by Craig Nelson
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If America’s secret weapons of World War II were radar and code-cracking, Japan’s were its spies. On March 27, 1941, Honolulu’s Japanese-language Nippu Jiji newspaper reported that “Tadashi Morimura, newly appointed secretary of the local Japanese consulate general, arrived here this morning on the Nitta Maru from Japan. His appointment was made to expedite the work on expatriation applications and other matters.” In fact, no person of that name was listed in Japan’s foreign registry, for Tadashi Morimura was no embassy clerk, but a naval officer whose career was struck short by illness and who had been reassigned into a civilian job with naval intelligence. Takeo Yoshikawa: “Since I had been studying English, I was assigned to the sections dealing with the British and American navies. I became the Japanese navy’s expert on the American navy. I read history, too. Like the works of Mahan, the famous American admiral.” After using Jane’s Fighting Ships to memorize the silhouettes of American naval warcraft, Morimura/Yoshikawa appeared in Honolulu in the spring of 1941 with $600 in cash. At the embassy, he developed a reputation as a drinker and a slacker who worked extremely odd hours, an act he called Bobby Make-Believe, to make his embassy colleagues dismiss the rumors that he was an officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy. No one in the navy, they knew, would ever behave like that.
Publicly dressed in the tourist uniform of linen trousers and aloha shirt, Yoshikawa regularly signed up for aerial sightseeing excursions, including a flight to Maui, where he watched the naval traffic at Lahaina. He went swimming near the outer edge of Pearl Harbor, looking for submarine and torpedo nets. Along with several women from the consulate, he took a glass-bottom-boat tour of Kaneohe harbor and noted its various depths. At a Japanese fencing club popular with US military officers, he became known as an “attentive listener,” while at the Shuncho-Ro teahouse on Alewa Heights, he drank and ate to his heart’s content while attended to by geishas and used the telescope the owner had installed for tourists on the second floor. Yoshikawa: “From there I saw the fleet in Pearl Harbor. Sometimes I went around Pearl Harbor by taxi, or bus. Sometimes I walked along, drinking a beer, to get information. I did you know ‘fishing’ to mark the depths of the sea. But it was very dangerous.” Disguised as a Filipino, he washed dishes in the Pearl Harbor officers’ club and went hiking through the Aiea Heights sugarcane fields, with their picture-postcard views of the American fleet. It was not exactly 007 derring-do, but Yoshikawa’s humdrum tasks would generate detailed reports that gave crucial information to Japanese fighter, bomber, and torpedo pilots as they decimated Oahu.
Consul General Nagai Kita oversaw Yoshikawa’s espionage work, and according to the army’s General Charles Herron, “It was a matter of common knowledge that the Japanese consulate in Honolulu was the hotbed of espionage in Oahu.” Though the United States had shut down German and Italian consulates by that time, Japan’s embassies remained open, since the Americans thought it might upset ongoing treaty negotiations to expel them, and because it was believed Japanese foreign agents were too mentally and physically incompetent to pose a threat.
Of Hawaii’s residents in 1941, 158,000 were of Japanese ancestry, a full 40 percent of the territory’s populace. This enclave had originated with the sugarcane plantations’ importing of Japanese workers for cheap manual labor, and its size meant that Honolulu was—and still is—the most Japanese city outside Japan. Half of Hawaii’s 1941 restaurateurs and grocers, most of its construction workers, most of its car mechanics, nearly all of its retail clerks, and 100 percent of its fishermen were Japanese. Many patriotically supported their soldiers in the China Incident, buying Japan’s war bonds, sending comfort packages to overseas troops, and contributing to Japan’s Red Cross campaign to outfit a floating hospital (unknown to these Americans, that money never went to any shipyard, but was instead used to build a bomber named Hawaii).
Those census figures worried US military commanders, such as the Hawaii Department’s intelligence chief from 1935 to 1937, Lieutenant Colonel George Patton, who prepared an undated memorandum, “Initial Seizure of Orange Nationals,” which named 120 prominent local Japanese—doctors, priests, politicians, lawyers, publishers, businessmen, and consular staff—who would be detained if war was declared. The focus was so great on saboteurs that across nine Pearl Harbor investigations, Yoshikawa’s espionage activities were never revealed. Then in the 1980s after the Japanese Hawaiian agent himself came forward and confessed, FBI agent J. Harold Hughes sniped, “We all knew he was a spy. . . . I’m just so tired of reading this kind of story about ‘Master Spy’ Yoshikawa. It just isn’t so, by dang.” However, while the FBI and army intelligence worked to ferret out evidence of fifth columnists among Honolulu’s locals—evidence they never found—Yoshikawa continued his grunt-work surveillance of Oahu, by dang.
Even though the FBI agent in charge of Hawaii, Robert Shivers, testified he could not get any useful intelligence about the local Japanese populace from Caucasians, the Bureau had only one employee of Japanese descent—a translator. At one meeting with Consul General Kita, Shivers coyly said, “Go ahead, Mr. Kita. Cruise around the island and see what you can see.” “Oh, no,” Kita said, smiling. “Then you would follow me and chase me.”
During this time, warning after warning was sent between Washington and Oahu. On April 1, 1941, CNO Stark cabled his naval district commanders (including Kimmel), “Personnel of your naval intelligence service should be advised that because of the fact that from past experience shows the Axis powers often begin activities in a particular field on Saturdays and Sundays or on national holidays of the country concerned, they should take steps on such days to see that proper watches and precautions are in effect.”
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With twenty-twenty hindsight, it is mystifying to read again and again of how insistent military officers in Hawaii were before December 7 that nothing was a threat to them, yet this was a broadly held sentiment in the United States before the shock of Pearl Harbor. Minnesota congressman and Marine Corps reservist Melvin Maas returned from active duty in Hawaii to report, “Japan is deathly afraid of the American fleet,” and that US forces in the territory could defend “against any combination of forces that might challenge our interest.” The New York Times called the islands “Our Gibraltar in the Pacific”; and Collier’s magazine reported that Pearl Harbor was “impregnable.” Clark Beach in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin editorialized, “A Japanese attack on Hawaii is regarded as the most unlikely thing in the world, with one chance in a million of being successful. . . . American naval men would like nothing better than to see the Japanese fleet outside of Pearl Harbor where they could take it on.”
In the spring of 1941, after George Marshall had completed a tour of Hawaii’s military installations, Marshall told Stimson, “With our heavy bombers and our fine new pursuit planes, the land forces could put up such a defense that the Japs wouldn’t dare attack Hawaii.” When Stimson passed this along to Roosevelt, the president asked for a White House meeting at noon the next day. On April 24, Stimson told FDR that Marshall “felt that Hawaii was impregnable whether there are any ships left there are not; that the land defense was amply sufficient, together with the air defense, to keep off the Japanese, and the air defense could always be reinforced from the mainland of America.”
Stimson then gave FDR a memorandum from Marshall which included, “The island of Oahu, due to its fortification, its garrison, and its physical characteristics, is believed to be the strongest fortress in the world. [To invade it] the enemy must transport overseas an expeditionary force capable of executing a forced landing against a garrison of approximately 35,000 men, manning 127 fixed coast defense guns, 211 anti-aircraft weapons, and more than 3,000 artillery pieces and automatic weapons available for beach defense. Without air superiority this is an impossible task. . . . With adequate air defense, enemy carriers, naval escorts and transports will begin to come under air attack at a distance of approximately 750 miles. This attack will increas
e in intensity until when within 200 miles of the objective, the enemy forces will be subject to attack by all types of bombardment closely supported by our most modern pursuit. . . . Including the movement of aviation now in progress Hawaii will be defended by 35 of our most modern flying fortresses, 35 medium range bombers, 13 light bombers, 150 pursuit of which 105 are of our most modern type. In addition Hawaii is capable of reinforcement by heavy bombers from the mainland by air. With this force available a major attack against Oahu is considered impracticable.”
In fact, Oahu did not have patrol planes that could fly out on a 750-mile arc; she did not have sufficient bombers to bring the enemy under attack at such range; and as of December 7, 1941, General Short would not have thirty-five B-17s; he would have twelve—only six of them operational. The key matériel problem that plagued Hawaii—not enough planes to thoroughly search 360 degrees—held true for all of America’s military forces at that moment, a problem that nearly got Army Air Corps commanding general Hap Arnold fired. From 1939 to 1940, Arnold had made his position clear: FDR’s enthusiastic policy of shipping planes to Britain was weakening American defense. Arnold got so vociferous with his complaints that Roosevelt told Assistant Secretary of War Louis Johnson that “either Arnold cut it out or he would be removed as head of the Air Corps.”
George Marshall’s optimism, meanwhile, was widely shared in his War Department, compounded by the US being as ignorant of Japan’s fighting forces as she was of theirs. After the war, army intelligence officer Colonel George Bicknell remembered: “Practically every person on the island of Oahu had been lulled into a sense of false security through the constant reiteration of the belief that the defenses of the island made it practically impregnable. In addition, it had been constantly stated that Japan, as a military and naval power, amounted to nothing when pitted against the superior equipment, personnel, and tactics of our own army and navy. . . . Little was actually known about Japanese airpower, although, again, there were many stories about the poor quality of Japanese aircraft, the lack of proper equipment, and the alleged fact that the Japanese made poor aviators and would never be as good as occidentals in this field.”
Some, however, knew of the military’s failings; a special investigation of Hawaiian forces prepared in July 1941 by the onetime commanding officer of Hickam Field, Colonel Harvey Burwell, concluded that after years of living a tropical island life, the army’s soldiers had lost their “aggressive initiative,” while their commanders, backed by such an enormous force of troops, had no “critical concern for the future,” with few having thought through a detailed response to enemy attacks, especially when it came to “an abrupt conflict with Japan.”
The chief of the Far East Section in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Rear Admiral Arthur McCollum, admitted that Washington was woefully uninformed about the Japanese. After McCollum presented a study of Japanese naval airmen and their technology in 1941 to the Navy’s General Board to demonstrate that a significant threat was coming out of Asia and to “tell these people that the Japanese aviators were darned good,” his warnings were utterly ignored, he said, because his fellow officers could only think of Japanese as “funny little people.”
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In Tokyo, the prime minister, the foreign, army, and navy ministers, and the vice chiefs of both services’ general staff argued over the future course of the nation at the May 3 and May 8 liaison conferences, with Foreign Minister Matsuoka repeatedly demanding that Japan attack Singapore as soon as possible to gain a tactical advantage. It would help their Nazi allies by requiring England to fight on two oceans at once, and a great Japanese victory over the British would serve to cow the American president. “Roosevelt is keen to go to war. You see, he is a huge gambler,” Matsuoka explained. “If Britain surrenders an hour before the United States enters the war in Europe, the United States would change its mind and refrain from going to war. [But] if Britain surrenders an hour after the United States enters the war, the United States would continue fighting. . . . If the United States were ever to enter this war, the war will be prolonged, and the world civilization will be destroyed.” The foreign minister’s enthusiasm was so excessive that Hirohito darkly concluded to Privy Seal Kido, “Matsuoka has been likely bribed by Hitler,” and the emperor immediately had a private meeting with Prime Minister Konoye to make sure that he didn’t agree with the foreign minister’s extremist views.
On May 12, Ambassador Nomura gave State Secretary Hull a new treaty draft that asked Washington to “request the Chiang Kai-shek regime to negotiate peace with Japan” and if Chiang refused, for America to “discontinue her assistance to the Chiang Kai-shek regime.” It offered a “withdrawal of Japanese troops from Chinese territory in accordance with an agreement to be concluded between Japan and China,” but, as part of a joint defense against communism, included the right of Japan to station troops in China. America and Japan would resume their most-favored-nation status in commerce, and as “Japanese expansion in the direction of the southwestern Pacific area is declared to be of peaceful nature, American cooperation shall be given in the production and procurement of natural resources (such as oil, rubber, tin, nickel) which Japan needs.” To cap these outrageous terms, Tokyo threw Hull’s diatribes about Japanese colonialism back in the American’s lap by suggesting the United States and Japan “jointly guarantee the independence of the Philippine Islands on the condition that the Philippine Islands shall maintain a status of permanent neutrality.”
Hull made Nomura a counteroffer a month later. The United States needed to know what treaty terms Japan proposed to offer China before it could urge Chiang to do anything; Tokyo and Washington both would offer “access by peaceful means to supplies of natural resources which each needed” and “mutual affirmation that the basic policy of each country was one of peace throughout the Pacific area and a mutual disclaimer of territorial designs.” Hull finished by telling Nomura that Japan could join the rest of the world by adhering to his principles of peace through commerce—or find herself alone and besieged.
Leaders in Tokyo, expecting a few minor changes from the original Maryknoll terms, were appalled. Couldn’t Washington at the very least recognize Japan’s dominion in China, if not the whole of Southeast Asia? Matsuoka told Nomura that it was high time the United States stopped trying to police the globe and interfere in other nations’ “spheres of living.”
Even though American officials expected that something might happen, at any time, in the Pacific—with Stimson writing on May 23, “The president shows evidence of waiting for the accidental shot of some irresponsible captain on either side to be the occasion of his going to war”—Kimmel lost nearly a quarter of his fleet in that year’s transfers from the Pacific to the Atlantic: carrier Yorktown; battleships Mississippi, Idaho, and New Mexico; four light cruisers, seventeen destroyers, three oilers, three transports, and ten auxiliaries—more than he would lose on December 7. In the wake of this order, Kimmel wrote CNO Stark on May 26 an eleven-page cable that included: “With the recent detachment of many of the most modern and effective units, the adequacy and suitability of the forces remaining to accomplish the tasks to which they may be assigned is very doubtful. . . . The defense of the Fleet base at Pearl Harbor is a matter of considerable concern. . . . The naval forces available to the Commandant are meager to the point of non-existence.”
Like his predecessor at Pearl Harbor, James Richardson, a concerned Admiral Husband Kimmel then came to Washington to make clear the many weaknesses of Pearl Harbor to Stark, Knox, and King at lunch, notably the “congestion of ships, fuel oil storage, and repair facilities,” which invited “attack, particularly from the air.” The “single entrance channel . . . exposed them to submarine attack. . . . In case of attack by air or otherwise with the Fleet in port, it would take at least three hours to complete a sortie. . . . The only real answer was for the Fleet not to be in Pearl Harbor when the attack came.”
On June 9, the admiral met w
ith the president at the White House for ninety minutes. They’d known each other casually for decades; Kimmel had even been an aide to Navy Undersecretary Franklin Roosevelt for ten days in 1915. FDR told CINCPAC that officials in the State Department “were carrying on informal talks with certain Japanese and others concerned looking forward to a peaceful Pacific for one hundred years;” Kimmel considered this “a considerable amount of wishful thinking.” Roosevelt also asked the admiral’s opinion on “further reducing the Pacific Fleet by three battleships,” since Knox had told him that “six battleships could raid Japanese communications and defend Hawaii,” and Stark thought that “three battleships is enough to defend Hawaii.” Kimmel said, “That’s crazy!” Roosevelt, as always, agreed with whoever was in the room at the moment: “It sounds silly to me. I told Knox it was silly.” Kimmel said that he “was convinced that such further reduction would be an invitation for Japan to come into the war.” “That’s right,” Roosevelt said.
On June 13, CNO Stark’s deputy Rear Admiral Royal Ingersoll sent a memo to all naval district commanders that pointed out, though it was commonly believed that aerial torpedoes required seventy-five feet to launch, “recent developments have shown that United States and British torpedoes may be dropped from planes at heights of as much as three hundred feet, and in some cases make initial dives of considerably less than seventy-five feet, and make excellent runs. [So] it cannot be assumed that any capital ship or other valuable vessel is safe at anchor from this type of attack if surrounded by water at a sufficient distance to permit an attack to be developed and a sufficient run to arm the torpedo.” Husband Kimmel read this memo, but still decided that it was impossible that “aerial torpedoes could run in Pearl Harbor.”
On July 5, Stimson received from Marshall “a very interesting piece of news that had come along through authentic channels of something that Matsuoka in Tokyo had been telling Ribbentrop—about how well they had been fooling the Americans in keeping our Fleet in the Pacific. This was the last straw for me in proof of the futility of the final late efforts of the State Department.” That morning at eleven o’clock he showed it to Roosevelt, who said that it “had better signalize the end of our efforts in appeasement in the Pacific.”
