Pearl Harbor Betrayed

by Michael Gannon

  25. Ibid., p. 311.

  26. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 29, Stark, Memorandum for the President, 11 February 1941, p. 2. In this memorandum Stark summed up in writing for the President’s benefit the arguments he had made in person earlier.

  27. Ibid., Box 5, Stark to Kimmel, 10 February 1941, Narrative Statement of Evidence at Navy Pearl Harbor Investigations [hereafter Statement of Evidence], p. 260.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Ibid., Kimmel to Stark, 18 February 1941, p. 261.

  30. Ibid., Stark to Kimmel, 25 February 1941, p. 263.

  31. PHA, Pt. 16, p. 2163.

  32. Ibid., pp. 2163–64. The northwestern cruise would have been made by one aircraft carrier, a division of heavy cruisers, and one squadron of destroyers, with tankers as necessary, to Attu, Aleutian Islands, then to Petropavlovsk in Siberia for a three-day visit. The phrase “to say ‘Boo!’” is borrowed from Morison, Rising Sun, p. 57.

  33. PHA, Pt. 16, pp. 2175–77.

  34. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 3, Their Finest Hour (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1949), p. 404.

  35. For a more detailed presentation of these Atlantic events, see Michael Gannon, Operation Drumbeat: The Dramatic True Story of Germany’s First U-Boat Attacks Along the American Coast in World War II (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1990), pp. 83–89.

  36. As examples of recent works that date the “shoot on sight” order to the post-Greer period one may list: Clay Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War, Vol. 1, The Hunters, 1939–1942 (New York: Random House, 1996), p. 360; Peter Padfield, War Beneath the Sea: Submarine Conflict, 1939–1945 (London: BCA, 1995), p. 164; O’Neill, Democracy at War, p. 31; William K. Klingaman, 1941: Our Lives in a World on Edge (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 370–71; and Waldo Heinrich, Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 167.

  37. Naval Historical Center Library, Rare Books, Operation Plans Nos. 4-41 and 5-41 (1 and 18 July 1941, respectively), in MS, dated 1946, CINCLANT, Administrative History No. 139, “Commander Task Force Twenty-Four,” pp. 61–62. Confirming copies of the same orders are found in Operational Archives [hereafter OA/NHC], Box CINCLANT (June–Sept. 1941), Operation Plan 5-41, Serial 00120, 15 July 1941; NARA, RG 80, Records of the CNO Headquarters COMINCH 1942, Box 11, cited in Task Force Fifteen, USS Idaho, Flagship, Secret Serial A4-3 (005), 29 August 1941; and Washington National Records Center, Suitland, Maryland, RG 313, Box 108, CINCLANT, cited in Task Force Three, USS Memphis, Flagship, n.d., but presumed July 1941. Operation Orders Nos. 6-41 and 7-41 were found in OA/NHC, Box “CINCLANT, Jun.–Sept. 1941.” All the above-cited archival collections, though not the NHC Library, have been moved to NARA, Archives II, Modern Military Branch, in College Park, MD.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Interview with Jürgen Rohwer, Stuttgart, Germany, 16 December 1986. Dr. Rohwer described the Admiral Scheer incident in his “Die USA und die Schlacht im Atlantik 1941,” Jürgen Rohwer and Eberhard Jäckel, eds., Kriegswende Dezember 1941 (Koblenz: Bernard & Graefe Verlag, 1984), pp. 81–103.

  40. The conversations and text of the agreement are given in PHA, Pt. 15, pp. 1485–1550. An ABC-22 staff agreement for joint United States-Canadian defense was incorporated into ABC-1.

  41. Rear Admiral Turner, who was one of two flag officers representing the Navy in the staff conversations, stated in 1944: “It would be a grave error for anyone to get the idea that the war in the Central Pacific was to be purely defensive. Far from it.” PHA, Pt. 26, p. 265.

  42. Morison, Rising Sun, pp. 53–54.

  43. WPPac-46, with four annexes, is given in PHA, Pt. 37, pp. 837–71.

  44. Here again the writer relies on Feis, Road to Pearl Harbor, pp. 150–59.

  45. Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, Vol. II, (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1948), p. 987.

  46. Ibid., p. 995.

  47. From postwar interrogation of Admiral Nagano Osami, chief of the Naval General Staff, cited in Feis, Road to Pearl Harbor, p. 217 and n. 20.

  48. PHA, Pt. 32, p. 560. On the same date that the President issued his freeze order he federalized the Philippine Army and appointed Douglas MacArthur its commanding general. By this same date the American Volunteer Group, composed of American pilots who called themselves the “Flying Tigers,” were flying Curtiss P-40B fighters in missions against the Japanese in China.

  49. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 29, Stark to Cooke, 31 July 1941.

  50. Morison, Rising Sun, p. 63, n. 37. In placing controls on oil exports Roosevelt intended to permit low-grade gasoline for civilian and commercial purposes to continue flowing at 1936 levels, and so informed Ambassador Nomura. However, Secretary Ickes and Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson enveloped the flow in so much red tape that the embargo became total. See John Costello, Days of Infamy: MacArthur, Roosevelt, Churchill—The Shocking Truth Revealed (New York: Pocket Books, 1994), p. 57.

  51. As naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison assayed the moment: “The oil embargo and assets-freezing order of 26 July 1941 made war with Japan inevitable unless one of two things happened, and neither was humanly possible. The United States might reverse its foreign policy, restore trade relations and acquiesce in further Japanese conquests; or the Japanese government might persuade its army at least to prepare to evacuate China and renounce the southward advance [which would surely] have been disregarded by an Army which, as the facts show, would accept no compromise that did not place America in the ignominious role of collaborating with conquest.” Morison, Rising Sun, p. 63.

  Chapter Five: An Air of Inevitability

  1. Morison, Rising Sun, p. 68.

  2. Hull wrote later: “We could not forget that Konoye had been Premier when Japan had invaded China in 1937; he had signed the Axis Alliance in 1940 and had concluded the treaty with the puppet government in Nanking designated to give Japan the mastery of China.” Hull, Memoirs, II, p. 1024.

  3. Ibid., pp. 1019–34; Feis, Road to Pearl Harbor, pp. 253–76; Morison, Rising Sun, pp. 68–70.

  4. PHA, Pt. 14, p. 1402, CNO to CINCPAC, CINCAF, CINCLANT, 16 October 1941.

  5. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 25, Kimmel to Stark, 22 October 1941; Kimmel, Kimmel’s Story, pp. 40–41. Two days before the warning of 16 October, Kimmel reissued security order No. 2 CL-41, which contained the advisory that a Japanese declaration of war may be preceded by “a surprise attack on ships in Pearl Harbor.”

  6. PHA, Pt. 5, pp. 2382–84.

  7. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 29, Stark to Cooke, 31 July 1941.

  8. PHA, Pt. 5, pp. 2175–76.

  9. Ibid., Pt. 5, pp. 2176–77.

  10. Ibid., Pt. 5, p. 2019; 1975. Turner identified the three times he claimed he received the denials by Noyes that Kimmel had Magic decryption equipment in January, July or August, and early November, all in 1941. Ibid., p. 2040.

  11. For Noyes see ibid., Pt. 33, p. 897. Noyes later testified that Turner, if he asked such a question as that suggested, may have had “traffic analysis” and “decrypted traffic” confused in his mind; ibid., pp. 1975–77, 2029; Pt. 10, pp. 4714–15. Or, as Roberta Wohlstetter has theorized, Turner may have had “intercepts” (which Kimmel had) confused with decrypts and translations (which he did not have); Wohlstetter, Warning and Decision, pp. 182–83. For Beatty, see U.S. News & World Report (28 May 1954), pp. 49–50. In his posthumously published book, “And I Was There,” pp. 19–20, then Rear Admiral (Ret.) Layton recounted how, when a personal guest of Admiral Nimitz on board his flagship South Dakota during the Japanese formal surrender ceremonies on 2 September 1945, then full Admiral Turner, another personal guest, strode into the wardroom. “The war had made ‘Terrible’ Turner a naval legend,” Layton wrote. “As commander of Nimitz’s amphibious forces, he had executed all our landing operations from Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima with brilliant distinction.” His booming voice stopped all conversation. “‘That goddamned Kimmel had all the information and didn’t do anything about it. They
should hang him higher than a kite!’

  “Turner continued to hold forth. Time and again he said, ‘Kimmel was given all that information and didn’t do anything about it.’

  “I sat there stunned. I knew that what he was saying was not only untrue, but a monstrous slur on my former commander in chief.” Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton, USN (Ret.), with Captain Roger Pineau, USNR (Ret.), and John Costello, “And I Was There”: Pearl Harbor and Midway—Breaking the Secrets (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1985.)

  Before the JCC on 21 December 1945, Turner was forced by evidence that had been presented earlier to the NCI, to admit that he “was entirely in error as regards the diplomatic codes”; PHA, Pt. 4, p. 1976.

  Others who believed that Kimmel was Magic-equipped were Rear Admiral Theodore S. Wilkinson, Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) who testified to that effect before the Roberts Commission in January 1942 (ibid., Pt. 24, p. 1361), and three Army G-2 officers at the War Department: Brig. Gen. Sherman Miles, chief of military intelligence (G-2); Lt. Col. Moses Pettigrew, executive officer of G-2; and Col. Carlisle Dusenbury, assistant to Col. Rufus S. Bratton, chief, Far Eastern Section, G-2. “I understood,” Dusenbury testified, “the Navy had about four or five hundred Naval personnel in Hawaii doing monitoring, breaking, and translating of the Japanese diplomatic codes.” Ibid., Pt. 35, p. 25.

  The accuracy of Turner’s predictions of Japanese intent and action may be measured right up to the morning of 6 December, when this exchange took place between the War Plans chief and Secretary Knox: “‘Are they going to hit us?’ Knox asked. To which Admiral Turner replied, ‘No, Mr. Secretary, they are going to attack the British. They are not ready for us yet.’” Vice Admiral Frank E. Beatty, “The Background of the Secret Report,” National Review (13 December 1966), p. 1261.

  12. The Knox-Turner exchange was recorded by Knox’s aide Captain Frank E. Beatty. See Vice Admiral Frank E. Beatty (Ret.), “Another Version of What Started War with Japan,” U.S. News & World Report (28 May 1954), p. 49. The Morison letter is found in KC, Roll 18, Morison to Shafroth, Northeast Harbor, ME, 1961, no date, but shortly before Morison’s article “The Lessons of Pearl Harbor” appeared in the Saturday Evening Post (28 October 1961), pp. 19–27.

  13. PHA, Pt. 32, pp. 560–62.

  14. E.g., ibid., Pt. 14, p. 1062.

  15. Ibid., Pt. 32, p. 560.

  16. Memorandum, “Reinforcement of the Philippines,” Gerow to Marshall, 14 August 1941, cited in Costello, Days of Infamy, p. 84.

  17. Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Ordeal and Hope, 1939–1942 (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1966), pp. 185–87.

  18. PHA, Pt. 16, pp. 2211–12; NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 29, Memorandum, Marshall to Stark, 12 September 1941. Cf. Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. 1, Plans and Early Operations, January 1939 to August 1942 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 178–79.

  19. PHA, Pt. 16, pp. 2211–12.

  20. PHA, Pt. 3, pp. 1119–20.

  21. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 29, Stark to Cooke, 31 July 1941.

  22. Ibid., Box 25, Kimmel to Stark, 26 May 1941.

  23. See PHA, Pt. 16, p. 2229, Kimmel to Stark, 18 February 1941; ibid., p. 2160, Stark to Kimmel, 22 March 1941, ibid., p. 2160; ibid., pp. 2233–38, Kimmel to Stark, 26 May 1941, also found in NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 25; ibid., Box 29, Stark to Kimmel, 19 August 1941. For Kimmel’s letter to Stark of 12 September, see ibid., Box 29; and for Stark’s interrogation see ibid., Box 23, NCI, OT, vol. 1, p. 129 ff.

  24. Ibid., Box 29, Stark to Kimmel, 17 October 1941.

  25. Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Reason Why (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1953), pp. 228–34.

  26. Gannon, Operation Drumbeat, pp. 90–92.

  27. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 29, “Betty” to “Mustapha,” 25 November 1941.

  28. Ibid., Kimmel to Betty, 12 August 1941.

  29. Ibid., Box 25, Kimmel to Betty, 22 August, and Betty to Mustapha, 12 September 1941.

  30. Ibid., Box 29, Kimmel to Stark, 15 November 1941; cf. Box 25, Kimmel to Stark, 26 May 1941.

  31. Ibid., Box 25, Kimmel to Stark, 22 October 1941.

  32. Ibid., Kimmel to Stark, “Survey of Conditions in the Pacific Fleet,” 26 May 1941. He could have mentioned the role of battleship gunfire in softening up invasion beaches, but as late as Betio Island, Tarawa, in the Gilberts on 20 November 1943, it was not understood how important it was to saturate a landing beach with heavy, sustained bombardment. Kimmel’s prediction that carriers and light forces would dominate sea warfare in its opening stages was confirmed by the Japanese Navy not only at Pearl Harbor but in their advances, built around air power, through the Philippines and the NEI. See Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, U.S. Navy, U.S. Navy at War, 1941–1945: Official Reports to the Secretary of the Navy (Washington, D.C.: United States Navy Department, 1946), p. 42. Of course, the main confirmations of the primacy of the carriers and air power came in the battles of the Coral Sea (7–8 May 1942) and Midway (3–6 June 1942).

  33. Ibid., Box 25, Kimmel to Stark, 26 May 1941. See Chapter 4 infra for the tanker numbers, and see Kimmel to Stark, 2 December 1941.

  34. Ibid., Box 25, Kimmel to Stark, 2 December 1941.

  35. Ibid., Box 29, Betty to Mustapha, 25 November 1941.

  36. Fukudome, “Hawaii Operation,” p. 1316.

  37. This point was made during the Hart Inquiry in 1944 by then Captain Vincent R. Murphy, who had been Kimmel’s assistant war plans officer: “I did not think they [the Japanese] would attack at Pearl Harbor because I did not think it was necessary for them to do so, from my point of view. We could not have materially affected their control of the waters that they wanted to control, whether or not the battleships were sunk at Pearl Harbor. In other words, I did not believe that we could move the United States Fleet to the Western Pacific until such time as auxiliaries were available.” PHA, Pt. 26, p. 207. Cf. Morison, Rising Sun, p. 132.

  Admiral Stark wrote to Roosevelt a month before the attack: “At the present time the United States Fleet in the Pacific is inferior to the Japanese Fleet and cannot undertake an unlimited strategic offensive in the Western Pacific … [which] would require tremendous merchant tonnage, which could only be withdrawn from services now considered essential.” KC, Roll 7, Memorandum for the President, 5 November 1941, p. 2.

  38. See Miller, War Plan Orange, pp. 294–308. The Navy Plan Option Dash One that was approved by the Navy Department, on 9 September 1941, is summarized in NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 5, Statement of Evidence, pp. 103–16. Cf. ibid., Box 25, Kimmel to Stark, 2 December 1941.

  39. Miller, War Plan Orange, pp. 306–07. Another version of his statement, and the one used here, appears in Miller, “Kimmel’s Hidden Agenda,” MHQ, The Quarterly Journal of Military History (autumn 1991), p. 42.

  40. Frederic L. Borch III, “Guilty As Charged?” MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History vol. 13, no. 2 (winter 2001), p. 61.

  41. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 5, Statement of Evidence, Japanese Diplomatic Dispatches, pp. 332–33. Neither of these two messages was sent to Kimmel or Short.

  42. Kirby et al., Loss of Singapore, pp. 90–93.

  43. For Proposal A, see Feis, Road to Pearl Harbor, p. 295; for Proposal B, see William A. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War, 1940–1941 (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1953), pp. 233–34. Neither of these two proposals, decrypted as Magic, was sent to Kimmel or Short.

  44. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 5, Statement of Evidence, Japanese Diplomatic Dispatches, p. 334. This message was not sent to Kimmel or Short.

  45. Ibid., Box 29, Stark to Kimmel, 17 October 1941.

  46. PHA, Pt. 3, p. 1167.

  47. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 5, Statement of Evidence, Estimate Prepared by Admiral Stark and General Marshall for the President, 5 November 1941, pp. 355A–58; PHA, Pt. 14, pp. 1061–62. This estimate was sent to Kimmel. The estimate did recommend that military action should
be taken against Japan in the following contingencies: “(1) A direct attack of war by Japanese armed forces against the territory or mandated territory of the United States, the British Commonwealth, or the Netherlands East Indies. (2) The movement of Japanese forces into Thailand to the west of 100° east or south of 10° north; or into Portuguese Timor, New Caledonia, or the Loyalty Islands.”

  48. KC, Roll 3, Stimson, Statement of Facts as Shown by My Current Notes and My Recollection as Refreshed Thereby, typescript, pp. 12–42.

  49. KC, Roll 8, Sumner Welles, Memorandum of Conversation, Monday, August 11, 1941, at Sea, p. 10. Welles noted further that “Mr. Churchill dissented very strongly from” the President’s insistence that “no future commitments had been entered into.” See Costello, Days of Infamy, p. 77 and n. 38.

  50. KC, Roll 3, Address of Winston S. Churchill, 27 January 1942. The address was not published in the United States at the time.

  51. Quoted in Costello, Days of Infamy, p. 145. See his Chapter 6, “If the British Fought, We Would Have to Fight,” pp. 131–49.

  51. NARA, RG 80 PHLO, Box 23, ALUSNA SINGAPORE TO CINCAF Ø61526. As the reader will notice, “A firm” [sic], “Baker,” and “Cast” are code for A, B, and C; double Xs represent periods. In 1946 then Captain John X. Creighton, USN, testified that he was the officer who sent the cable to Hart but that his memory was blank about its particulars. He doubted that he had received the information from Brooke-Popham because he was not close to the air marshal. For Creighton see PHA, Pt. 10, pp. 4803, 4809, 4818–19, 5075, 5080–89; Pt. 11, 5207, 5484, 5514–15; Pt. 18, p. 3344; Pt. 33, p. 838; Pt. 40, n. 170, n. 414.

  53. CINCAF to OPNAV, 6 December 1941, reproduced in Kemp Tolley, The Cruise of the Lanikai (Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1973), p. 265.

  54. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 23, Stark’s Testimony Before the NCI, OT, vol. 1, p. 129.

  55. Ibid., Kimmel’s Testimony Before the NCI, excerpt.

  56. Hull, Memoirs, II, p. 1062.