At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor

Miles had not seen Short’s brief response to the message of November 27 at the time it reached Washington. But when he read it, he considered it “a totally inadequate reply. . . .” This was all too true. A little later in the questioning, when Murphy asked why the War Department had not sent more warnings, Miles replied, “You do not have to tell a commanding general but once that a danger faces him.” Up to that moment Short had remained quite impassive. But at Miles’s remark he glared at him and restlessly fingered a piece of paper on the table.²

“It’s almost unique, somewhat refreshing, to have someone stand up in the open and assume whatever blame may be in the offing . . .” remarked the Baton Rouge State-Times. And it praised Gerow for displaying “a soldier’s courage. . . .”⁴

Apparently some dedicated Washington watchers thought something lay behind Gerow’s acceptance of War Plans’ responsibility. According to Coll of the Honolulu Advertiser, “. . . there was considerable speculation among correspondents and others present as to whether the general was making a big sacrifice of his otherwise estimable record in order to relieve Gen. Marshall, his superior, of any blame.”

After that day’s session Coll asked Short “if he cared to make a statement . . . on the message controversy.” But Short preferred to maintain his silence. “As you know, I haven’t been making any statements,” he told Coll smilingly, “and will reserve my reply for delivery when called to testify.”⁵

Coll anticipated that all would not be “milk and honey” when Marshall took the stand. “. . . Meanwhile the little group of do-gooders that sit every day behind the row of committeemen goes right ahead clicking knitting needles and you can see their woolen sox take form as the evidence piles up. . . .”⁶

To this day one can sense the electric tingle of excitement as the crowd in the hearing room awaited Marshall’s first appearance. The war had ended a mere four months before, and these people still stood close to the pyramid of military victory—millions of GIs at its base, thousands of noncoms and officers, dozens of generals, tapering up to Eisenhower and MacArthur, and at the peak, holding it all together, George C. Marshall. He had no great battles to his credit; his duty station had been Washington, D.C. He projected neither the fatherly warmth of Eisenhower nor the austere glamour of MacArthur. What earned him the respect of a nation? Fundamentally the answer is quite simple: This man, not a West Pointer, personified the West Point motto—Duty, Honor, Country. Could the fetid breath of scandal reach him?

Marshall’s entrance resembled an ancient Roman triumph in miniature. The audience, which included a large number of servicemen and women, filled every seat, overflowed onto the deep windowsills, and stood “3 abreast up in the aisle as far as the red velvet rope separating the committee” and its satellites from the rest of the room.⁷ A row of generals and admirals occupied the front seats. Coll expressed the hope “that the chamber floor was well braced against this additional weight of gold braid and brass.” Short “was a quiet but intent listener” to Marshall’s testimony. Kimmel, too, “followed every word. . . .”⁸

The committee decided to accept responsibility for placing in evidence the full text of Marshall’s letters to Dewey, although they contained references to “the technical cryptoanalytical methods which we had adopted to break the Japanese code. . . .” Undeniably the committee had to consider the Magic material, but there was no real excuse for publicizing clues to the methodology involved in obtaining it. Murphy declared that the disclosure would “add immeasurably to the difficulty of our armed services and will contribute nothing to the actual inquiry.”¹⁰

Each of the Democratic members polished off his portion of the questioning with dispatch. Under Barkley’s inquiries Marshall, like Gerow, took a measure of blame for not acting when Short’s reply to the warning of November 27 came through the War Department. Marshall did not recall whether or not he had seen it but presumed that he had. “In any event that was my opportunity to intervene which I did not do.”¹¹

In thus taking his medicine, Marshall had “enhanced, rather than damaged, his reputation . . .” declared the Hartford Courant. “General Marshall did not hide behind General Gerow’s confession. . . . Here is no buck-passing, no evasion of responsibility for what did and did not take place in the War Department.”¹² Here, too, was the unequivocal answer to the speculations that Gerow had set himself up or had been set up as a whipping boy for Marshall.

Beginning on December 8, the Republicans entered the ring. They did not treat Marshall gently. In this apocalyptic confrontation, Gearhart took first crack at Marshall. Ferguson followed and kept Marshall on the stand for an incredible nine and a half hours. His first session, for the balance of December 8, covered a potpourri of subjects which we need not examine. Back in full battle array on Monday, December 10, Ferguson pursued a rather erratic course, obviously aimed at demonstrating prewar belligerence on the part of the Roosevelt administration. He took the general exhaustively through messages, memorandums, and minutes virtually line by line.

The next day Ferguson plunged with unabated energy into such subjects as the war warnings, delivery of Japan’s final message, the Army board, and the Clausen investigation.¹³ The afternoon was wearing on when Keefe took over from Ferguson, so he confined himself to laying some groundwork.

In an interesting exchange he guided Marshall down the years of building up Oahu as “an impregnable fortress”; Army and Navy war plans for possible conflict with Japan; maneuvers “to implement those plans . . .”; air and submarine defenses; the gradual deterioration of U.S.-Japanese relations.¹⁴ One would have expected Keefe to explode with the corollary: Then why were both Washington and Oahu surprised when Japan attacked? He did not do so. Yet the passage demonstrated why the armed forces’ psychological unpreparedness for Pearl Harbor was so incongruous and so puzzling.

Keefe and Marshall resumed on the morning of December 12. This session produced no new information. Keefe was quite courteous, and his line of inquiry is easy to follow, for he stayed closely to a chronological approach, in pleasing contrast with other members, who played verbal hopscotch all over the landscape.¹⁵

By this time Marshall appeared tired. And Frederick G. Othman of the United Press noted that Short and Kimmel were “getting fidgety from sitting so long in the senate’s chairs. Whoever designed those chairs knew nothing about human anatomy.” The difference in personality between the two protagonists was not lost upon Othman: “The general is not a clubby guy. He speaks only to his lawyer and then not much. The admiral, however, is beginning to feel at home. He stood in line . . . to get his lunch in the cafeteria . . .,” confining himself to a modest 20-cent bowl of navy bean soup.¹⁶

December 13 saw the end of Marshall’s testimony, and he hurried from the room to a round of applause.¹⁷ In reviewing his testimony before the various investigations, one cannot but feel that the real man kept getting in the way of the legend, according to which Marshall was an unassuming gentleman of phenomenal memory. Be that as it may, in some respects he was not a good witness. He had a rather rambling style and did not express himself well. He knew that he was not at his best when testifying. During a conference in Stimson’s office on July 21, 1941, the talk turned to various struggles with Congress. “They will insist on my going up there,” Marshall remarked worriedly. “. . . I make a poor witness and I will ruin myself.”¹⁸

Perhaps Marshall did not do himself justice when he spoke extemporaneously. He lacked the punch of Hull, the clarity of Stimson, the salt of Kimmel, the swift cut to the center that makes Ingersoll’s testimony a pleasure to read. Marshall gave many monosyllabic answers and replies of the “I-do-not-recall” variety. These do not create trust and confidence, although they may well represent the exact truth.

Marshall might have resolved a number of problem areas and refreshed his memory by conferring with some of his former colleagues. But he had imposed upon himself a rigid discipline of silence in regard to Pearl Harbor. In a letter to Hull on December 14, 1945, explaining why he had not paid his respects before leaving for his new post as special envoy to China the next morning, Marshall wrote: “Since the Pearl Harbor issue was raised in Congress, I have thought it wise not to discuss the matter with any of the individuals concerned. . . .” He further explained that he desired that when he testified,

there be no possibility of a claim or assertion being made that I had connived with other leading witnesses to present a story more favorable to me than the facts might justify. For the same reason I never read the report of the Pearl Harbor Board or even of the Roberts Board—I did not think it wise to divert my concentrated attention from the war effort to concerns regarding me personally, and I did not wish to be influenced, possibly subconsciously, in what I recalled regarding the occurrences at the time.¹⁹

Marshall had scarcely left the scene when the inquiry almost fell apart. Mitchell and his staff resigned on December 14. Just one member, Assistant Counsel John E. Masten, continued to serve with the new staff. Mitchell was not politically minded. He was a beaver for work despite his age, often putting in twelve hours a day at his task, as did Gesell. They believed that their mission was to determine what had caused the tragic defeat at Pearl Harbor and that the question of why Japan and the United States went to war was irrelevant to the purpose of the investigation. So they found frustrating the preoccupation with gathering political plums.

Mitchell reminded the committee that he and his assistants had taken the assignment with the understanding “that they would not be held for any considerable time after January 1st.” And the inquiry had not worked out as expected. “Since the start of the hearings it has become increasingly apparent that some of the members of the committee have a different view than that entertained by counsel, either as to the scope of the inquiry or as to what is pertinent evidence,” he told his colleagues. He offered to continue until the new legal staff could “pick up the case and carry on.”

One has to sympathize with Mitchell. Obviously the committee would not finish anywhere near the deadline of January 3; in fact, it had barely begun to tap the prospective witnesses. What is more, Mitchell and Gesell had served without pay. Gesell rather regretted the necessity of resigning. He was not the type of man who readily abandoned an unfinished job, and he had developed a keen interest in this particular one. He would have liked to stay on to the end and write the final report.²⁰ However, the two counsels had worked together so closely that Mitchell’s resignation inevitably entailed that of Gesell.

Barkley termed the legal staffs resignation “a tragedy.” Obviously much distressed, he feared for the effectiveness of the inquiry. He seriously considered retiring from the committee and returning to his job as majority floor leader. Senator George, too, cast a thoughtful eye toward his important, temporarily abandoned tasks as chairman of the Finance Committee.²¹

On Monday, December 17, the committee called to the stand Admiral Wilkinson, former director of Naval Intelligence. He proved an articulate, intelligent witness. In “brisk, business-like tones” he explained many technical details of the respective functions of Communications and Intelligence concerning Magic, the Intelligence setup on Oahu, and the “bomb plot” series. He regretted that he had not attributed to these “the bombing target significance which now appears.”²²

“It never occurred” to him that “it would be appropriate or advisable” to warn Pearl Harbor specifically against a surprise air raid for these reasons: He thought Hawaii knew of the possibility, reaching conclusions about “enemy functions” was not his province, and he believed “that an approaching force would be detected before it could get into attack range.”²³

Wednesday, December 19, found Wilkinson back on the stand covering a variety of items, among them the Herron alert of 1940, a subject which particularly interested Keefe. Barkley finally dismissed Wilkinson that afternoon with a few gracious words of appreciation.²⁴

The committee had recorded Wilkinson’s important testimony with little time to spare. On February 21, 1946, he perished when a friend’s car he was driving plunged off a ferry at Norfolk, Virginia. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin observed: “He was gallant and brave to the last. His final act on earth was to push his wife from the car that was doomed. . . .”²⁵

As the inquiry proceeded, one thing was becoming more and more evident: The most recent witnesses had been damaging to Kimmel and Short. Not surprisingly Brewster suggested to reporters that the time was ripe to put them on the stand. “They ought to testify soon,” he said. “Then, perhaps, we’ll be looking elsewhere to place some of the blame.”²⁶

The order in which witnesses should appear had been the subject of a running battle between Mitchell and Gesell on one side and the minority members, particularly Ferguson, on the other. The Republicans had wanted to put Kimmel and Short on the stand at the outset of the hearings. These two men were key witnesses who had waited to tell their stories publicly while the months lengthened into years. Then, too, no doubt the minority members reasoned that to take the testimony of the two Hawaiian commanders at the beginning would place the Washington witnesses and the committee itself on the defensive. For their part, Mitchell and Gesell wanted to build up a substantial background of evidence before they called Kimmel and Short so that their stories would fit into the broadest possible perspective.²⁷

Actually the position of Mitchell and Gesell was rather favorable to Kimmel and Short. The longer they waited to testify, the more they would know about the thinking of other witnesses; thus the better their opportunity to prepare a rebuttal. And they would have the psychological advantage of the last word.

Kimmel did not attend the session of December 21.²⁹ This may have been just as well. He was not famous for concealing his feelings, and Turner came down very hard on him that day. He declared that in his opinion Kimmel did not comply with the order to take defensive deployment. If he had done so, he could have reduced “the disastrous effects” and perhaps inflicted “considerable damage on the Japanese Fleet.” He could see no possibility of misinterpreting the sentence “This dispatch is to be considered a war warning.”³⁰

One of the highlights of Turner’s testimony was his assertion that in 1941 he thought “the chances were about 50-50 that we would get a heavy raid in Hawaii.” The obviously skeptical Murphy pounced on this expressed opinion. His forceful interrogation of the strong-minded Turner was a real battle of giants. They also dueled sharply over the apparent lack of cooperation between War Plans and ONI, especially Turner’s failure to check with Wilkinson before assuring Stark that Kimmel was receiving Magic.³¹

In questioning Turner, Gearhart devoted most of his attention to political considerations. He took the same astounding position he had taken with Grew—fulsome praise of the very diplomatic instrument he had condemned as triggering the war. But Turner did not step into this booby trap.³²

Turner’s testimony clearly indicated that the Navy Department Headquarters had been no monolithic structure. There had been serious differences of opinion and some maneuvering for position. But in the essential point under the committee’s consideration—how could Pearl Harbor have happened?—his opinions concerning the Navy and Kimmel had been substantially the same as those of the War Department’s witnesses toward the Army and Short: The commanders on Oahu had received what their superiors deemed adequate warning to place their commands on the alert for whatever warlike action Japan might take.

On December 21 questioning came to a temporary halt for the holidays. The committee knew that a long road lay ahead. On December 20 in closed session it had voted to continue the inquiry until February 15. During the Christmas recess disaster struck a blow that could have robbed the investigation of much authenticity. On Saturday, December 22, Short entered Walter Reed Army Hospital, “threatened with pneumonia.” Hospital authorities could offer no assurance when he would be able to testify. While his condition was serious, they did not “feel unduly alarmed about him.” Still, the general was not robust, and pneumonia could have been deadly. But evidently Short had no intention of dying until he had spoken his piece in open session. He rallied over Christmas, and on the twenty-sixth the hospital could report that Short was “resting considerably more comfortably.”³³

The investigation still pulsed with rumor, innuendo, myth, and controversy, but the trajectory had veered sharply downward. It had cruised too long in the stale air of politics, and people had become tired of investigators who smudged their arguments with political rhetoric. The bite of newspaper opinion was beginning to leave deep teethmarks. Something exceedingly dramatic would have to erupt to recapture the original widespread interest in the inquiry and to hold the front pages of the nation’s press. Not that such considerations should be dominant. The imperative duty of each member of the congressional committee was to dig up the skeleton of truth, even if only a dozen people in the United States cared about it.

Stark took the stand on the last day of 1945. His appearance produced no such outpouring of interest and admiration as had that of his former opposite, Marshall. The interruption of the hearings had broken the public’s attention span. No doubt many were not yet ready to cut into the holiday season to spend their precious time in a stuffy chamber on Capitol Hill when they could read all about it in the papers and hear the highlights on the radio. One suspects, however, that the primary reason why Stark roused less interest than Marshall was the man’s personality. He was a most likable individual and a gentleman to his fingertips, but he lacked the characteristic called star quality, that indefinable something which would bring out a cheering crowd on the last day of a cold Washington December.

Stark had called upon his competent counsel before the Navy court, David W. Richmond, for legal assistance. Another bright young lawyer, James E. Webb, who “felt very strongly” that when Stark sent his “war warning” message, “he had discharged his responsibility,” offered his services to the admiral. Stark could have found no more capable advocate. Webb would later become director of the Bureau of the Budget; undersecretary of state; and director of NASA, among other important positions. Webb recommended adding Hugh Obear, who could give the team prestige and clout. Obear was a prominent attorney who had been president of the District of Columbia Bar Association. From time to time Stark’s son-in-law, a lawyer from Philadelphia, joined the group.

Richmond wanted Stark to take a strong stand, perhaps blame Marshall, as the Army board had done. But Stark refused. “No. I do not want to point the finger at anyone. I have to live with myself, and I want to live a long time.” In any case, Stark thought the world of Marshall and would never have tried to spare himself at Marshall’s expense.

Stark and his legal battery prepared an extensive statement for the admiral to read before the committee. Its substance was entirely his own. He decided to state the facts as he knew them as extensively documented as possible and leave the conclusions to the committee.³⁴

Stark asked the committee to keep in mind two things in connection with the Navy’s basic war plan (WPL 46): “First, that the Atlantic and European area was considered to be the initial decisive theater. . . . Second, the plan was . . . predicated on the availability of forces actually in hand.” Those were not sufficient “to wage all-out war in both oceans. . . . I considered, as did my principal advisers, that the forces allocated to the Pacific Fleet were adequate for the execution of the tasks assigned.”³⁶

Stark then tackled the thorny questions of basing the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and the later transfer of ships to the Atlantic.³⁷ By far the major portion of his statement dealt with his actions to keep his Fleet commanders informed. This was natural, because in this area lay the principal objections to Stark’s performance as CNO. He liberally sprinkled his narrative with extracts from his correspondence with Kimmel and others, wisely endeavoring “to stick to the record of events as they happened. . . .”

Attorneys for both Stark and Kimmel agreed that these letters were “pertinent and material to the inquiry. . . .”³⁸ They were well advised to do so, because nowhere else in the Pearl Harbor records do the two admirals show to better advantage. This, correspondence is untainted by hindsight or self-service. Stark’s missives reveal him as having a sincere interest in keeping his Fleet commanders posted, a deep concern about future events and the Navy’s role in them, his high regard for Kimmel, and—by no means least important—the dedication to duty which caused him to devote his Sundays to writing these long, detailed accounts to Kimmel and other key officers. Throughout 1941, in letter after letter, dispatch after dispatch, Stark had sounded the drumbeat of warning.

Thus, be believed the letters and dispatches he had sent to Kimmel and Hart “sufficient to keep them informed on the important military and political developments in the Pacific, as we knew them, and that they had received adequate information and directives to be on guard.”³⁹

The committee held no hearings on New Year’s Day but had a busy session reviewing Stark’s statement and letters as well as Short’s testimony at previous inquiries. The caucus room was sparsely populated when the committee reconvened on January 2.⁴¹ In general, the majority members concerned themselves with naval matters, the minority with the political aspects, although of course, the lines frequently crossed.

Under Mitchell’s questioning that day, Stark confirmed Turner’s testimony about the misconception that Kimmel’s command could decode and translate Magic. To his credit, Stark did not exploit this inviting escape hatch. “. . . I want to make it plain that that did not influence me in the slightest regarding what I sent,” he stated. “I felt it my responsibility to keep the commanders in the field . . . informed of the main trends and of information which might be of high interest to them.” Washington had the benefit of other sources along with Magic, all of which information the Navy Department “welded together” and sent out. So Stark considered that he was keeping Kimmel informed.⁴²

Barkley asked probing questions about Kimmel’s failure to institute long-distance reconnaissance. His persistence finally elicited Stark’s admission that the Hawaiian commands “did not obey the instructions. . . .” Stark further conceded that while the attack surprised him, he was astonished, too, “that certain steps had not been taken to intercept it and be on the lookout for it.”⁴³

On January 3 Murphy questioned Stark on a wide variety of subjects. Then Gearhart took his turn. Immediately he mounted a pet hobbyhorse: Where were Stark and Marshall on the night of December 6, 1941? Stark’s memory was a total blank on that point.⁴⁴ Indeed, the events of December 7 seem sufficient to have wiped the previous evening from his mind.

Thus far Stark’s testimony had developed no such bonanza of editorials as had Marshall’s. As in mid-December, interest centered more on the committee’s executive sessions than on the open hearings. On January 3, the day the committee optimistically had planned to submit its report, it announced the unanimous selection of Washington attorney Seth W. Richardson to replace Mitchell as chief counsel. Its members had made their choice during the midday break on January 2. Ray Richards of the Milwaukee Sentinel’s Washington office almost fell over himself rushing to bury the hatchet in Richardson’s skull:

It was cynically taken for granted in Washington tonight that the new chief counsel of the Pearl Harbor investigating committee . . . will try to be an even more ardent defender of the administration than was the retiring counsel. . . .

Richardson’s livelihood depends on his standing with the administration. He is a member of a Washington law firm headed by New Dealers from ’way back. The firm lives on government favor.⁴⁵

By the time Stark came back to the witness chair on January 4 the minority members seemed almost frantic to prove a prewar American commitment to the British, although no one explained how such an agreement would have affected the ability of the Japanese to whale the tar out of the American defenses at Pearl Harbor. Ferguson, who followed Gearhart, was hot on this trail and questioned Stark long and closely on the subject. If Stark wanted to take postmortem revenge upon Roosevelt, he could have easily done so by a few judicious “I don’t recalls.” But in this area Stark’s memory was clear, and he was not the type to curry favor by dishonest equivocation. So Ferguson got no help from him.⁴⁷

Soon after the noon recess of January 5 Ferguson turned the admiral over to Keefe, who asked a number of questions about Stark’s “war warning” and the Navy Department’s expectations of Kimmel in consequence. Stark had not asked Kimmel to report measures taken. “That was not Navy custom. It was not my practice, it never has been, to tell the ‘how to do,’ but rather the ‘what to do,” Stark was obviously uncomfortable with this line of questioning, which compelled him to admit that had he been CinCPAC, he would have acted differently from Kimmel in certain areas. But prodded by Keefe, he asserted, “My feeling is that I certainly would have had my planes out. . . .”

Indeed, Stark displayed firm loyalty to his former Fleet commanders and staff officers. He lost no opportunity to praise Kimmel, and when he had to disagree with him, he phrased his remarks impersonally. He tried hard to prove that there never had been “any real difficulty” between Wilkinson and Turner in regard to the evaluation of intelligence.⁴⁹

In mop-up operations at the end of Stark’s testimony, Gearhart leaned hard on the admiral concerning Halsey’s orders to his ships as they set out on their mission to Wake Island.^* Gearhart continued his inquisition until Barkley took a hand: “What you are being asked, Admiral, is, if . . . the orders were given, it constituted an overt act which justified an attack on Pearl Harbor.” Shortly thereafter he dismissed Stark with praise as well as thanks.⁵⁰

On the basis of the record, the committee treated Stark much more gently than it did Marshall. Perhaps some of the season’s peace and goodwill animated the members; perhaps Stark’s attractive personality defused some of the heavy artillery. Although the usual opinion of those consulted for this study was that Marshall had a keener mind than Stark, the transcript shows that in many instances Stark expressed himself more clearly than did his former opposite. Stark also appeared to be better prepared than Marshall, with a fresher grasp of the documentation. The two officers were as one in their firm denial of any prewar commitment to Britain or of any desire to fight Japan if it could be avoided. Their assessments of what they had expected of their Hawaiian commanders upon receipt of the warning messages of November 27 were virtually identical, allowing for the differences between the services.

The strength of Stark’s testimony lay in the force of his documentation and in his thesis that the original sources should speak for themselves. He resisted speculation and made a conscientious effort to see the year 1941 without benefit of hindsight. And he refused to testify outside his own field of competence. Throughout the investigation Stark tried to put a favorable construction on matters and to be considerate of everyone. Yet he stood by his guns. His replies carried the ring of self-assurance, authority, and confidence in his own rightness.

CHAPTER 78

“THE EVIDENCE PILES UP”