by Max Hastings
Cmdr Oka did no better when he hired Herbert Greene, a nephew of William Greene, a senior Admiralty official and brother of the novelist Graham. Oka codenamed him ‘Midorikawa’ – ‘Green River’ – paid him £800 and cherished hopes that Greene had an entrée to the smart London clubland where secrets were discussed. Instead, in December 1937 Greene proclaimed his half-hearted treachery to the Daily Worker, which blazoned all over its front page his announcement that he was a Japanese spy. In July 1941, when Japan was still a neutral, its naval attaché formally requested from the British government details of the national electricity grid. Guy Liddell of MI5 branded this ‘characteristic impertinence’, since British surveillance officers had just seen a member of the Japanese embassy staff pass German cash to an Abwehr agent operating under Double Cross control. The only advantages enjoyed by Japanese spies, said Liddell, was that they were very hard to watch ‘as to a European they all look alike and there is the additional difficulty of the blackout and four exits from the military attaché’s office’. The Japanese navy’s most useful intelligence connection in London was Rear-Admiral Lord Sempill, an enthusiastic Nazi sympathiser. When it was found that he had been selling classified information to Tokyo, in 1941 he was permitted to resign quietly from the Royal Navy and retire to his Scottish castle; Churchill flinched from a treason trial at the heart of the old aristocracy.
The last significant Japanese spy in America – if she can be dignified as such – was Velvalee Dickinson, who passed information on naval matters through a friend in Buenos Aires. Born in Sacramento in 1893, a Stanford graduate, she worked for some years in a San Francisco bank, then assisted her husband Lee in a brokerage business that failed. Thereafter she found work in New York City as a doll saleswoman at Bloomingdale’s, before starting a modestly successful doll store of her own on Madison Avenue. Her association with Tokyo began with her husband’s membership of a Japanese-American society before his death in 1943. As an informant for Japanese intelligence she received $25,000, at the cost of also receiving a ten-year jail sentence from a federal court for violation of censorship statutes when arrested and convicted in 1944. Other clumsy Japanese espionage efforts on both sides of the Atlantic, including the extensive Californian Tachibana network, were curtailed without much difficulty, and with negligible loss of Allied secrets.
The leaders of Japan’s armed forces disagreed about almost everything else, but were of one mind in regarding intelligence-gathering as a mechanical process which could readily be carried out by junior officers – their view was even more myopic than that of Hitler’s OKW. Analysis, such as it was, was conducted by the army’s 2nd Department and the navy’s 3rd. The navy designated sigint as Toku-jo – special information; codebreaking as A-jo; telephone taps as B-jo; DF direction-finding as C-jo. It identified four levels of reliability for information: Ko – certain; Otsu – almost certain; Hei – a little uncertain; Tei – uncertain. As with other nations, in the Japanese army and navy a posting to intelligence was a career dead-end. Even when war came and clever university graduates were conscripted into uniform, almost all were dispatched to become cannon fodder, rather than assigned to military or naval roles – intelligence in particular – where their brains might have been useful.
Japan’s naval codebreakers achieved little success in breaking higher British and American ciphers, and thus concentrated instead on radio direction-finding and traffic analysis. So bitter was the rivalry between the services that when the army broke some low-grade American strip codes, the soldiers concealed their knowledge from the sailors until 1945. At no time before 1943 did Japan devote anything like the personnel and resources necessary to make eavesdropping and codebreaking major sources of intelligence against the Western Powers, nor did their commanders seem much to care about this weakness.
With nationalistic complacency, Japan took for granted the security of its own codes, diplomatic, military and naval. Captain Risaburo Ito warned the navy that its traffic was vulnerable, but was ignored. Japan’s Type 91 and 97 Shiki O-bun Injiki cipher machines, created by naval engineer Kazuo Tanabe and known to the Americans as ‘Red’ and ‘Purple’ respectively, were deemed impregnable – the Foreign Ministry used the latter, and the navy’s ‘Coral’ and ‘Jade’ employed similar technology, differing from Enigma because it employed telephone stepping-switches instead of rotors. The army’s ‘Green’ machine alone used the latter. Supremely fortunately for the Allies, Tokyo ignored an April 1941 warning from the German embassy in Washington, derived from an American traitor’s tip to the Soviets, that US codebreakers had cracked Purple. When Berlin presented the Japanese with several Enigmas and urged them to manufacture copies for their own use, the machines were left to rust; Japan persisted with its home-grown models. Given the difficulties experienced by American and British codebreakers in reading the Japanese army’s traffic, they may well have been better off doing so.
Japan’s military counter-espionage organisation was bizarrely named the ‘Conspiracy Section’, devoted to rooting out plots against the nation. In December 1937 an intelligence training centre was opened, later known as the Nagano School. This offered the usual tradecraft courses, with optional extras in lock-picking, ninja martial arts and ‘Kokutai-gaku’ – ‘Study for National Structure and Mind’, ideological indoctrination. Nagano’s teaching was unusual: it encouraged officers to stay alive, rather than to conduct banzai charges and commit ritual suicide in the event of failure. A weakness of the counter-espionage service persisted, however: it lavished extravagant energy on monitoring Japan’s own civilian politicians, not for evidence of treason, but to ensure that they did not deviate from their own army’s foreign policy objectives. In July 1937, when Prince Konoye as prime minister dispatched envoys to Nankin to discuss possible peace negotiations with the Chinese Nationalists, the army decrypted cables about the talks, and promptly sent military police to arrest Konoye’s couriers.
Hachiro Arita, a pre-war foreign minister, moaned: ‘In Japan we are in a very difficult position for conducting real diplomacy, because Japanese politicians are always watched by the military. I cannot make good use of flattering or diplomatic language … If I say something wrong in a telegram, the Japanese army and navy intercept it and immediately criticise me … The situation is so awkward.’ Japan had a Cabinet Intelligence Department, intended to brief the prime minister, but the navy and army insisted on sustaining monopoly influence over the nation’s inner councils, and secured its emasculation: the CID became a mere propaganda organ.
The War Ministry had its own counter-intelligence organisation, with a fifty-strong staff charged with concealing Japan’s preparations for war. In Mitsubishi’s Nagasaki shipyard, work on the new battleship Musashi was carried on behind vast hemp curtains, screening it from view. The luggage of foreign rail travellers was routinely examined. The Kempeitai’s 6th Section maintained RDF surveillance for illegal wireless transmissions by foreign agents in Japan. Almost all foreigners’ correspondence was intercepted at Tokyo’s Central Post Office and photographed before onward dispatch. Outside the US embassy Japanese secret policemen, stripped to their underpants against the heat, maintained 24/7 surveillance from behind curtains in a supposedly broken-down car – ‘the spy wagon’, as it was known to diplomats. In 1936, military police chanced on a letter in English, signed only ‘Jimmy’ and posted at the Teikoku hotel in Tokyo; it gave details of the refitting of the battleship Nagato. An investigation swiftly pinned authorship on local Reuters correspondent and MI6 informant James Cox. He was arrested, and three days later died after being thrown or throwing himself from the fourth floor of the Tokyo police headquarters.
It was never established whether Cox committed suicide or was murdered – the latter seems more plausible, given the brutality of the Kempeitai. The British Foreign Office gave his widow a £5,000 pay-off, presumably to secure her silence. Nor was her husband’s the only mysterious death of an Englishman: in October 1938 a Royal Navy lieutenant named Peacoc
ke also vanished without trace. In July 1940 alone, fifteen British citizens were arrested on suspicion of espionage, though most were later released. If these cases represented supposed successes for Japanese counter-intelligence, it remains striking to behold that, for all Japan’s increasingly feverish xenophobia and intensive surveillance of foreigners, the Sorge spy ring functioned for eight years at the heart of Axis strategy-making.
Japan’s intelligence-gathering machine failed miserably where it mattered most: in providing the nation’s rulers with an understanding of the principal enemy whom they proposed to attack – the United States, most powerful industrial nation on earth. After Japan’s defeat Col. Shinobu Takayama of the army’s Operations Department acknowledged ruefully that it would have been prudent to research America’s actual and potential warmaking powers before embarking on a conflict with it. The most striking characteristic of Japan’s leadership was its refusal to examine, far less to act upon, unpalatable information. No single branch of government was responsible for making and coordinating grand strategy. The chief of army intelligence, Major-General Yuichi Tsuchihashi, was not consulted about the implications of joining an alliance with Germany and Italy, because he was known to oppose it. The army paid little attention to American matters, which its generals considered the business of the navy and the Foreign Ministry. They read some low-grade diplomatic wireless traffic, and gained a little intelligence from niseis – immigrants living in the US – but mostly relied on open sources, which meant attachés reading newspapers. Several officers explored the Philippines and its garrison, but there was no serious analysis of the US Army’s actual and potential strength. Once the war began, some officers who had spent their entire previous careers studying the Soviet Union were arbitrarily transferred to monitor America. Japan’s South Area Army eventually abolished its US and British intelligence sections, because its senior officers decided that they were producing nothing of practical value. Operations departments despised intelligence officers as old women who raised objections to intended courses of action, and themselves preferred to rely upon front-line eyeball observation by soldiers in the field. When the army moved into Indochina in 1940, its Operations Department summarily appropriated all intelligence responsibilities to itself, and ran the invasion as if the intelligence staff did not exist.
The attitude of the Japanese navy before Pearl Harbor reflected a profound contradiction: those of its senior officers who used their brains recognised their own nation’s strategic vulnerability, because of its dependence on imported oil and commodities, but made little attempt to impose their views upon the Tokyo government. They knew that it would be easy to annihilate the Royal Navy’s small forces in the Far East, but recognised the immense power of the US Navy. Operations chief Captain Tasuku Nakazawa wrote before hostilities began: ‘We have no chance to win a war [with Britain and the US]. War games resulted in heavy losses in shipping and loss of control of overseas shipping lanes and lines of communication.’ Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was foremost among those who, while disliking and resenting the United States’ policies, recognised its economic and industrial supremacy. He and his cleverest subordinates knew that if they failed to secure victory fast, they would not get it at all. A February 1941 assessment concluded: ‘After 1944, the US Navy would be confident of victory.’
In 1941 also, a new National Institute for Total War Studies carried out exhaustive war gaming, presuming an advance into South-East Asia. This concluded that within two years Japan would be on its knees, with Soviet entry into the war delivering a coup de grâce. Gen. Hideki Tojo, soon to become prime minister, read the Institute’s report, then commented: ‘You did a good job, but your report is based on a kind of armchair theory, not a real war … War is not always carried out as planned. We shall face unpredicted developments.’ Tojo chose insistently to believe that these would operate in favour of the Axis. In September 1941 the Economic Planning Section of the War Ministry reached the same conclusion as the War Studies Institute, but once again the findings were rejected by the high command. The Imperial Japanese Army’s chief of staff declared that ‘the report is against our national policy’, and ordered it to be burnt.
The army’s iron men almost always prevailed, reciting their mantra that the government and people of the United States would succumb to a moral collapse after suffering the early defeats and humiliations that Japan was rightly confident of being able to inflict upon them. The soldiers were also convinced of German invincibility, and spurned doubters. In 1940 Japan’s naval attaché in London and military attaché in Stockholm emphasised British successes in resisting the German onslaught on their island, and the scale of Luftwaffe losses. On 25 July the army’s monthly intelligence report expressed respect for the strength of Britain’s resistance in the air battle over the island: ‘The UK is maintaining the fight against Germany with great determination … British public opinion continues to support the government’s hard-line policy.’ The report highlighted the postponement of Hitler’s invasion, Operation ‘Sealion’, because of German lack of amphibious capability, and failure to achieve air superiority.
IJA headquarters dismissed the authors of these reports as having succumbed to British propaganda, and instead embraced the supremely optimistic dispatches of Baron Ōshima, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin. Until June 1941 the Foreign Ministry made policy on an assumption that following Britain’s defeat, the Nazis would forge an alliance with the Soviet Union to divide the spoils. Japan’s generals succumbed to euphoria following the signing of the 13 April 1941 Soviet–Japanese neutrality pact, which they convinced themselves made the nation safe from a two-front war. When Ōshima reported that Hitler planned to invade the Soviet Union – his warnings became explicit on 18 April 1941 and were reinforced on 4 June – the Japanese government simply refused to consider this new and unwelcome scenario. Only a fortnight before the German onslaught, foreign minister Matsuoka doggedly insisted that there was only a 40 per cent prospect of such an event. War minister Tojo said: ‘I do not think it is an urgent matter.’ The cabinet deferred discussion of the implications of a Russo–German war, clinging blindly to its policy of supporting the Nazis more or less whatever they did. Without reference to the civilian politicians, the army dispatched large reinforcements to Manchuria in case a decision was made to join Hitler’s assault on Stalin.
Before ‘Barbarossa’ was launched, intelligence officer Lt. Col. Saburo Hayashi suggested that if the Russians could get through winter undefeated, their armies could regroup and sustain a long struggle, but the Operations Department and higher commanders dismissed this assessment out of hand. Hayashi wrote again in August: ‘It is expected that the Germans will occupy Moscow, but have no more success within 1941. When winter comes the Soviet Army will have an opportunity to catch its breath, and will never surrender. The Communist Party is strong and solid. Following the fall of Moscow, the Germans will be obliged to continue the war, while maintaining control of huge captured territories. To summarise: the war will not end quickly.’ Yet the all-powerful Operations Department instead predicted Stalin’s looming overthrow by his own generals. In Japan as in Nazi Germany, it had become an institutional precept that no intelligence assessment could be countenanced by policy-makers which ran contrary to a desired national course. Again and again between the 1930s and 1945, strategy was distorted to conform with the visceral inclinations and ambitions of commanders, rather than with realities, of which by far the most important were America’s economic superiority and Germany’s precarious strategic predicament.
The most penetrating appreciation of Japan’s prospects before Pearl Harbor was presented to Tokyo not by its own analysts, but by Winston Churchill. In April 1941 he dispatched a memorandum to the Japanese foreign minister which was designed to deter war. ‘I venture to ask a few questions,’ wrote the British prime minister,
which it seems to me deserve the attention of the Imperial Japanese Government and people.
1. Will
Germany, without the command of the sea or the command of the British daylight air, be able to invade and conquer Great Britain in the spring, summer or autumn of 1941? Will Germany try to do so? Would it not be in the interests of Japan to wait until these questions have answered themselves?
2. Will the German attack on British shipping be strong enough to prevent American aid from reaching British shores, with Great Britain and the United States transforming their whole industry to war purposes?
3. Did Japan’s accession to the Triple Pact [with Germany and Italy] make it more likely or less likely that the United States would come into the present war?
4. If the United States entered the war at the side of Great Britain, and Japan ranged herself with the Axis Powers, would not the naval superiority of the two English-speaking nations enable them to dispose of the Axis Powers in Europe before turning their united strength upon Japan?
5. Is Italy a strength or a burden to Germany? Is the Italian Fleet as good at sea as on paper? Is it as good as it used to be?
6. Will the British Air Force be stronger than the German Air Force before the end of 1941, and far stronger before the end of 1942?
7. Will the many countries which are being held down by the German army and Gestapo learn to like the Germans more, or will they like them less as the years pass by?
8. Is it true that the production of steel in the United States during 1941 will be 75 million tons and in Great Britain about 12½, making a total of nearly 90 million tons? If Germany should happen to be defeated, as she was last time, would not the 7 million tons steel production of Japan be inadequate for a single-handed war?
From the answers to these questions may spring the avoidance by Japan of a serious catastrophe, and a marked improvement in the relations between Japan and the two great Sea-Powers of the West.
