He told them of the interception, decoding and transcription of the Japanese diplomatic messages.
“I further stated,” said Marshall, “that neither this information, nor the source thereof, should be made public because it would result in at least temporarily, if not permanently, extinguishing this source. This would have meant that our enemies concerned would certainly have changed their systems of communication and would thus have terminated this most vital source of information which has continued to be available up to the present hour. Many of our successes, and the saving of American lives, would have been seriously limited if the source of intelligence mentioned had been so compromised.”
I said that I should warn Marshall that I believed, in legal terms, he had done himself a disservice in giving this information to the General Officers while eliminating the Recorder of the Court and the System Recorder from the meeting.
“Well,” he said, “I had in mind the war effort, on trying to win the war. I have done things that might be highly questionable, such as permitting a whole troop convoy to sail into a nest of enemy submarines rather than ordering them to skirt around it. But if I had given the order it would have compromised the source of my intelligence.”
As a lawyer, I had to admit that he gave a hell of a good answer. “Another place where I believe you did yourself a disservice,” I said, “was appointing a board consisting of General Grunert, whom you relieved as Commanding General in the Philippines in favor of MacArthur, and General Russell, whom you relieved on the training field and sent to Columbus, Ohio, and General Frank, whom you relieved as commander in Dayton, Ohio, and thereby prevented him from getting his third star. Each man had an axe to grind with you. I’m not saying they were dishonest, but if I were trying a lawsuit, I would eliminate them by challenge from serving on any jury with which you or your interests were involved.”
“Colonel Clausen, the sole reason I picked those men to serve on the Army Board was their availability for the job at hand,” Marshall said.
I thought that was very patriotic, though somewhat naive. Yet, it was typical of the type of man Marshall was. He picked those fellows because they could be spared for the job, not for his own purposes. But it explains the derogatory reports of the Army Board and the confusion they have given historians over the years.
Marshall did not deny that Miles, Bratton, Sadtler or others had been ordered to mislead the Board. But he said that he personally did not see these men “prior to or after their testimony.” In other words, Marshall himself did not order these men to dissemble to preserve the secrets of Magic.
“It was not until it developed that the ‘Magic’ papers were being disclosed before the Navy Court of Inquiry,” said Marshall, “that the Army officers concerned were authorized to go into all the details regarding ‘Magic’ before the Army Pearl Harbor Board.”
Now, this meant, as I had explained at the outset of my investigation to Secretary Stimson, that the Board heard tainted testimony about some Magic, and the truth about other Magic. The situation was further confused by Marshall’s now telling me that on his second appearance before the Board, he “discussed with the Board at length the general problem concerning the method of including ‘Magic’ in the report of the Board, and also the availability to the Board of any officers concerned for the purpose of giving testimony on the Top Secret ‘Magic’ phases on the investigation.” (It was around this point in time that I had first learned about Magic.) Marshall even suggested to the Board that Colonel Bratton was available to testify before them. But how was Marshall to know that Bratton would lie?
This was how Marshall boxed himself into a no-win situation by trying to handle problems in the “Army way” instead of coming clean with the Board’s lawyers. The Board itself is guilty for falling into the same trap, like Groucho Marx, who said: “I never make a decision without ignoring my lawyer.” Thus, the Board issued reports that were improperly biased on tainted evidence, faulty by virtue of the fact that the Board itself was prejudiced against Marshall, and improperly critical of Marshall because he had, without malice, caused perjured testimony to be presented to the Board.
Marshall understood this now. But how could it be explained to the public?
The problem was that Marshall was a soldier first, last and always, and an innocent when it came to the law. That was not a good situation when so many lawyer-type congressmen were going to try to pillory him in their forthcoming investigation.
First things first, however. I reviewed with Marshall the intercepts I carried with me. He said he believed before Pearl Harbor that Short was aware of some of this information, and that Short was also receiving some other information from facilities available only in Hawaii. (By this, Marshall meant the messages from British intelligence that I had picked up in Hawaii.) As for Short’s earlier testimony that the most important information he could have received would have been the news that the Japanese were destroying their codes, Marshall referred me to Bicknell’s testimony. You will recall that Bicknell had told me that the Navy had shown him on December 3 a cable from the Navy Department in Washington which read:
Highly reliable information has been received that categoric and urgent instructions were sent yesterday to the 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.
Marshall reflected on this message and said: “It was customary and expected that information of this character would be exchanged between the respective services at Hawaii.”
This puts the icing on the cake, I thought. I have taken the testimony of Captain Layton, the Pacific Fleet Intelligence Officer, who swore that it was against regulations to exchange this type of intelligence with the Army. Yet, here I have just heard the five-star general who has served for six years as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army say that it “was customary and expected that information of this character would be exchanged between the respective services at Hawaii.” It attributes the lie or violation or disobedience to Layton—and to Kimmel—in the most sweeping terms imaginable.
I must digress here for the moment. I don’t believe any historian or any politician ever picked up on this point of who was telling the truth about these vital matters: Layton and Kimmel or Marshall. The reason for not doing so is obvious. In a single sentence, Marshall destroyed Layton’s and Kimmel’s arguments by showing how Layton and Kimmel had failed to do their duty. If you had Layton and Marshall testifying on this matter in a trial, the jury would side with Marshall, as it should. But the historians and politicians continue to ignore this, because it does not fit into their preconceived notions of conspiracy theories, or their ill-conceived plans for political revenge.
But to get back to Marshall’s testimony: The Chief of Staff would not elaborate on his statement to me. Nor would he make further comment on the fact that the Navy at Pearl Harbor had kept the second message of December 3, as well as the first one, from going directly to Short. Marshall was not going to engage in hindsight or speculation. He would deal only with fact. Marshall had already pointed out that Kimmel and Layton had failed to do their duty, and he rightly pointed out that Bicknell had also failed, even though he had had to rely on back-channel information that violated Top Secret regulations. Bicknell waited three days to present his news at a regular staff conference and then had watered down his report, as I have pointed out earlier.
The real problem, which Marshall advanced with deadly clarity, was this: There were no relevant intelligence communications between Layton and Fielder, or between Kimmel and Short. The Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor had wanted to have everything its own way. It wanted to control intelligence information, and it did not share the information with Short’s command, yet it wanted the Army to protect the fleet at Pearl Harbor. From my point of view, any further defense Layton or Kimmel might propose of their actions would be ludicrous.
As for the types of warnings Marshall had personally given Short about the defense of his command, Marshall referred me to two letters he had sent Short. The first was dated February 7, 1941, and it said:
My impression of the Hawaiian problem has been that if no serious harm is done us during the first six hours of known hostilities, thereafter the existing defenses would discourage an enemy against the hazard of an attack. The risk of sabotage, and the risk involved in a surprise raid by air and by submarine, constitute the real perils of the situation. Frankly, I do not see any landing threat in the Hawaiian Islands so long as we have air superiority.
A second letter from Marshall to Short, dated March 5, 1941, said:
I would appreciate your early review of the situation in the Hawaiian Department with regard to defense from air attack. The establishment of a satisfactory system of coordinating all means available to this end is a matter of first priority.
Marshall went on to point out that “estimates to the same general effect were sent to General Short by the War Department.” The replies and other communications that the War Department received from Short indicated “that he was then alive to the danger of the possible surprise air attack against Pearl Harbor.”
Marshall said all this with calm precision. His voice did not rise. Nor did anger show on his face. He delivered the coup de grace to Short by saying: “He participated in plans and exercises against such a possibility [of surprise air attack]. At no time did General Short inform me, or, to my knowledge, anyone else in the War Department that he was not in full agreement with these War Department estimates and plans for the defense of Oahu, which, in effect, warned him to expect air and submarine attacks as primary threats in the event of war with Japan.”
What about Short’s changing of the SOPs without having notified Washington? I asked.
Said Marshall: “The doctrine of military command required that the Commanding General of an overseas command, such as the Hawaiian Department, must not act contrary to War Department estimates of the character mentioned, unless he believed such action to be dictated by necessity, and unless he immediately reported and gave full details and reasons to the War Department.”
Since Short had changed the SOPs and reversed their order of importance without informing Washington, any confusion created by this, Marshall was saying, was Short’s personal responsibility. Short’s command’s trying to hide the fact that these changes had been made without notifying Washington only made the situation worse.
I also believe that the two personal letters of instruction that Marshall had sent Short were ample directives to any general fearful of what to do, or unsure of what he was supposed to do. They were definitive in the respect that they predicted the exact thing that occurred, namely, a surprise air attack. Short should have been prepared to defend against an air attack by using long-range reconnaissance, whether by plane or by radar.
As it turned out, the Army’s radar was not fully operational on December 7 when the attack occurred. Nor had an integrated air defense command system been established. Neither did Short make any effort to learn from Kimmel about the Navy’s plans, or lack of plans, for long-range reconnaissance.
The debacle at Pearl Harbor was the result of Short’s and Kimmel’s being asleep at the switch.
Think of what would have happened if Short and Kimmel had been ready to fight.
When the Japanese attacked, they would have been met by our fighters in the air and antiaircraft guns blazing away from below. The Japanese might have sunk some of our ships, but our defenders would have been like the men at the Alamo, ready for an attack. If they were overwhelmed and killed, they would have been heroes. If they had kept the casualties down and saved some of the battleships from sinking, they would have been even greater heroes.
The fact of the matter was that our commanders and their forces were caught with their pants down. In war, you can’t have it both ways. You can be a hero if you’re ready to repel a surprise attack. You can’t be a hero if you fail in your primary mission and suffer the casualties in personnel and the loss of matériel that we did.
From what I had learned during my investigation, Short and Kimmel deserved to be relieved of their commands. Did they deserve harsher punishment? I believed so. According to law, they appeared to be guilty of criminal negligence and dereliction of duty.
Since this has been such a controversial matter for the past fifty years, let me pause a moment to explain. Let us use an auto accident as an example. Say you have a car that is defective. You put a bad driver in that car, and there is an accident. Had the driver been attentive, he might have avoided the accident. But, according to law, the driver should have known he had to be careful and look out for potentially dangerous situations; therefore, the accident occurred because the driver was violating his duty, and he is liable under the law. Now, the system that Kimmel and Short were operating under may have been faulty—indeed, I believe the system of handling Magic was improper—but both men were ex industria warned to be careful and avoid an accident, such as a surprise aerial attack. Neither man avoided the calamity. And, as I shall show later, neither man tried to communicate with the other about the potential dangers they jointly faced.
Let’s put it another way: Kimmel and Short were like two sentries on duty who either did not look, and hence did not see, the tank that overran them, or who looked and still failed to see it. In either event, they were guilty of having failed to warn their comrades, and hence of dereliction of duty, just as a sentry on duty in time of war would be guilty and subjected to court-martial with the possibility of capital punishment.1
Whether the military could accept this judgement remained to be seen. I was certain, however, that other civilian lawyers, such as Secretary Stimson and Harvey Bundy, would agree with me. Indeed, they did.
If there was one mitigating factor in favor of Kimmel and Short, it was that, while they might have been sentries, it wasn’t during a time of war that they failed in their duties, but in a time of peace. One might call it the result of the Pearl Harbor syndrome. Stephen Coonts is one of the first ex-military writers to touch on this, which he does in his recent best-selling novel Under Siege. Coonts’s hero, Jake Grafton, explains why governments are caught with their pants down. “They weren’t unprepared,” Grafton says. “They just weren’t ready, if you understand the difference. It’s almost impossible for people who have known only peace to lift themselves to that level of mental readiness necessary to immediately and effectively counter a determined attack.… We refuse to believe.”2
Although the affidavit from General Marshall was the last major piece of testimony for my investigation, there were still some minor players I had to call upon.
One of these was Col. Rex W. Minckler, who in the months before Pearl Harbor was the Officer in Charge of the Signal Intelligence Service. This meant he had direct supervision over the receipt and dissemination of intercepted radio messages.
Minckler recalled the action taken to monitor Japanese radio broadcasts for the execute message of the Winds Code. Again, I asked: Had a Winds broadcast been intercepted?
“I never saw, or heard of, an authentic execute message of this character before, or since, 7 December 1941,” said Minckler. “It is my belief that no such message was sent.”
Minckler confirmed that there had been one or two “false alarms,” which he discussed with the Navy and G-2. There was one message that indicated a possible breach in relations between Japan and Great Britain, but even that was not verified.
Minckler also said, confirming earlier testimony by others, that it was normal procedure in sending messages between the Army and the Navy to send six copies.
I showed Minckler two decrypts I had carried with me during my investigation, which have caused considerable consternation to historians because they were intercepted just before Pearl Harbor, but were not translated until the day after the attack. The first message read as follows:
From: Hon [Honolulu]
To: Tokyo
Dec. 6, 41
PA-KY
#253 release p5——123a
1. On American continent in Oct. Army began training barrage balloon troops at Camp Davis, N.C. 400, 500 balloons considering use in defense of Hawaii & Panama. So far as Hawaii concerned through investigations made, they have not set up mooring equipment, nor have they selected troops to man them. No training for maintenance balloons. No signs barrage balloons equipment. In addition, it is difficult to imagine that they have actually any limits to barrage balloon defense. I imagine that in all probability there is considerable opportunity left to take advantage of a surprise attack against these places.
In my opinion battleships do not have torpedo nets. Details not known; will report results of investigation. Army 718 258777 2a Trans 12/8/41 (2-TT).
The second message read:
To: Tokyo
Dec. 6, 41
PA–K2
#254
1. On evening 5th, among battleships which entered port—one sub tender. The following ships observed at anchor on 6th.
9 battleships, 3 light cruisers, 3 sub tenders, 17 destroyers, in addition 4 light cruisers, 2 destroyers lying at docks (heavy cruisers & air plane carriers all left).
2. “It appears that no air reconnaissance is being conducted by the fleet air arm.”
Army 7179 25874 Trans 12/8/41 (2–22) 3 a.
Minckler confirmed that both messages had been intercepted on December 6 but had not been translated until December 8, the day after the Japanese attack. He also confirmed that this was the proper amount of time for normal decryption and decoding the code in question, PA–K2.
Minckler also said that when such messages came in, they were automatically sent in raw form to the Navy.
I knew that the Navy had intercepted at least three more, similar messages from the Japanese Consul General in Honolulu. These were intercepted in enough time for decryption and translation to give ample warning of an attack. It wasn’t until much later, however, that I learned why they had not been processed in time.
One of the things I had done when I was in Hawaii was to go to Mayfield’s District Intelligence Office and get the Consul’s answers to Tokyo’s requests for the movements of ships at Pearl Harbor. They were in the form of intercepted cables that had been sent via commercial RCA traffic. When David Sarnoff, the president of RCA, had visited Hawaii in November 1941, Mayfield persuaded him to let the Navy have copies of the cables the Japanese Consul was sending. This was in violation of the law at that time. After the Consul had destroyed his code machines and codes, with the exception of one system, on the December 3 order from Tokyo, the RCA code link was the only one left to the Consul for sending messages. This meant commercial cable traffic, but neither the Army nor the Navy thought to upgrade the priority to hasten decryption and translation of this code traffic because of its new importance. This is where an array of hideous errors occurred.
One of the other messages sent and intercepted on December 3 read:
R.C.A.
No. 362 |
3 DEC 1941 |
From: Kita
To: Foreign Minister Tokyo
Consul San Francisco
URGENT REPORT
1. Military transport (name unknown) departed for mainland on 2nd.
2. Lurline arrived from San Francisco on 3rd.
Another message on December 3 read:
R.C.A.
No. |
3 Dec. 1941 |
From: Kita
To: FM Tokyo #363
Wyoming and two seaplane tenders departed third.
Another message went out on December 4, reading:
R.C.A.
No. 364 |
4 Dec. 1941 |
From: Kita
To: FM Tokyo
PM/3rd one British warship arrived Honolulu and departed early morning fourth X approximately 100 tons one stack one four inch gun fwd and aft X Fueled?
Immediately after arrival enlisted rating(s) received mail from British consulate.
This precise surveillance ended any doubt I might have had that the Japanese had established competent naval observers in Honolulu.
But even as late as 1946, when Capt. Arthur H. McCollum, the head of the Far Eastern Section of Naval Intelligence (Washington), testified before the Congressional Committee investigating Pearl Harbor, he contended this was not true, saying: “It was my feeling then, and is my feeling now, that the Japanese had been unable to put Naval observers into the Consulate General in Hawaii.” McCollum admitted that the Navy knew the Japanese had such observers in Seattle, San Francisco, the Los Angeles-San Diego area and Panama. But how the former Chief of the Far Eastern Section of Naval intelligence could swear to Congress that the Japanese didn’t have such an observer in Hawaii is beyond my comprehension, especially when he said he knew that the Japanese Consul in Honolulu had received specific instructions from Tokyo to report on the movement of our ships.3
Thus, Kimmel had in his possession—via his subordinates Admiral Bloch, Commandant of the Fourteenth Naval District, Captain Mayfield and Commander Rochefort by their receipt of these five Japanese messages from RCA—derivative knowledge that the Japanese were keeping close watch on Pearl Harbor. And Captain Layton, the Fleet Intelligence Officer, had acknowledged to me that he knew of the arrangement whereby RCA was turning these cables over to Captain Mayfield.
Why weren’t the cables translated quickly, because of their newfound importance (the PA–K2 code being the only one left for the Japanese Consul to use)? According to Captain Safford’s testimony to the Hewitt Inquiry (page 109), the system had been used for several years and was easily read by our code breakers. I concluded every effort should have been given to breaking these messages.
The reason this effort was not made was that Rochefort was overwhelmed by his concentration on cracking the unbreakable Japanese Naval Code for flag officers, which was introduced on December 1, 1940, and the pressure to locate the Japanese fleet. He wanted more personnel to help handle the workload, but to avoid acrimony, he refrained from asking Washington for this help. Next, Rochefort found that among the important PA–K2 code messages there were a lot of “garbage cables.” This made him reluctant to assign staff to wade through so much rubbish. Finally, he told a warrant officer named Woodward to do the job. Woodward was able to read the PA–K2 code, but he erroneously stacked the pile of cables in inverse order of date, making the code sequences impossible to crack. It took four days for him to discover his error, by which time the attack had already occurred.4
The most telling point in all this was the fact that Kimmel possessed within his own command information identical or similar to the information he so vociferously claimed Washington had denied him.
I will never forget sitting in the Hawaiian office of the Navy’s Fourteenth District Intelligence Officer assembling all this documentary proof. I wondered why the Army Board and others had failed earlier to do the work I was now doing. And I remembered how Warrant Officer Emanuel told me that when he executed Mayfield’s order to stop tapping the telephones of the Japanese Consulate, he closed out his log by writing “Sic transit gloria mundi.”
1 Clausen to Lee interview, Jan. 29, 1991; Clausen letter to Lee, Apr. 2, 1991.
2 Stephen Coonts, Under Siege, New York: Pocket Books, 1990, p. 35.
3 PHA Hearings, pt. 8, p. 3391.
4 PHH 26/363; Edwin P. Layton, And I Was There, New York: Morrow, 1985, pp. 162–163, 244, 278 ff.