1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  Nagumo was already persuaded. He had been anxious about the entire operation from the start and now that his main mission had been accomplished he wished to take no further chances. At midday, December 7, 1941, the Japanese fleet came about and sailed for home.18

  Chapter Six

  By midafternoon radios had begun to break the news all across America; people were of course shocked and horrified but, more significantly, they were furious, and their fury would not cease until the empire of Japan was crushed. This was not the reaction anticipated by the Tokyo militarists who, like Hitler, thought that Americans, with their ridiculous argument-plagued democracy, were a weak and divided people who had no stomach for a bloody and prolonged war—especially one in the far distant reaches of the Pacific Ocean.

  To read contemporary accounts, one would almost have to assume that the majority of American citizens that Sunday afternoon were either attending professional football games, or listening to them on the radio, or were enjoying classical music concerts broadcast by the networks. In Washington, for instance, by halftime of the Redskins–Eagles football game, nearly a third of the fans had gone, called away by loudspeaker.

  It was the same all over the country, north, south, midwest, and Pacific coast. In St. Louis, Missouri, for example, one man who wasn’t dealing with ball games or music was John R. Shepley, a physician who had been born in 1860 and had had his share of war, even as a child. When the radio broadcast the news he said to himself, “Here we go again.” West Coast citizens were more immediately alarmed because they feared they would be next. The young movie star Evelyn Keyes (Gone With the Wind, Here Comes Mr. Jordan) was at the Hollywood home of director King Vidor when they got word. “We were on the West Coast,” she said, “and we thought surely they [the Japanese] would be along here. Shock! Horror!”1 Perplexed and angry crowds filled the streets of Los Angeles, creating huge traffic jams. A blackout had been ordered by the mayor and people began throwing rocks and other objects at anything lit up. Some antiaircraft batteries opened up around dark, firing at suspicious objects in the sky—including stars and planets—adding to the fear and confusion. Japanese residents caught on the streets were chased and beaten, while others were rounded up by the FBI using a prearranged list of suspected enemy agents. Many people immediately fired their Japanese gardeners and kitchen help.

  Meanwhile, by midafternoon on the day of the attack a massive America First rally was getting under way in Pittsburgh. The featured speaker was North Dakota senator Gerald P. Nye, perhaps the most fervent of all the isolationists. Also on the ticket was the famous dancer Irene Castle, whose husband, Vernon, the other half of the dance team, had been killed in the First World War. Before he went to the podium, Nye was handed a wire-service teletype report about the Pearl Harbor attack. He refused to believe it and proceeded to open the rally by branding President Roosevelt a warmonger. Thousands in the crowd roared their approval. An army colonel arrived in the hall to try to tell the Firsters what had happened, but he was accused of being a warmonger too and was thrown out of the building.

  Nye was still carrying on when a newspaper reporter who had just spoken to his editor was told that Japan had formally declared war on the United States. The newsman got the word to Nye by writing it on a piece of paper and placing it in front of the senator on the rostrum. But even after Nye read it, he continued with his harangue, working his audience up into a fever pitch until they were shouting that Roosevelt was a “traitor,” and should be impeached.

  Finally, after about an hour, the dramatic news sitting before him on the rostrum must have begun to sink in. Nye stopped his prepared bombast and declared, “I have before me the worst news that I have encountered in the last twenty years.” Breaking into a sweat, he then read from the newsman’s message about the Japanese declaration of war. Later a reporter asked Nye what the country should do now. “We have been maneuvered into this by the President,” the senator replied, “but the only thing to do now is to declare war and jump into it with everything we have and bring it to a victorious conclusion.” Thus the final America First meeting was concluded.2

  Governors from Boston to Seattle began calling up National Guard units to protect railways, bridges, and other strategic sites. In Washington, near the Jefferson Memorial, somebody chopped down a number of the cherry trees that had been a gift of friendship from the citizens of Tokyo back in 1912. Mysterious flights of planes (most nonexistent) were reported on both coasts. An angry crowd gathered at the Japanese embassy in Washington; the police held them at bay while smoke rose from its backyard and roof, where the Japanese were burning documents.

  At Pearl Harbor the drama continued. A Japanese invasion was anticipated by everyone. Army soldiers manned the shorelines, digging trenches and setting up guns, assuming that a huge fleet of Japanese troop transports would appear above the horizon at any moment. Civilians pitched in, including Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the popular Tarzan books, who was vacationing at the time. In military hospitals army and navy wives and local women, including prostitutes, helped roll bandages and perform other helpful duties. Boy Scout troops signed up as messengers, served coffee, and did whatever else they could. The football team from San Jose College scheduled to play in a benefit game that week stayed over and volunteered for guard duty.3

  About three that afternoon General Marshall’s warning to the Pacific commanders finally arrived, handed over by an RCA courier of Japanese ancestry who had dodged bombs and bullets all day to make his delivery. When it reached Admiral Kimmel he glanced at it and angrily threw it in the trash.

  Rumors flew everywhere: the Japanese were landing paratroops north of Pearl; they had sunk the Enterprise on the high seas; they had invaded San Francisco. Shots from nervous sentries rang out all over Oahu and not a few innocent people were injured or killed. Into this state of quasi-panic flew a squadron of U.S. Navy fighters from the Enterprise, which had been searching for the enemy carriers. It was too dark to try a landing on the ship, so they headed for Pearl. As they approached Ford Island runway they were instructed by the control tower to turn on their lights before landing. Soon as they did, practically every ship in the harbor opened up on them and five of the six U.S. planes were shot down.

  Simultaneous with the Pearl Harbor raid, the Japanese attacked the other American possessions in the Pacific, most importantly the Philippines, where General MacArthur waited with his army of 120,000. They also invaded Thailand in order to seize British Malaya with its vast natural resources and its fortress city of Singapore, as well as British Hong Kong.

  Before turning to these fascinating battles let us first deal in summary with the matter of American blame for the tragedy at Pearl Harbor. For more than fifty years an entire cottage industry of book publishing has grown up around the subject of who was culpable for allowing the Japanese to surprise us so completely. Some are written by cranks, some even by crackpots; many are thoughtful and reasoned. As is often said, hindsight is twenty-twenty. Further, there were half a dozen public investigations of the thing, some political, others less so.

  Once the initial shock of the attack wore off, Americans high and low—politicians, the press, the Roosevelt administration, and of course the military—began searching for somebody to condemn for the disaster. How, they asked, could the U.S. Pacific Fleet let itself be caught napping? The most obvious suspects were Admiral Kimmel and General Short, U.S. Navy and Army commanders in Hawaii, and indeed they held their share of culpability. Yet there was still blame enough to go around for all. From the best this author can tell, the reason for the Pearl Harbor calamity lies mostly in a lack of coordination and communication between Washington and Hawaii, as well as a misreading and misinterpretation at various levels of the vast quantity of intelligence available at the time from MAGIC and other sources. As well, the American people themselves deserve a good part of the blame, for the leaders they elected to Congress were, for too long, loath to vote money for adequate defenses, especially long-ra
nge patrol planes, to their Pacific outposts.

  First, this sort of raid was not entirely unexpected. Ever since 1936 the Pacific Fleet had practiced at-sea war-game maneuvers based on a theoretical Japanese carrier attack on Pearl Harbor delivered from north of Oahu. Studies had been conducted at Pearl Harbor itself indicating it was certainly a possibility, though nobody ever suggested that the Japanese would come with as many as six aircraft carriers. It was a classic example of one of the most common military intelligence failures seen throughout human history: calculating what an enemy would do, instead of what he could do.

  All MAGIC intercepts were sent directly to Washington to the army and navy intelligence sections, where they were to be decoded, translated, and interpreted and their information passed along to the highest authorities. Then, a digest of this intelligence was passed along to the Pacific theater commanders. This digest of the intelligence, instead of the raw intelligence itself, was what both Kimmel and Short complained of afterward because they said they felt handicapped by not being able to collate the raw intercepts themselves; that if they had, they would have somehow caught indications that the Japanese were about to attack them.

  A prime example cited by Kimmel was the so-called bomb-plot message, which was intercepted from the Japanese spy Yoshikawa in Honolulu. In it Tokyo wanted to know all grid coordinates for the positions of Kimmel’s ships while in Pearl Harbor, and Kimmel, understandably angry, testified later that if he had received this intelligence it would have made an important impression on him. But the navy high command in Washington, while admitting that they, too, were “impressed” with the bomb-plot message, chose not to send it to Kimmel.*

  Nevertheless, as Pearl Harbor historian Roberta Wohlstetter put it, “If anything emerges clearly from a study [of the attack] it is the soundness of having a center for evaluating a mass of conflicting signals. It would have created endless confusion if Washington had tried to relay all available signals to the overseas commands.”4 But both Admiral Kimmel and General Short still wondered, and wondered loudly and publicly in years to come, why the Hawaiian command did not have a MAGIC machine of its own. (The reason was that the one scheduled to be sent to them had been sent to the British instead, in exchange for one of the Ultra machines used to read the German codes.)

  The principal facts during the weeks and months leading up to the attack are these:

  • Washington knew after putting the embargo on oil sales to the Japanese that war with Japan might ensue though, as in all intricate assessments of this kind, some high-level officials did not agree. The most notable among those who believed the Japanese would declare war against the United States were Roosevelt and Cordell Hull. But the military—Admiral Stark, General Marshall, as well as both of their intelligence staffs—seriously doubted it, and said so many times.

  • Washington sent numerous messages and warnings to the Pacific area indicating that war might be imminent, but instructed the Pacific commanders that they were to let the Japanese strike first (i.e., let them be the bad guys).

  • Nobody in high authority believed—even if Japan did declare war—that an attack on Pearl Harbor was a strong possibility; instead their warnings foretold of a Japanese attack against the Philippines, Russia, or the British and Dutch possessions in the southern Pacific.

  • Both Kimmel and Short were aware of the possibility of an attack on Pearl Harbor, but neither thought it likely, owing to the information they were getting from Washington.

  • There had been discussion of placing torpedo nets to protect the big ships in Pearl against aerial attacks but they came to nothing. Earlier in the year Stark had assured Kimmel that Pearl Harbor did not have enough water depth to permit an aerial torpedo attack and Kimmel was glad to get the news; he felt that antitorpedo nets would further congest a harbor in which it was already difficult to maneuver.5

  • There had also been discussion about installation of barrage balloons around the harbor. In the event of an imminent attack this would have been a great aid to the fleet at anchor. Several hundred barrage balloons suspended from cables all over Pearl would have made enemy plane maneuvers infinitely more difficult since the aircraft would have to dodge all those cables while at the same time keep a steady course on their torpedo and bombing runs. Unfortunately, it was again the story of too little, too late. Army troops were at the time of the attack training on the installation and operation of barrage balloons for Pearl back in the States, but none had yet been delivered to Hawaii.

  • Both Kimmel and Short were concerned that they did not have enough patrol planes to perform the necessary daily 360-degree longdistance reconnaissance around Pearl. In fact, Kimmel had informed Washington that in order to do this, he would need an additional 180 B-17 long-distance planes, when there weren’t even that many in existence in the United States (many of the B-17s were going to England straight from the production lines).6

  • The few existing B-17s in Hawaii were in fact destined for the Philippines and their crews were in training for that mission. Though they were bombers and not patrol planes, the B-17s had exceptional long-range capabilities. The navy had only a limited number of PBY “flying boat” planes in Hawaii that were suitable for long-range patrols. Of only sixty-nine available, most were badly handicapped by a shortage of both spare parts and relief crews.7 These shortages were so critical that if twenty-four-hour, 360-degree patrols covering half a million square miles of ocean had been instituted, in less than two weeks all the planes and their crews would be worn out and grounded for rest, maintenance, and spare parts.

  This was a crucial issue because Kimmel, as Pacific Fleet commander, could not afford to have his reconnaissance “eyes” grounded if some sudden further intelligence showed that an attack on his ships was imminent. Since the messages from Washington indicated an attack most likely would come thousands of miles farther west, he decided to hold off on flying all-out long-range patrols and, in time-honored naval tradition, “to await further developments.” Kimmel guessed wrong and paid the price.

  * * *

  The principal facts during the last days and hours leading directly to the attack itself are these:

  Admiral Stark’s “war warning” message to Kimmel of November 27, ten days before the attack, indicated that any Japanese action against America would likely fall on the Philippines or some of the outlying U.S. islands such as Guam, Wake, or Midway. It did not put any special emphasis on Pearl Harbor or, for that matter, even mention it.

  General Short’s decision to go on the lowest army alert instead of the highest was based on his interpretation of the message similar to Kimmel’s, which he received from Washington. In a further clarification Marshall had instructed Short to guard especially against sabotage and not to “alarm the local population.” Short accordingly went into his sabotage alert level—the lowest—and when he informed Marshall of what he had done, he received no instructions to the contrary from his boss in Washington.

  As to the final day before the attack and the morning of it, there seems to have been a rather casual attitude in Washington.

  When Colonel Bratton interrupted the chief of military intelligence General Miles’s dinner party to show him the first thirteen parts of the MAGIC-intercepted final Japanese reply to the United States, Miles did not consider it important enough to disturb the chief of staff at home. Thus, next morning, Marshall went on his usual Sunday horseback ride blithely unaware that the Japanese might be about to immediately declare war. If there had been cell phones in those days, Marshall might have found himself at his desk reading the fourteenth and most important part several hours earlier than he in fact did. In the event, it was nearly noon Washington time when he finally got off his latest warning to the Pacific command, and by then the Japanese bombers were already in the air.

  Admiral Stark seemed even more cavalier about the impending crisis that morning. When it was suggested to him that the fourteen-part message meant war, he declined at first even to no
tify his Pacific commanders, saying that he had already told them to be on lookout. Later in testimony he cited an earlier warning he had sent Kimmel on November 24, saying that “a surprise aggressive movement in any direction [emphasis added] including attack on Philippines or Guam is a possibility,” and used this to defend against suggestions that he had not properly warned Pearl Harbor. As historian Roberta Wohlstetter points out, “How Stark could have believed that the phrase ‘in any direction’ could have carried over from a sentence in a less urgent message [thirteen days before the attack] ... is incomprehensible.”8 In fact, Stark’s testimony was comprehensible: he was making an excuse, grasping at straws.

  Then there is the matter of the actual transmission of Marshall’s (and, by proxy, Stark’s) final warning message (indicating Japan’s one P.M. suspense deadline for delivery of Tokyo’s reply), which was sent to Pearl Harbor the morning of the attack. How it somehow got shifted from an urgent top-priority radio transmission, which because of solar flares became a low-priority Western Union via undersea cablegram that did not reach the Hawaiian commanders until long after the attack was over, remains something of a mystery.

  This is yet another example of the ubiquitous fog of war, in which somewhere between “I told him to do it” and “I ordered it done,” the thing got screwed up. Nevertheless, some blame attaches to Marshall for, first, not accepting Stark’s offer to transmit the message through his navy channels and, second, for not personally—or not having one of his people personally—follow up the matter in detail. Even fifteen or twenty minutes’ warning might have made some difference in the severity of the attack.