It is not clear why the Navy and Army Departments deprived Kimmel and Short of vital messages from the summer of 1941 to late that November. It may have been because of Marshall’s fear that the Japanese would discover that the United States had solved their Purple code; the natural tendency of intelligence officers to guard new information almost obsessively; or interservice and interdepartmental rivalries.
Although both Marshall and Stark felt it was necessary to wage war with Hitler and Mussolini, both had vigorously opposed inciting Japan to battle on the grounds that neither the Army nor the Navy was yet prepared for a two-front war. Up to the very last moment before the Hull ultimatum to the Japanese on November 27, Marshall and Stark had urged Roosevelt to respond temperately.
The President himself had been wavering until the final day despite persistent urging from Stimson, Ickes and other Japanophobes. Less than a week later Roosevelt was faced with the most momentous decision of his life when a number of reports to Washington indicated that the missing Kido Butai was heading eastward toward Hawaii. These included warnings from the Lurline;1 from the Twelfth Naval District (Lieutenant Hosner and Seaman First Class Z); and from General Ter Poorten and Thorpe in Java. Finally there was the meeting of Captain Ranneft at O.N.I., authenticated by excerpts from Ranneft’s official diary.2
Ten years after the war, General Ter Poorten asked General Thorpe, “Did you really send that message I gave you?” After Thorpe gave assurance he had, Ter Poorten revealed that he had not trusted Consul General Foote to send the entire message to Washington and had sent one himself—including the mention of attacks on Hawaii and the Philippines—to Colonel Weijerman, the Netherlands military attaché in Washington. Weijerman informed him that he had personally taken this message to Marshall a few days before Pearl Harbor; the Chief of Staff had said, in substance, “Can you take such reports seriously?”
Confirmation of Dutch foreknowledge of the Japanese attack also came from General Albert C. Wedemeyer. In 1980 he informed the author that during a meeting in 1943 Vice Admiral Conrad E. L. Helfrich of the Royal Netherlands Navy expressed wonder that the Americans had been surprised at Pearl Harbor. The Dutch, Helfrich said, had broken the code and knew that the Japanese were going to strike Pearl Harbor. “He seemed surprised that I did not know this,” recalled Wedemeyer, “and when I explained that I doubted seriously that this information was known in Washington prior to the Pearl Harbor attack, Admiral Helfrich was skeptical because it was his clear recollection that his government had notified my government.”
There were other indications of imminent war that were either ignored or suppressed, including the warnings of Major Clear, Tricycle, and Army and Navy Intelligence and Communications officers such as Bratton, Sadtler and Safford.
“A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”
Rudyard Kipling
By December 4 Roosevelt and a small group of advisers, including Stimson, Knox and Marshall, were faced with three options. They could announce to Japan and the world word of the approaching Kido Butai; this would indubitably have forced the Japanese to turn back. Second, they could inform Kimmel and Short that Japanese carriers were northwest of Hawaii and order them to send every available long-range patrol plane to discover this force. An attack conceived in such secrecy would necessarily depend on complete surprise for success, and once discovered out of range of its target, Kido Butai would have turned back.
A month before the Hull ultimatum to Japan, Ickes had written in his diary: “For a long time I have believed that our best entrance into the war would be by way of Japan.” The first bomb dropped on Oahu would have finally solved the problem of getting an America—half of whose people wanted peace—into the crusade against Hitler. And the third option would accomplish this: keep Kimmel and Short and all but a select few in ignorance so that the Japanese could continue to their launching point unaware of their discovery. This would insure that the Japanese would launch their attack. If Kimmel, Short and others had been privy to the secret, they might possibly have reacted in such a way as to reveal to the Japanese that their attack plan was known.
This course was a calculated risk but Roosevelt, like Churchill, could take a gamble. Nor did risk at that moment seem so great. Recall the memorandum the President had received from Marshall in May 1941, describing Oahu as the strongest fortress in the world, with assurances that any enemy naval task force would be destroyed before it neared Pearl Harbor. Long a Navy man, Roosevelt believed in its power. Also he had been receiving reports on the low efficiency of Japanese pilots, whose planes were second rate.3 Consequently the Pacific Fleet would not only stem any Japanese attack with little loss to U.S. shipping but deal a crushing blow to Kido Butai itself. One of the keenest admirals in the Navy, “Terrible” Turner, believing this, had told the Navy Court of Inquiry, “I knew our carriers were out, and with the warnings which had been given, I felt we would give them a pretty bad beating before they got home by our shore-based aircraft and by our carriers.”
Such a defeat would have been catastrophic to the Japanese militarists and perhaps eliminated Japan as a menace in the Pacific with a single blow. Moreover, Kimmel’s two available carriers would be out of Pearl Harbor and those warships left were in no real danger of being sunk. Aerial bombs were not that much of a threat and the waters of Pearl Harbor were too shallow for a torpedo attack.
Only such reasoning could account for the events in Washington on December 6 and 7. What novelist could persuade a reader to accept the incredible activities during those two days by America’s military and civilian leaders? Was it to be believed that the heads of the Army and Navy could not be located on the night before Pearl Harbor? Or that they would later testify over and over that they couldn’t remember where they were? Was it plausible that the Chief of Naval Operations, after finally being reminded that he talked to Roosevelt on the telephone that night, could not recall if they had discussed the thirteen-part message? Was it possible to imagine a President who remarked, “This means war,” after reading the message, not instantly summoning to the White House his Army and Navy commanders as well as his Secretaries of War and Navy? One of Knox’s close friends, James G. Stahlman, wrote Admiral Kemp Tolley in 1973 that Knox told him that he, Stimson, Marshall, Stark and Harry Hopkins had spent most of the night of December 6 at the White House with the President: All were waiting for what they knew was coming: an attack on Pearl Harbor.4
The incredulities continued the following morning with Marshall insisting he did not reach his office until eleven twenty-five. Yet Stimson’s military aide, Major Harrison, recently revealed in an interview that he saw the Chief of Staff in the War Secretary’s office around 10 A.M. “I saw and talked to General Marshall: and whoever said he was out riding horses lied, because I saw him and talked to him at that time.” So had Commander McCollum and Lieutenant Colonel John R. Deane, one of Marshall’s assistant secretaries.
And why had Stark, having seen the complete fourteen-point message by 9:15 A.M. and the 1 P.M. message an hour later, not followed the urging of subordinates to telephone an immediate warning to Kimmel? And why, after finally reading all the messages and agreeing that this meant immediate war, had Marshall composed an innocuous warning to Pearl Harbor and Manila indicating he didn’t know “just what significance” the 1 P.M. delivery time meant but to “be on the alert accordingly”? And why, instead of accepting Stark’s offer of the naval radio facilities or using his own scrambler phone, had the message gone by Western Union and RCA? Marshall’s excuse for not using the telephone was that it might have revealed to the Japanese that the Purple code had been broken. Seven months earlier a dozen intercepted messages had revealed that the Japanese feared their top code had been broken by the United States. And immediately following the attack, the telephone connections between Washington and Hawaii were in common use.
The comedy of errors on the sixth and seventh appears incredible. It only makes sense if it was a charade, and Roosevelt and the inner circle had known about the attack.
A massive cover-up followed Pearl Harbor a few days later, according to an officer close to Marshall, when the Chief of Staff ordered a lid put on the affair. “Gentlemen,” he told half a dozen officers, “this goes to the grave with us.” The unnamed officer, who is still alive, had lunch on May 4, 1961, with Brigadier General Bonner Fellers and Dr. Charles C. Tansill. According to the former, the officer stated that on December 7 Marshall was obviously dragging his feet regarding the warning to Short. That was why the Chief of Staff had bound certain members of his staff not to disclose the truth; and why he himself later conveniently forgot where he was on the eve of Pearl Harbor.
The cover-up continued with Roosevelt’s revision of Knox’s original report of Pearl Harbor, and was carried a long step forward by the report of the Roberts Commission. One of the members, Admiral Standley, later called Justice Roberts’ performance “as crooked as a snake.” Standley’s outspoken criticism earned him a Distinguished Service Medal and an assignment as ambassador to Moscow where he would be out of reach of indignant Republicans and suspicious reporters.
The cover-up persevered after the Army and Navy Boards reversed the conclusions of Roberts to find Marshall and Stark rather than Kimmel and Short primarily guilty of dereliction of duty. Then amendments by Stimson and Fonestal to the Army and Navy reports led much of the public to believe that Roberts had, in fact, been upheld. Too little attention has been paid to the efforts of important government, military and naval officials to reverse the findings of the Army Pearl Harbor Board and the Navy Court of Inquiry. One of the main thrusts was the attempt to prove there was no “winds” execute; and this was so successful that the majority report of the congressional hearings concluded there had been no such message since Safford alone believed in its existence. This ignored the testimony of Admiral Ingersoll and Colonels Dusenbury, Pettigrew and Sadtler that they too had seen an execute. Strong proof of its existence lies in the taped interview of Ralph Briggs by the Historian, Naval Security Group Command, on January 13, 1977. A transcript of this tape was released in 1980 at the author’s request by the National Security Agency and the U. S. Navy, with a few security deletions. Briggs served forty-four years in the Navy as an enlisted man, officer and civilian specialist up to the grade of GS-13. In the postwar years he was the case officer for counterintelligence and a security review analyst in the office of the director of Naval Intelligence.
All “winds” execute messages apparently have been lost or destroyed.5 According to A. A. Hoehling, a former Naval Intelligence officer and author of The Week Before Pearl Harbor, panic gripped the Second Deck of the Navy Department immediately after Pearl Harbor. “One officer then in intelligence, now in a high post in the Navy, told this writer that he went to his office safe one morning to find that a number of the ‘magic’ dispatches were mysteriously missing. He never retrieved them. ONI, in fact, had done such a thorough housecleaning of its top-secret and secret as well as not-so-secret files that, according to another officer on duty at that time, not even a departmental organization chart of November and December, 1941, could ever be found.”
Although Captain Safford emerged from the hearings branded by some as a liar and by others as a brilliant but erratic genius who suffered hallucinations, he invented the Super ECM shortly before leaving the service. The idea had come to him, he said, while walking his dog; it was the answer to a problem which “had eluded us for 15 years.” In 1958 President Eisenhower signed a bill to reward Safford with $100,000 for some twenty cryptographic inventions he developed. Until the day he died Safford did his utmost to convince the world that there had been a “winds” execute. It was to his credit that he never told anyone about Ralph Briggs, whose career in the Navy would have been endangered.
General V.,6 perhaps the living person with the most significant inside knowledge of Pearl Harbor, commented in a recent letter that if there was anything proving Roosevelt and Marshall shared responsibility for the Pearl Harbor tragedy, it was the methods used, particularly by George Catlett Marshall.
The testimony of the Chief of Staff at the various investigations does not stand up now that the prestige and glamor of his high office have gone. It was a tragedy that a man in his high position was forced to lie. So too his two trusted subordinates, Bedell Smith and Gerow. Both had refused to pass on any warning to Hawaii on December 5. So testified Sadtler before the Army Pearl Harbor Board. He later changed his testimony to Clausen, who brought with him the rank and prestige of Marshall. But later at the congressional hearings Sadtler did reverse himself again and declared he had given the message to Gerow and Smith. In his letter General V. also wrote that he did not know what Roosevelt did to suppress the message and prevent action, but he did know that Gerow lied and why he lied.
Why did Gerow and Smith, perhaps the two closest subordinates of Marshall, stonewall this December 5 message? It is difficult to believe they would have acted without Marshall’s orders. By this time the Chief of Staff and the Chief of Naval Operations, caught in the web, were acting as faithful servants of their Commander in Chief, the President.
It was also a tragedy that men like Stimson, Hull, Knox and Forrestal felt obliged to join in the cover-up and make scapegoats of two innocent men, Kimmel and Short.7 Open criticism of this injustice from such prestigious naval officers as Admirals Yarnell, Richardson, King, Standley and Halsey indicated how deep were the resentment and disgust among leading Navy officers.
Despite shortcomings, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a remarkable leader. Following the maxim of world leaders, he was convinced that the ends justified the means and so truth was suppressed.
The greater tragedy is that the war with Japan was one that need never have been fought. And so we must continue to mourn the victims; first the 2,403 who died on Oahu, then those whose careers were ruined—such as Kimmel, Short, Safford, Bratton and Sadtler. In a larger sense we must also mourn the millions of dead and mutilated in the unnecessary war in the Pacific: the soldiers and sailors on both sides and the innocent civilians of many countries, particularly those of Japan, who were savaged by fire bombings and atomic warfare. A final victim is the present state of the world. Imagine if there had been no war in the East. There would have been no Hiroshima and perhaps no threat of nuclear warfare. Nor would it have been necessary for America to have fought a grueling, unpopular war in Korea and a far more tragic one in Vietnam which weakened U.S. economy and brought bitter civil conflict.
The profit was the lesson learned by Japan and America through the consequences of their war. The former realized that her true allies were not the Axis, and the latter that only a strong, industrialized Nippon, working in concert with the democracies, could stabilize Asia and prevent domination by Japan’s traditional enemy, Russia. But a small group of men, revered and held to be most honorable by millions, had convinced themselves it was necessary to act dishonorably for the good of their nation—and incited the war that Japan had tried to avoid. It was, to quote Nietzsche, “Human, all too human.”
The mistakes and cruel acts of violence committed by both Japan and America must not be forgotten—only understood. Enemies in the past, and friends today, they must remain equal partners in the future.
1Minutes after the Lurline docked in San Francisco at 3:37 A.M., December 10, Lieutenant Commander Preston Allen entered the radio room to request that the voyage log be turned over to him. Chief Operator Asplund insisted the log be taken to Commodore Berndtson, who handed it over to the naval officer with other notes on the period from November 30 to December 7. There is no record in the Navy files of these documents or the incidents that took place. The Matson Line gave the author free access to its records, which included Grogan’s journal.
2Captain Ranneft remained as naval attaché in Washington throughout the war. In 1946 Admiral Nimitz personally presented him the Legion of Merit Degree of Commander. His citation read: “… Discharging his responsibilities with great skill and initiative, Rear Admiral Ranneft rendered invaluable assistance in prosecuting the war against our common enemy … his contributions to the development of Naval ordnance were of inestimable aid to ships of Allied Navies carrying out defensive and offensive measures against the enemy.” See Notes.
About 1960 Admiral Ranneft casually mentioned to an old friend, Admiral Samuel Murray Robinson (former Chief of Procurement and Material, who had initiated the largest shipbuilding program in history), that he was amazed to keep reading that the Americans were taken by complete surprise at Pearl Harbor. How was this possible when O.N.I. officers had shown him on a chart that the Japanese task force was only some four hundred miles from Honolulu on December 6?
Robinson was stunned. He knew nothing about it and insisted Ranneft ask Admiral Stark how this was possible. Later in the afternoon Admiral Robinson called back with a terse message: it was not necessary for Ranneft to see Stark. Robinson himself had just telephoned Stark, who refused to comment on the matter.
3Roosevelt’s feeling was shared by most Americans. Famed cartoonist J. N. “Ding” Darling expressed it all in a drawing of a small, bucktoothed, scowling Japanese soldier wearing horn-rimmed glasses. He is vainly attempting to blow up a huge balloon. Across the Pacific stands a supremely confident Uncle Sam wearing a Navy cap. He is hiding a slingshot behind his back while smiling slyly.
4Almost the first question Knox asked Kimmel, upon arriving at Pearl Harbor on December 10, was: “Did you receive our dispatch the night before the attack?” When Kimmel replied he had not, Knox said he was sure they had sent one. This was later explained as a slip of the tongue; he was referring to the message sent by Marshall the following noon. Was it a Freudian slip when Knox wrote in his original report to Roosevelt, “The Army and Navy Commands had received a general war warning on November 27th, but a special war warning sent out by the War Department at midnight [author’s italics] December 7th to the Army was not received until some hours after the attack on that date”? Had those meeting at the White House on the night of December 6, as reported by Stahlman, decided to send a warning to Hawaii at midnight—a warning which later was rescinded without Knox’s knowledge?
5It could be no coincidence that other vital messages and documents concerning Pearl Harbor also disappeared. These include: the material confiscated by the U. S. Navy in San Francisco from the Lurline on December 10; the Thorpe and Ter Poorten messages; the questionnaire and other papers Tricycle delivered to the F.B.I.; records of the tracking of Kido Butai by the Twelfth Naval District; records of Grogan’s original report to the Fourteenth Naval District on December 3, 1941; and records of the illegal collection of names of all Japanese-American citizens by the Census Bureau.
Perhaps further revelations of suppressed information will come from readers of this book, for there is no cover-up today in the Army, Navy or F.B.I.
6The identity of General V. will be revealed after his death. The letter, addressed to a prominent general, is in the archives of a presidential library.
7Short lived quietly in retirement. The Saturday Evening Post offered him a large sum to co-author an anti-Roosevelt article but he refused. He died in El Paso on September 3, 1949.
Kimmel never gave up the battle to clear his record. “My principal occupation—what’s kept me alive—is to expose the entire Pearl Harbor affair,” the indomitable admiral told the Associated Press when he was eighty-four, two years before his death. “I don’t know whether the whole story will get out. All incriminating documents have been destroyed.” But he predicted history would “eventually” clear him. He received far more support from Navy colleagues than Short did from Army officers. In 1957 Kimmel was elected alumni president by his classmates at Annapolis.