I remember that evening in the Old Senate Office Building (it’s called “Old” because another one has been built, which is called “New”). I worked until long after midnight, making sure the Army Signals Intelligence Service numbers on my exhibits corresponded to the numbers the Committee had assigned various decrypts, and making sure that the language in them conformed. I got to bed around two-thirty and was back in the hearing room the next morning before ten.
It would be late that afternoon before I had finished answering the single question Senator Lucas had asked the previous day.
I first explained to the Committee that I had checked all three recipients of British Secret Intelligence Service messages in Hawaii. They were Mayfield of the Navy, Shivers of the FBI and Bicknell of the Army. In some cases, the messages went only to Mayfield, and they carried the notation “Captain Mayfield only.” In other cases, copies were distributed to all three men. I obtained nearly two hundred of these British intelligence messages that were retained by Hawaii and never sent to Washington. A summary of them was incorporated in my Exhibit 6.1 I believe this was the first time the Committee understood that Hawaii had intelligence sources that were exclusively its own, and it caused them real consternation.
I was able to read into the record in this way the affidavits I had obtained from men such as Bicknell. I slipped the camel’s nose under the tent, so to speak, because it gave me the opportunity to introduce my documentary proof that the Navy had not played straight up with the Army. Furthermore, I was able to explain to Senator Lucas that the Army and the Navy had been collaborating before 1941 to obtain the cables sent from the local RCA cable office in Hawaii to Tokyo by the Japanese Consul, and to break the code in which they had been sent and received.
This, of course, upset Representative Keefe. He was carrying his own torch. He did not want my affidavits introduced as evidence, because they conflicted with his preconceived notion of events.
Fortunately, Keefe was put down by Representative Murphy, who pointed out that if the Committee followed the wishes of Keefe, “we will know nothing about Pearl Harbor.”2 Both Murphy and Senator George were forceful in saying that the Committee had called only one witness to date from the Army who had been at Pearl Harbor. That was Short. What they wanted now was to hear more about what had gone on in the Army’s Hawaiian command. In response to this request, I was able to introduce the affidavit of Colonel Fielder, which really put the cat among the pigeons.
This meant that Bicknell, who did not possess the necessary security clearances, was identified as having seen a number of Top Secret messages. Moreover, it proved false Captain Layton’s claim that he had given information to Colonel Raley; he either hadn’t done so or had rendered the information useless by failing to reveal the importance of its source.
I also introduced the messages that had been intercepted from the Japanese Consul but were not translated by the Navy at Pearl Harbor until after the attack. (These were the messages requesting information about the fleet’s movements at Pearl Harbor and whether it was protected by barrage balloons or torpedo nets.3
The members of the Committee could not recall the facts of the matter, and Ferguson asked me to make interpretations for the Committee. To avoid that hot potato, I replied: “Senator, I am saying the [Fielder] affidavit says what it says.… I am not going to put my impression on the language.”4
In other words, I could lead the Congressional horse to water, but I mustn’t make it drink. If the Committee foundered, or made the wrong evaluation on the basis of my opinion, all my work would have been negated.
This led to the operations of Theo H. Davies and Co., one of the five largest business operations in the Islands, and the British warning to Hawaii of December 3 that said: “Our considered opinion concludes that Japan envisages early hostilities with Britain and the United States.”5
Then came the fact that the Navy had been tapping the telephones of the Japanese consulate for twenty-two months but quit on December 2 because Captain Mayfield “got peeved.”6 There was more consternation among the Committee when the members realized exactly what my affidavit from Donald Woodrum really meant.
Senator Lucas: So the Navy just turned the work over to the FBI?
Colonel Clausen: No, they did not turn it over. They just quit.
Senator Lucas: They just quit and let the FBI handle it?
Colonel Clausen: No, they didn’t do that. They did not tell the FBI. They just quit and said nothing.
The Vice-Chairman: They just quit, period, then?
Colonel Clausen: Period.
Mr. Gearhart: And if the FBI had known that the Navy had withdrawn, they would have extended their taps to cover the other parts of the consulates?
Colonel Clausen: Yes, sir.7
Over the objections of Representative Keefe, the Committee allowed me to put into evidence the affidavits of Generals MacArthur, Sutherland and Willoughby.
Now the charge was made public that the Navy had, throughout the course of the war in the Pacific, withheld vital intelligence from the Army.
When Senator Ferguson asked (rather pointedly, I thought) if this had been referred to in any report by Stimson or the Army’s Judge Advocate General, I replied that Stimson had said in his final report that the Hawaiian command of the Army and Washington were not operating “in the highest degree of efficiency.” In effect, what Stimson was saying was that, with regard to intelligence, and especially the ships-in-harbor reports, the information should have been analyzed “by a man with more analytical and imaginative insight to see the possibility of an attack on Pearl Harbor.”8
Watching the faces of the Committee members, I could see that a seed had been planted in their minds. Whether it would come to fruition, I could not tell. But I began to sense that some members, at least, were getting the idea that something had been wrong with our overall intelligence system before Pearl Harbor.
Washington knew this; Pearl Harbor knew that. Kimmel perceived something else, and Short’s staff had additional information. It was Admiral Stark, I believe, who put it rather well when he said: “We never had time to think.” The situation was compounded within the Navy, for example, by the fact that its Washington offices were so crowded that when two top Navy people had to discuss matters of code-breaking intelligence, they had to step outside their offices and talk in the corridor.
To me, the question now was whether the Committee would pick up the leads I had given it.
Meanwhile, the hearings lapsed into partisan arguments.
Senator Ferguson, who consistently contended that the commanders at Hawaii had been kept in the dark about the Magic codes broken by Washington, jumped on me for not going to Short for his testimony. Ferguson said I should have asked Short if he had received the information that the affidavits I had collected said he possessed.
One of my reasons for not doing so, I explained, was that I was sure “Congress was going to conduct its own investigation.”
“Oh,” said Ferguson.
“So far as I was concerned,” I replied, noting that some wind seemed to have gone out of Ferguson’s sails, “I mean I was willing to do anything that would be required, but with the end of the Japanese War and the opportunity of Congress to confront General Short with whatever it wanted and to go into the matter, it would seem to me that the entire matter could be taken up at that time.”9
Of course, the Committee had not, when he had appeared before them, grilled Short about these matters. Nor would they now. Nor would they grill Kimmel. So Ferguson let the matter drop, and tried to beat on me for exceeding my brief by questioning various Navy personnel. Why, for example, had I interrogated Commander Rochefort?
I explained that Rochefort had testified before the Army Pearl Harbor Board and had never given the Board any information on Magic. Nor had the Board asked him about Magic, because, I assumed, the Board didn’t know the details of Magic at the time.
It was then that Senator Lucas came to my assistance with a neat bit of legal logic that threw another roadblock before Ferguson.
Lucas pointed out that what I was testifying to was documentary proof that had been taken from the files in Hawaii. As he put it: “Documentary proof speaks for itself.” Therefore, it wouldn’t be necessary to cross-examine Short or Kimmel about it.
Okay, I thought. I have one member of the Committee on my side.
A short time later, I sensed another member was coming over to my side in the argument.
Representative Murphy asked if he could see my Summary exhibit of Far Eastern documents. I replied that I had a copy. It had been Exhibit A before the Army Pearl Harbor Board. Murphy said that was good news, because, of the two copies of the Summary that had been furnished earlier to the Committee, one had been held by Senator Ferguson since October 25, and the other had been held by Representative Gearhart since November 17.
What Murphy was saying, in the polite manner congressmen use in speaking with each other, was that Gearhart and Ferguson had been blocking the other Committee members from seeing this section of my report. Why? Because they believed it would be harmful to their isolationist-revisionist cause. Gentlemen, I thought, the time has come. You can no longer shield Kimmel and Short by keeping my entire investigation from being read by your colleagues. Stop playing petty party politics, and turn over this evidence to the other members of the Committee.
It took me until nearly four in the afternoon to reach the point where I had finished answering the single question posed to me by Lucas the day before. Now, the opposition was going to counterattack.
Ferguson was first. His premise was that I had conducted my investigation because Secretary Stimson had been dissatisfied with the findings of the Army Board. He also believed that Stimson was trying to protect Marshall from the criticism in the Board’s report. He didn’t believe my investigation had been necessary; he was dissatisfied that I had been appointed to do the job.
I pointed out that he was wrong on all counts. As to why I had been appointed to do the job, I said: “I can only apologize for being a major … and I have to apologize for being my age … I do not delude myself. They selected me [for the job] because I was the fellow they could spare the most.”10
By now, it was five in the afternoon. Ferguson was so set to nail me against the wall that a special evening session was scheduled. The Committee broke for dinner. I went to my hotel and lay down on the bed, trying to figure out what they were going to ask me next.
My guess proved right. Ferguson came charging back, accusing me of favoring Marshall over Short. But he kept stumbling over his questions. He was especially put off when I pointed out to him that the Army Board had questioned Short after the Board had officially learned about Magic, and that I had determined from my investigation that the intelligence unit in Short’s command had adequately advised Short and his staff about the problems of Japanese aggression against America, Great Britain, the Netherlands and China in the Pacific.
Finally, Ferguson acknowledged that the work of the Army Board had been of a questionable nature because it had not fully investigated the implications of Magic. Then he tried to turn this around, saying it had destroyed my investigation, too.
I pointed out that this wasn’t true, telling him to “go back to your Public [Law] 339. You told Stimson to investigate—first, you extended the statute of limitations. Then [you] ask Col. Stimson and Mr. Forrestal to conduct several investigations. In other words, each department conduct its own and that is the reason you should not put any invidious implication upon my not going into the Army, or the Navy going into the Army, because you put in there the word ‘several.’ Now it would have been better, I think, if you had all amalgamated and called everybody up and had sort of an adversary proceeding.… The thing that Colonel Stimson had in mind was to comply with your Public, 339, and he could not court-martial Kimmel, he doesn’t have any jurisdiction over Kimmel.…”
Ferguson did not appreciate hearing this fact. He then attacked me for not having grilled Secretary Stimson.
To this I replied: “You mean I should investigate the investigator. That would be like the grand jury investigating the grand jury. You told him [Stimson] to do the job. If you wanted somebody else to investigate Stimson you should have said so in the law.”11
Ferguson became incensed. He realized I had him cold. Congress had ordered Stimson to conduct an investigation. I was Stimson’s investigator. We had done exactly what Congress ordered. What angered Ferguson was that my investigation produced answers that did not agree with his preconceived notions.
I told Ferguson: “[Stimson] was complying with your Public [Law], 339, and you did not say in there how he should do it. You did not say that he should not take affidavits, or that he should take affidavits.”
Said Ferguson, “No.”
I continued. “You did not say that he should appoint a board, or not appoint a board, and if you wanted him to have three high-ranking generals you should have said so.”
Ferguson said that no one would have thought that Stimson would start out with three generals investigating as a board and then switch to the Assistant Recorder of the board to complete the investigation.
“You are misconceiving, sir,” I replied. “The Board finished its job. They were glad to be gone, and they made their report. It would have been all right with Henry C. Clausen if [Stimson] had picked somebody else.”
Ferguson asked when I had first learned of the fourteen-part Japanese message.
I told him that it had not been until the last week the Board had been in session. In fact, the Board had “been so afraid to touch it that it delegated General Russell as custodian of the material and he alone had the combination of the safe in which it was kept.” Furthermore, the two Recorders of the Court, of which I was one, were never given the documents to handle because of their high security classification.
Ferguson didn’t have any more rocks to throw. But now he lobbed in a question. If people had testified to the Army Board and had failed to testify fully, why shouldn’t their later testimony be discounted?
I replied: “Senator, it is very unfair to take the testimony of a man who has not been authorized to reveal Magic information and say that he testified so and so before so and so.… If those subjects are such that they cannot testify fully before the Boards … you must make allowance for the fact that they were bound by oath not to reveal it to a soul.… Now, you cannot say that when he is under oath not to reveal things, like General Miles, that he did not tell the truth. You cannot gag him on one hand and say, ‘Oh, you did not say that to the Board.’”12
Now, if you ever want to upset a Senator, all you have to do is to contradict him, or say that there is information that Congress cannot have because of security regulations.
Ferguson hit the roof. He could not comprehend that these men had sworn to tell the truth before various investigating bodies, but, at the same time, were bound by a higher oath not to reveal anything about Magic. (As I said earlier in my narrative, I had a feeling of déjà vu when I read the testimony of Richard Helms about the CIA’s operations some forty years later; Congress will never believe that it shouldn’t have access to every secret in government. On the other hand, as I have witnessed it over the years, could Congress keep a secret if it knew one?)
This took us into the instructions that had been given to General Miles about how he was to testify before the Army Pearl Harbor Board. You will recall that Miles had told me that the Chief of Staff, Marshall, did not want him to talk about Magic.
Ferguson wouldn’t touch this issue with a barge pole. It was too hot. Thus, he never attacked Marshall where he was most vulnerable. Instead, he moved on to my affidavit from General MacArthur. This worried him because MacArthur had testified that, as far as he had been concerned, the dispatches he received from the War Department gave him ample and complete information to warrant his alerting his command for war. Ferguson did not believe MacArthur’s statement. It would have been politically inconvenient for him to do, so he tried to get me to say that other factors were more responsible for MacArthur’s preparedness than the War Department’s dispatches, as compared with Short’s being asleep at the switch.
With some exasperation, I said: “If you are alerted for war, you are alerted for war whether you get a thousand alerts or not.… I knew I was not investigating MacArthur; I was not investigating the Philippine Islands.… I did know there was a great deal of Japanese activity, military activity in the Mandates, the Philippines, all over. That is the reason, of course, why the basic mistake was made of thinking the Japs were going to strike in the South. It is not a question of knowing the Japs were going to strike, but where.”13
Ferguson paused. I waited. I prayed his next question would be bipartisan. It was, thank the Lord, for Ferguson asked if I had reached any conclusion from the affidavits I had taken from MacArthur, Willoughby and Sutherland. In effect, Ferguson opened the doors to admit the most basic findings of my investigation.
I fudged my answer somewhat at the start, saying that I had a “hazy curbstone opinion” that the Navy at Manila had shortchanged the Army about intelligence in that the Navy had not given the Army all the intelligence available.
Once Ferguson and I had agreed on what the term “shortchanged” meant, Ferguson asked if the claim was being made that the Navy had been shortchanging the Army before Pearl Harbor, as far as intelligence was concerned. This meant Magic in particular.
“That is what General Willoughby says in his affidavit,” I replied. “He said it existed down to the time of the Philippine campaign; after the reconquest of the Philippines, and for that reason he wanted an integrated, one overall agency to handle this stuff, so you do not in the future have one service monopolizing the information to the detriment of the other, and neither one may be knowing what the other is doing.”
Ferguson picked up on this immediately. He asked that I expand my statement.
“If I have a basket of Magic here,” I explained, “and I am the Navy, and you are the Army over there, then I would pick these up and determine in my mind what would affect you.”
“You would give me what you wanted to give me?” asked Ferguson.
“I would give you what I wanted to give you and obviously that would be wrong,” I said. “Because I, as a Navy man, would not know what the military implications may be to you.”
Suddenly, we had established an unusual colloquy. Both of us understood the importance of this magic moment about Magic; both of us understood the message we were delivering.
Ferguson wanted to know if the same “shortchanging” occurred in Washington.
“I think there was far more cordial and freer exchange, but the same thing applies, Senator,” I said. “For the sake of the country, it should be known that there was evidently some jealousy between the services, and this existed prior to Pearl Harbor.”
“You mean it existed in Washington, Hawaii and the Philippines?” asked Ferguson.
“That is what I understand,” I said. “In other words, what a ludicrous situation is presented if you have a fleet intelligence officer, Captain Layton, saying he gave information to Colonel Raley but would not tell Raley where it came from! How could Colonel Raley know how to evaluate it?”
“That is what I was going to get at for many days in this hearing here in Washington,” said Ferguson.
“If I can make one single contribution to this case,” I said, “and if anything came out of this hearing, it would be that you pursue the idea of having one agency and let that be coordinated on a business basis, so you do not have monopolistic agencies trying to hide the information for themselves.”
“All right,” Ferguson said, reiterating that the intelligence shortchanging existed in at least three places: Washington, Manila and Pearl Harbor. “Did you find any supervising head who was able, in any of the services, to really evaluate the intelligence so that it could be used by the United States?”
“Now you’ve hit the nail right on the head,” I replied. “If one thing more should be done, it is this: You ought to train people to look at this stuff and be able to read it, just like lawyers can pick up a case in a short time; you can do that by training people. You cannot do it by going through normal communications and so forth.…”
Said Ferguson: “I am talking about an overall head that really coordinated the various officers in the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands and in Washington?”
“Of course not,” I said. “Then you would not have had the ludicrous situation of Admiral Turner saying that he thought Hawaii was getting this stuff based on what Admiral Noyes told him. What a silly thing that is! What kind of a set up is that?”
“That is what I am trying to find out here,” Ferguson said.
“I did not find any such thing,” I said again, “and I hope the future sees a different picture. Otherwise, we are liable to have Pearl Harbor all over again.”14
I could see that my remarks had struck home. Ferguson asked me a series of rather inconsequential questions and then returned to the subject. He wanted to know what Pearl Harbor had possessed in terms of decrypting equipment. He seemed shaken when I pointed out, again, that the Navy did not have equipment in Hawaii capable of breaking the diplomatic Purple code.
As for what other facilities the Navy had at Pearl Harbor, I pointed out that the Army was “solely at the mercy of the Navy” when it came to getting code-breaking intelligence. The Navy, claiming its communications were more secure than the Army’s, had limited what the Army in Washington could send to its Hawaiian command in terms of advisories based on Magic. And while the Navy was supposed to keep Short and his staff fully advised about intelligence received from Washington, Colonel Fielder had sworn to me that if he had asked the Navy for such information, it would have been refused him.
Meanwhile, the Navy was doing things in a sub-rosa fashion, like tapping the phones of the Japanese Consul’s home and office, and the phone of the Japanese steamship line, then, when it became frightened, cutting off the taps without telling anyone.
Ferguson asked if I had found that the Navy had been giving the Army all the intelligence it had obtained in Hawaii.
“Well, as I size it up,” I said, “the Navy was not doing it. It just comes down to that.”
Ferguson was looking for a closer, a kicker for the story, as a journalist would say. Suddenly, we were back in the Philippines with General Willoughby.
“Here is a man fighting the war in the Philippines,” I said, “when I was there, with guns booming, and he at that time is having this vexing problem of trying to get the information from the Navy when the war was going on!”
How long after Pearl Harbor was Willoughby having these problems, Ferguson asked.
In May 1945, I replied, or some four and one-half years after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.15
Ferguson said he had no more questions.
I was delighted to be finished with Ferguson and hoped I might have changed his point of view. I knew he had fully understood the implications of what I had told him.
Now, I had another hostile congressman after my scalp.
Representative Keefe was bound and determined to prove that my investigation was prejudiced from its inception. He wanted to prove that Stimson had sent me on my mission to save Marshall’s reputation from the stinging criticism of the Army Board.
We went around the mulberry bush for some time on the matter, and I finally let him have it.
“Mr. Keefe,” I said, “I at no time went out with any preconceived idea to slant any investigation. I would not have been a party to it. Mr. Stimson would not have authorized it. You assumed, in your questions; that I was some kind of stooge sent out by the War Department.”
“Well, now,” Keefe said, retracting his charges. “You are jumping at conclusions.”
“I am glad to hear you say that,” I said. Still, battle was joined.16
Keefe seemed to be marching to his own drummer. He could not grasp the fact that the secrecy surrounding Magic had caused serious problems for the Army Board, to say nothing about the way Marshall had handled the issue of Magic in a secret session before the general officers of the Board, and that testimony about Magic had been denied the Board. It wasn’t difficult to figure out that Keefe was madder than hell at me, for I was the person who found the evidence that Marshall was not guilty of the charges the Army Board had made against him. I was the guy who rained on Keefe’s parade.
It was now twenty minutes after ten at night. The Committee was worn out. So was I. The hearing recessed until the next morning.
When the hearing resumed, Senator Lucas began the questioning, which gave me something of a breather. He helped rebut Keefe’s charges by stating the groundwork for my investigation as being the Army Board’s meeting for three months without having had the chance to question any witnesses about Magic. Furthermore, when the witnesses came close to the issue of Magic, they had squirmed and danced their way out of trouble.
I said that this was true, that “my experience as a trial lawyer led me to see these various witnesses as they testified; and there seemed to be, in two instances, at least … as though they were on the brink of something and could not say something.…”17
That’s why it was necessary, in the words of the Judge Advocate General, “to complete the picture and, in fairness to other personnel,” to follow the leads I thought necessary to complete my investigation.18
This led to the question as to who had more power and authority concerning my investigation or any other war matters: Stimson or the Army Board?
I pointed out that the Secretary of War had the power and authority, not the Army Board. It was the Secretary whom Congress empowered under Public Law 339 to conduct the investigation into Pearl Harbor. I also again pointed out: “There was no form prescribed by that law as to how the investigation would be conducted.”19
The fact that Stimson chose me, like himself a former U.S. Attorney skilled as a trial lawyer, to be his investigator was perfectly legal and correct. If I questioned fifteen people who had testified before the Army Board, located another thirty-five new witnesses (who, as it turned out, never testified before any other investigation, including that of Congress) and presented their sworn testimony to the Secretary of War to enable him to reach a decision about the guilt or innocence of certain parties involved in Pearl Harbor, that, too, was perfectly legal and proper.20
Now, Lucas introduced the real reason for Keefe’s petulance about my testimony. He read into the record Keefe’s statement on the floor of the House dated November 6, 1945, about how “Colonel Clausen went to Colonel Bratton along with all the other witnesses and browbeat him into signing an affidavit a year later in which his testimony is subject to some change.” Keefe had declared, “I want to talk to Colonel Bratton.”
“Now, that is a pretty serious charge against you, Colonel Clausen,” Lucas said.
I replied that “I considered it so … when it is not true and correct.… I treated every single person whom I interviewed with as much fairness as I knew how. I certainly did not conduct an inquisition. I went to them and, in all cases where I could, showed them what other people had said about the subject. Now, one example, General Fielder.… There had also been testimony about the Navy giving the Army all [of the Navy’s] information. That immediately put General Fielder on the spot and in order to be fair to him I took him with me to Guam and there confronted him with Captain Layton, who was the fleet [intelligence] man and who had the information of this super-duper code-cracking, and Captain Layton said he did not give it to General Fielder. Now, that is the kind of investigation I tried to conduct.”
I could see Keefe, Gearhart and Ferguson squirming in their seats. Under the Committee rules, they couldn’t say anything at the moment, but I knew they were going to come after me hammer and tongs when their time came.
Meanwhile, Lucas laid another cornerstone for the reason Bratton had changed his story to me. Lucas asked: “What I specifically want to know is whether or not you browbeat this 225-pound Colonel here [Bratton was sitting just behind me] into giving evidence that was other than what he considered at that time the truth?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“Did you browbeat him into signing this affidavit?”
“No, sir.”
“Since I have seen the Colonel here, I would not want to attempt to browbeat him into anything,” said Lucas.21
Later on in the hearings, Lucas questioned Bratton on this issue. “Were you ever mistreated by Clausen in the way of being browbeaten into signing this [your] affidavit? Lucas asked Bratton.
“Not in any manner whatsoever, sir,” Bratton testified to Lucas. “My relations with Colonel Clausen were cordial in every respect.”22
In continuing his questions to me, however, Lucas went on to say that I had testified to things that took place in Hawaii “which, frankly, I was amazed and startled at. I confess that I had not had time to read your report … but I cannot see how this Committee can conclude this hearing without calling a couple of witnesses from Hawaii. We have been investigating Washington all this time.”
I thought this was quite an admission for a senator to make. Not only did he acknowledge that he had not read my report, but he was saying that, given my testimony, he was now of the opinion that the Congressional investigation was improperly focusing on what had happened in Washington. I was making some real headway, after all.23
This brought us back to the issue of the Navy’s having tapped the phones of the Japanese Consul in Honolulu.
Lucas placed in evidence the testimony of Captain Mayfield (now an admiral) before the Hewitt Investigation. Mayfield had been cross-examined by Sonnett and said that nothing of military significance had been obtained by tapping the Consul’s phones. He also explained that he had stopped the phone taps, “since the interceptions to that date had revealed nothing of particular value,” and a conflict was perceived with the FBI’s tap on the Consul’s phone.
Sonnett had then asked Mayfield if he recalled the transcript of the Mori conversation that FBI Agent Shivers had intercepted. Mayfield said that Shivers had brought it to him on the afternoon of December 6 and that it was never brought to the attention of Kimmel. Mayfield did not know if the matter had been brought to Short’s attention.
It had been, of course, by Bicknell, who had taken the transcript of the conversation to Fielder and Short that Saturday evening. This was the conversation in which Short could not see anything suspicious even though it appeared to be in a code based on the flowers in bloom in Hawaii at that time. The answer to Tokyo’s question had been that the “flowers in bloom were the fewest out of the whole year, but that hibiscus and poinsettias were in bloom.”
In his testimony, Mayfield acknowledged that he thought this language was strange, but it was not until after the Japanese attack that he “heard or read something to the effect that such a code may have been in existence.”
Lucas asked whether, during my investigation, I had learned if anyone in the Army or the Navy knew about the existence of such a code.
“You remember, Senator,” I replied, “[Bicknell] said he had been trained under General Knowland … [who was] G-2 in the European War [World War I], and he always instructed his men that no matter how insignificant the detail might appear, the information might have some important bearing. Colonel Bicknell was especially alarmed because of the use of those two words, poinsettias and hibiscus, and he testified before the [Army] Board that the next morning when the attack was going on he stood on the veranda of his home, repeating automatically to himself, as the Japs were dropping bombs on the ships, ‘poinsettias and hibiscus.’”
The hearing room was silent for several moments when I finished this statement. Then, Representative Gearhart came to the attack.
He probed around a bit, asking if I had been given a free hand to conduct my investigation. I said that was true. He next asked about the Winds Code messages. He could not understand why I had spent so much time investigating them.
I told him that I agreed with him that the Winds Code had been overemphasized. But I had to follow up the leads in Captain Safford’s testimony before the Hart Inquiry, because he was asserting “that all the Japanese intentions were known on December 6. Well, that would imply that you even knew that Pearl Harbor was the attack target.… That is one reason why it [the Winds Code] is magnified out of all proportion.”
It is interesting to note that Safford tried to aid Kimmel in the years after the attack by saying that the execute message for the Winds Code had been intercepted. But no one could verify his claim. The other dramatic part of Safford’s statement was whether the so-called execute message had been mislaid, whether somebody swiped it or whether it had been destroyed. I couldn’t find evidence that a Winds Code execute message had ever been received by Washington. I told Gearhart: “The ‘Winds Code’ set-up, and the query and implement message, is magnified out of proportion to all the aspects of this tragedy.”
Then, Gearhart got down to brass tacks. “The greatest mystery of all of these Pearl Harbor investigations,” he said, “is the mystery of where the Chief of Staff of the Army was, and where the Chief of Naval Operations of the Navy was, on the night of December 6.”
It was obvious what Gearhart was after: Marshall’s scalp. In particular, Gearhart was focusing on the report of the Army Board, which criticized Marshall because, as the Board put it: “He [Marshall] failed in his relations with the Hawaiian Department in the following particulars—to get to General Short on the evening of December 6th and the early morning of December 7th the critical information indicating an almost complete break with Japan, though there was ample time to have accomplished this.” (Emphasis added)
Said Gearhart: “That is the finding and the conclusion and the indictment, if you please, of the Army Board itself, and that ties in with General Marshall and Magic as closely as any two ideas could be associated.”
I couldn’t believe Gearhart could be so obtuse.
Even Keefe had understood that Marshall had not been given the fourteen-part diplomatic message on the night of December 6, as Colonel Bratton had claimed. But Gearhart could not comprehend that Bratton had lied to the Army Board. Nor could he understand the significance of the fact that General Miles had seen the first thirteen parts of the fourteen-part message while dining with his counterpart, the head of Naval intelligence, that same evening, yet neither man had done anything about it. Nor could Gearhart understand why Marshall could not remember where he had been that fateful evening. (Some members of Congress had gone so far as to accuse Marshall of having been to the movies with a WAC, although the Women’s Army Corps was not then in existence.) Nor could Gearhart comprehend how the office of the Chief of Staff or other officers functioned.
He thought Marshall should be on duty twenty-four hours a day.
I pointed out that this obligation still allowed Marshall to sleep. The office of the Chief of Staff is open twenty-four hours a day, and Marshall could be contacted at any time, I said, just like our California Supreme Court.
“That is right,” said Gearhart.
“But I bet the justices go out to play golf on Sundays once in a while,” I said.
“Answer my question,” said Gearhart with asperity. “It means you must be in touch with your office, in touch with your command, for the full 24 hours of the day, doesn’t it?”24
I pointed out to Gearhart that that was the reason Marshall had a staff, and the staff had testified that there were procedures that could be followed to reach Marshall at any place, at any time. Then I figured out how I could stop Gearhart in his tracks.
“Mr. Gearhart,” I said, waving my hand over my report and the exhibits, “I think you will find through here plenty of evidence that, according to the procedure then in operation, if it became necessary to see the Chief of Staff the night of December 6, he could be seen.… Let’s prove the negative. I don’t know of anybody that tried to see the Chief of Staff on the night of December 6 and could not find him.”25
You know, when you hit a man with a good punch, you can see his eyes glaze over. That’s how Gearhart looked as he tried to recover.
“Well, maybe there will be some testimony that they were trying to deliver to him.…”
I pointed out that Colonel Bratton had testified that he gave the thirteen parts to Colonel Dusenbury for delivery to Marshall at his quarters when Dusenbury went home. Furthermore, Dusenbury had testified to me that he had not delivered the material to Marshall’s quarters. In reality, Dusenbury didn’t deliver the material to anyone until nine hours later the following morning, Sunday, December 7. (It is also interesting to note that Congress never asked Dusenbury to testify before the Committee. In other words, Congress accepted my affidavit.)
Gearhart tried to keep punching on the Marshall question, but the best he could do was ask: “The mystery still remains—the big mystery of the Pearl Harbor investigation after 5 years of investigation. How do you account for that?”
“Well, you want me to answer your opinion,” I said. “I can’t very well argue with you. I mean, it’s not my function. I am here as a witness. But I don’t agree. In other words, I don’t think that is the big mystery of Pearl Harbor at all.
“The big mystery—there are some big highlights.
“Query: What information did Washington have?
“Query: What did Washington do about it?
“Query: What did Hawaii do about it?
“I mean, those are the basic, big questions.” (Emphasis added)
Still, Gearhart tried to contend that Marshall’s whereabouts were more important than anything else. Give a congressman a chance to expound on a conspiracy theory, and you’ve got trouble. Gearhart was bound and determined to prove his belief that Marshall had gone to ground so that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would be a surprise success. He didn’t seem to realize that if the Japanese had attacked and been repulsed, the result would have been the same: America would have gone to war, anyway.
The Congressman kept wriggling, trying to get off the hook on which he had impaled himself. I had to admire him for trying as hard as he did.
Finally, I said: “Mr. Gearhart, if you and I were in Fresno trying a damage action involving automobiles, we would be following, according to the judges, the rules of the road. We would be squaring our proof to certain rules, certain standards.
“Now, in assessing responsibility against Army officers, you just can’t discard the rules of the military. You have to consider the military rules. They are contained in books. There is nothing secret about the functions of the staff officers and what they are supposed to do. Your proof here, or in any other case involving the military, must be by the standards of the military.…” I pointed out that even if everyone knew where Marshall was on “the night of 6 December, he still didn’t get the 13 parts [of the diplomatic message]. And his G-2, the man supposed to be charged with certain aspects and obligations, just like the Chief of Staff, he did know [about the message].”26
Still, Gearhart went on to say that both Marshall and Stark were missing on the night of December 6. The fact was that Stark, who had said originally that he also couldn’t recall where he was, had remembered later that he went to the theater that night. After President Roosevelt had read the thirteen parts of the fourteen-part message and had declared, “This means war!” he tried to call Stark, but did not want him paged at the theater. The two men did talk later that night, after Stark came home. Meanwhile, Secretary Knox called Stimson and Hull to set up a conference at the State Department for ten o’clock the next morning. But Roosevelt never tried to call Marshall.
Dusenbury’s failure on December 6 to deliver the messages to Marshall kept the one man unalerted who, I believe, would have taken immediate action upon learning of the impending crisis. To paraphrase the words of President Kennedy, there’s always some poor fellow who never gets the word. In the case of Pearl Harbor, it was Marshall, the most important man in town.
As I say, Gearhart didn’t give up easily, but he gave up in the end. A Republican, Gearhart broke ranks with his fellow minority members when the Committee reached its final conclusions. He voted against Kimmel and Short, against the Roosevelt-Marshall conspiracy mob, and I am sure my testimony and my report were major factors in his change of heart.
That still left me facing the remaining members of the Committee.
Murphy of Pennsylvania indicated that he agreed with me. He drove home the point that Marshall had told the Committee he believed he was in his own home on the evening of December 6, and the Committee had heard “not a single word of evidence in this record that the General was not at home that night.”27
I agreed, and said again that during my investigation, I hadn’t been able to find anyone who had brought the thirteen-part or fourteen-part message to Marshall on the night of December 6.
Murphy did ask a very important question: Who had seen the reply that Short made to the warning message Marshall had sent on November 27?
The answer was, of course, Gerow, Marshall and Secretary Stimson. Both Gerow and Marshall had accepted the blame for not having been more alert to Short’s failure to provide an adequate reply. The explanation for this error may well have been that each of the commands in Manila, Panama and California had sent lengthy, detailed replies that gave all the background of their readiness to repel an attack, so Short’s brief message slipped by. But historians will never know for sure, because Colonel Bundy, who had been responsible for the Far East messages at the time, was killed before he could be questioned on the matter.
I didn’t have much time to think about all this, however, because Senator Ferguson began throwing his beanballs again.
First, he wanted to know whether or not the so-called pilot message of December 6, the one alerting Washington that a fourteen-part message would be sent by Tokyo, had been seen by Bratton, Gerow or anyone else.
I could only reply that I had tried to check out who had seen what, and when they had seen it, but everyone had testified that the Magic intercepts as distributed, and all receipts signed for them at the time, had been destroyed. That had been the SOP, the standard operating procedure. In retrospect, the SOP might have been improperly set up, but there was nothing that could be done about it after the fact.
Ferguson kept trying to break me about Bratton’s having lied to the Army Board.
When the Senator found he could not do this, he switched targets. He next wanted to know what the policies of the War Department had been. I had to reply that the scope of my investigation did not apply to matters of analytical military nature. Furthermore, the policies of the War Department were set by Secretary Stimson, the man for whom I worked. In other words, if Ferguson had questions or arguments about policy, he should direct them to the man who made the policy, not to me.
Surprisingly, Ferguson gave up at this point. Now, it was Representative Keefe’s turn for a parting shot. He read into the record the affidavit from Dusenbury and made a great point about how Dusenbury had said that he had “received all 14 parts of the Japanese diplomatic message at about 12 that night. Thereupon, I left and went home. I returned the next morning and began the distribution of this intercept consisting of the 14 parts.”28
The most important part of the message for Keefe was the fact that Dusenbury had testified that the message had been sent to the Army by the Navy. Therefore, the Navy had known around midnight, and before the Army, that the Japanese were breaking off diplomatic relations.
Keefe was concerned because there were great and glaring inconsistencies in various testimonies about the timing of the receipt of the fourteen-part message.
I had to agree that he was correct.
Keefe then brought up the biggest contradiction to date, which was that, according to the Navy, the fourteenth part of the diplomatic message had not come in, “or did not start coming in, until 5 o’clock in the morning and was finally decoded and translated about 7:15 on the morning of the 7th.”29
What Keefe was trying to do was to show that my affidavit from Dusenbury was flawed, because of conflicting testimony by the Navy about its not having received the fourteenth part until early in the morning of December 7.
I replied that when I questioned Dusenbury, and he had been one of my very first witnesses, I had not known what the testimony of the Navy might be. I don’t believe the Navy had even broached the subject at the time. Dusenbury had been on his way to a new posting at Chungking when I first talked to him. He was available now to testify before the Committee. But, as I said earlier, the Committee never called him. If Keefe was trying to imply that I was wrong in not having cross-examined Dusenbury about the discrepancy in timing, I can only say that Keefe and the Committee were guilty of an even worse failure, because they never tracked down the matter, or the man. (Nor did they question Colonel Rowlett, whose affidavit to me supported Dusenbury’s statement that the fourteenth part was in hand around midnight.)
Senator Brewster of Maine was the last Committee member to take a shot at me. A Republican, he was pro-Kimmel to a fault and anti-Roosevelt in every bone in his body. Of course, the first thing he tried to do was get me to criticize the Committee’s work.
That wouldn’t do. I saw through his blustering. Instead, I said that the Committee had done a very fine thing. Congress could investigate Pearl Harbor better than anyone else.
“I also think,” I said, “that the basic recommendation that can come from this Committee is a fine one if you make it that never again shall Magic, this information, be monopolized by one service or the other service, but have it distributed by one agency on an overall basis.”30
Brewster disliked my implied criticism of the Navy and Kimmel. It showed when he began questioning me about the report of the Army Board, which had chastised Marshall. I pointed out—again, since Brewster had not been present during my earlier testimony—that the Army Board had not known about Magic until the last week of its existence, and therefore its findings were tragically flawed.
Brewster replied that he didn’t care when the Board had found out about Magic.
His mind was already made up. I could tell that. So he attacked me as hanging my investigation on a “slender peg” and tried to discredit the work I had done.
Murphy came to my rescue, however. He read into the record a statement that Brewster had given to the Chicago Tribune only five days earlier.
“Much of the responsibility for the Pearl Harbor disaster must rest upon the late President Roosevelt and figures in his administration who sought strenuously to fasten the blame on Kimmel and Short,” Brewster reportedly told the Tribune.
Brewster didn’t like having this read into the record, but he said, “I think that statement I made is a very fair one.”31
He then went after Marshall’s keeping the Army Board from getting information about Magic. Fair comment, I thought. He refused to accept Bratton’s change in testimony, or the fact that Dusenbury had sworn that he had not delivered the diplomatic messages to Marshall on the night of December 6. He criticized me and my report in general, but I don’t think his bluster scored any points with the other members of the Committee.
My testimony had ended.
The Committee broke for lunch at 12:40 on the afternoon of February 14, 1946. I couldn’t tell what the final effect of my testimony would be, but as I left the hearing room, I said a silent prayer asking the good Lord to let my message get through: We had to get our methods of gathering and disseminating intelligence squared away. The military could never be trusted to do the job for themselves. A new, independent, impartial intelligence agency would have to be created.
I also wondered whether the Committee would vote its findings along purely partisan lines. If this were to happen, the question of who was to blame for Pearl Harbor would never be laid to rest. Would the isolationists, the anti-Roosevelt faction, force through their beliefs that our President had been involved in a conspiracy that allowed the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor? Or would cooler heads prevail?
The facts were on the table. Now it was up to the Congressional jury to decide.
1 See appendix, pp. 410–414 for exact headings.
2 Proceedings of Joint Committee, p. 4354.
3 See appendix, SIS 25877 and 25874, p. 314.
4 Proceedings of Joint Committee, p. 4363.
5 Ibid., p. 4359.
6 Ibid., p. 4368.
7 Ibid., p. 4369.
8 Ibid., p. 4381.
9 Ibid., p. 4411.
10 Ibid., pp. 4420, 4421.
11 Ibid., p. 4428.
12 Ibid., p. 4431.
13 Ibid., p. 4437.
14 Ibid., pp. 4437–4439.
15 Ibid., p. 4441.
16 Ibid., p. 4451.
17 Ibid., p. 4462.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., p. 4463.
20 Ibid., p. 4472.
21 Ibid., pp. 4464–4465.
22 Ibid., p. 4535.
23 Ibid., pp. 4464–4465.
24 Ibid., p. 4475.
25 Ibid., p. 4477.
26 Ibid., p. 4481.
27 Ibid., p. 4483.
28 Ibid., p. 4493.
29 Ibid., p. 4495.
30 Ibid., p. 4499.
31 Ibid., p. 4502.