Pearl Harbor: From Infamy To Greatness

by Craig Nelson

  On November 29 in Washington, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox told a vacationing president, “The news this morning indicates that the Japs are going to deliberately stall for two or three days, so unless this picture changes, I am extremely hopeful that you will get a two- or three-day respite down there [in Warm Springs, Georgia] and will come back feeling very fit.” On that same day, Secretary Hull told British ambassador Viscount Halifax that it would be “a serious mistake for our country and other countries interested in the Pacific situation to make plans of resistance without including the possibility that Japan may move suddenly and with every possible element of surprise . . . this would be on the theory that the Japanese recognize that their course of unlimited conquest now renewed all along the line probably is a desperate gamble and requires the utmost boldness and risk.”

  Hirohito asked the nation’s previous prime ministers to a palace luncheon on November 29 to discuss what Japan should do in the wake of the Hull Note. Admiral Yonai began by saying, “Excuse me for speaking my mind in crude ways, but I think we mustn’t become utterly poor in our quest to avoid becoming gradually poor.” Konoye agreed: “Can we not stick to the status quo? In other words, should we not wait out the hard times and see if we could break the deadlock?” But none of these onetime leaders had the determination or political strength to inspire their timid emperor to stop the nation’s rush to battle, which was the entire point of the meeting.

  Hirohito met with his little brother, Rear Admiral Nobuhito Takamatsu, the next day. Though raised separately due to the traditions of a Japanese imperial heir, they were close. Now the thirty-six-year-old prince repudiated his public reputation of being in favor of war by admitting to his emperor brother, “The navy cannot afford to fight. There is a feeling that, if possible, the navy would want to avoid a Japanese-American war. If we pass up this opportunity, war will be impossible to avoid. The navy will start mobilizing for combat on December 1. After that, it cannot be contained.”

  When the emperor admitted he was worried that Japan would lose, his brother insisted that this was one more reason that Hirohito needed to act immediately. But the emperor explained that the decision had been set by the military and the government, and that there was no legal avenue for an imperial veto: “If I did not approve of war, Tojo would resign, then a big coup d’état would erupt, and this would in turn give rise to absurd arguments for war.”

  It is a shame of history that Emperor Showa was no Meiji.

  Beginning November 30, Tokyo cabled Manila, London, Havana, Washington, Hong Kong, and Singapore with orders to destroy all their codes and all their decrypting machines “preparatory to an emergency situation.” Simultaneously, the United States was bringing citizens home, destroying codebooks and machines at its own Asian embassies, and publicly discussing both its refusal to tolerate further Imperial Japanese Army aggressions, and its pessimism about the future of negotiations with Japan’s envoys. Later that same day, Tokyo cabled its Berlin ambassador, “The conversations begun between Tokyo and Washington last April during the administration of the former cabinet . . . now stand ruptured—broken. . . . In the face of this, our Empire faces a grave situation and must act with determination. Will Your Honor, therefore, immediately interview Chancellor HITLER and Foreign Minister RIBBENTROP and confidently communicate to them a summary of the developments. Say to them that lately England and United States have taken a provocative attitude, both of them. Say that they are planning to move military forces into various places in East Asia and that we will inevitably have to counter by also moving troops. Say very secretly to them that there is extreme danger that war may suddenly break out between the Anglo-Saxon nations and Japan through some clash of arms and add that the time of the breaking out of this war may come quicker than anyone dreams.”

  After MAGIC processed this cable, US military intelligence predicted that Japan might attack Siberia, Yunnan Province, Thailand, Burma, Malaya, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, and/or the Netherlands East Indies. . . . “The most probable line of action for Japan is the occupation of Thailand. . . . Our influence in the Far Eastern Theater lies in the threat of our Naval Power and the effort of our economic blockade. Both are primary deterrents against Japanese all-out entry in the war as an Axis partner.”

  • • •

  During the first week of December 1941, numerous American newspaper headlines promoted the readiness of the country’s West Coast defenses. The Los Angeles Times on December 1 wrote, “HARBOR DEFENSE TESTED BY GUARD: Eighty Men Engage in Maneuvers Aimed Against Enemy Invasion,” and on the second, “ARTILLERY UNITS MOVE TODAY FOR TEST OF AIR RAID DEFENSE: Gunners to ‘Defend’ L.A. from ‘Attack’ by Enemy Planes in State-wide Maneuvers.” On the third and fourth, the Orange County Register announced, “LAGUARDIA WARNS OF RAID DANGER” and “TROOPS FOR AIR RAID DEFENSE MANEUVERS TO ARRIVE TODAY.”

  Hull told Nomura and Kurusu on December 1 that, since Japan’s troops in Indochina were a menace to the Philippines, the Netherlands East Indies, Burma, Malaya, and Thailand, it was forcing America and its allies to keep additional forces stationed in Asia, in effect helping Hitler. Though the United States would not be driven out of Asia, Japan had no reason to war against it; she did not need a sword to get “a seat at the head of the table.” Nomura replied that the Japanese people felt the United States was treating them with disdain, and his government had directed him to ask Washington to make “a deep reflection” on what was the ultimate aim of the United States in its relationship with Japan, considering the Hull Note.

  That afternoon, a weary Cordell Hull told his assistant how sick he was of the whole mess: “They all come at me with knives and hatchets. The president remarked to me that he wished he knew whether Japan was playing poker or not. He was not sure whether or not Japan had a gun up its sleeve. My reply was that I had no doubt that sooner or later, depending upon the progress of Germany, Japan would be at our throats; as for me, when I knew that I was going to be attacked, I preferred to choose my own time and occasion. I asked the President whether he had any doubt that Japan would attack Siberia if the Germans overcame the Russians. He said that he hadn’t. I felt that by going to war with Japan now we would soon be in a position where a large part of our Navy, as well as of the British Navy and of the Dutch East Indies Navy, could be released for service in the Atlantic. The President’s feeling was that Japan would draw herself in and that she was too far away to be attacked. It seemed to me that the President had not yet reached the state of mind where he is willing to be aggressive as to Japan.”

  A fourth imperial conference convened in Tokyo that day to approve going to war against Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States. When he returned to his office, Prime Minister Tojo told his secretary, “I could see with my own eyes that the emperor highly values peace. Inexcusably in one way or another I had to request the imperial sanction. It was extremely regrettable. In a quiet voice, the emperor talked about the treaty between Japan and England [of 1902] and the warm reception he received on his visit to England [in 1921]. . . . In the imperial edict proclaiming war, the sentence ‘Indeed, this is not my will’ was not in the original draft. It was explicitly added at the emperor’s command.” The nation had stumbled into war under the most wayward of circumstances, with Tojo commenting from this period, “With war, if you don’t try it, you can’t know how it will turn out.”

  That same December 1, Husband Kimmel received from his intelligence officer Edwin Layton a radio report that the Japanese had suddenly changed their military cable signals. After Kimmel underlined one of the report’s points—“the fact that service calls lasted only one month indicates an additional progressive step in preparing for operations on a large scale”—he asked Layton to follow up with information on the locations of Japan’s naval forces, which Layton delivered the next day. After reading it, Kimmel asked why the IJN’s Carrier Divisions 1 and 2 were missing from the report, and Layton said that it was because insufficient info
rmation was available to make a reliable call on those four carriers’ locations.

  Kimmel was duly alarmed. “What! You don’t know where Carrier Division One and Carrier Division Two are?” he asked.

  “No, sir, I do not,” Layton said. “I think they are in home waters, but I do not know where they are. The rest of these units, I feel pretty confident of their location.”

  Kimmel: “Do you mean to say that they could be rounding Diamond Head and you wouldn’t know it?”

  Layton: “I hope they would be sighted before now.”

  Layton later explained, “When carriers or other types of vessels go into home waters, home ports, home exercise areas, they use low-power radio direct with shore station. This is then handled normally on telegraphic land lines to prevent our direction-finder stations and intercept stations from hearing their traffic.”

  Joseph Rochefort, commander of the navy’s Combat Intelligence Service, had determined that the Japanese carrier force had remained in Kyushu for training because, in a great act of radio deception, the First Air Fleet’s wireless operators had stayed behind and continued to broadcast in what was a well-known hand to American listeners. This fooled US naval intelligence into thinking the carriers were anchored in home waters instead of heading at full speed toward Hawaii.

  At five in the afternoon on December 2, the emperor approved the launch of X-day. Admiral Ugaki then received a telegram from the General Staff with the authority to open Imperial Naval Order Number 12, which commanded the First Air Fleet—which was at that moment about to cross the international date line along the 180th meridian—to attack Oahu at any time after midnight on December 6. Ugaki cabled Chuichi Nagumo this order with the coded message “Niitaka yama nobore ichi-ni-rei-ya”—“Climb Mount Niitaka.” At the time, Niitaka, a peak on the island of Formosa, was the highest point of the Japanese Empire.

  Now all the men of Nagumo’s task force could be told their mission’s target. Most of them agreed with Iki Kuramoti that “at last Japan would be at war with Britain and the USA! An air attack on Hawaii! A dream come true. What will the people at home think when they hear the news? Won’t they be excited! I can see them clapping their hands and shouting with joy. These were our feelings. We would teach the arrogant Anglo-Saxon scoundrels a lesson!”

  Soryu bomber pilot Tatsuya Otawa remembered thinking, “If it was permitted, I would have wanted to jump up and shout, ‘Hurray!’ I thought then what a happy man I was, to be able to participate directly in this historic moment.” But not everyone was elated; Lieutenant Commander Sadao Chigusa remembered thinking, “I am very sorry that I should take part in the attack against Hawaii where my brother now lives.” He had already written farewell letters to his parents and to his wife, thanking her for their many good years together.

  In the chief of staff’s cabin on Akagi were two platforms with large models of Oahu and Pearl Harbor. Pilot Yonnekichi Nakajima: “After we finished flight training, we gathered models of the American ships, and a pilot would ask us which model was which ship. ‘How about this one? How about that one?’ Even now at the age of seventy-three, I remember the ship names as if they were poems.”

  On December 2, the order to burn all codes was sent to Japan’s diplomatic officials in “North America (including Manila), Canada, Panama, Cuba, the South Seas (including Timor), Singora, Chienmai,” as well as to all Japanese officials in British and Dutch colonies. The message to Washington additionally ordered Nomura to “stop at once using one code machine unit and destroy it completely [and] at the time and in the manner you deem most proper dispose of all files and messages coming or going and all other secret documents.” Nomura was told to contact the naval attaché about the procedures to be taken, as the attaché had chemicals “on hand for this purpose.”

  That same day, Nomura was given a message from Roosevelt asking why Japan’s troops were surging through Indochina, other than for further conquest? Nomura replied that Japanese forces had to be increased in the area because of the increasing activity of Chinese troops, and that the numbers the president mentioned were exaggerated.

  Yamamoto went to Tokyo on December 3 to receive his rescript—the order to lead his Combined Fleet into the war he so dreaded—directly from the emperor at the Imperial Palace and later reported that Hirohito seemed “serene after fully realizing the inevitability of going to war.”

  • • •

  Across the whole of 1941, Japan had engineered one of the greatest military operations of all time. After six months of exhaustive planning from information gathered by spies across the Pacific, Colonel Masanobu Tsuji had sent the master blueprint for the Japanese takeover of Southeast Asia—Operation Number One—to General Staff Headquarters in Tokyo that summer. Questioned closely by the Imperial Army chief, Hajime Sugiyama, on this simultaneous invasion of Malaya, Singapore, Burma, the Philippines, Wake, Guam, Borneo, and Java by an army that had so far failed to conquer China, Tsuji boldly insisted, “If we begin on November third, we will be able to capture Manila by the New Year, Singapore by February eleventh [of 1942], Java on March tenth, and Rangoon on April nineteenth.” All of Tsuji’s predictions would come true in an epic global conflict that established the Great Empire of Japan: Dai Nippon Teikoku.

  Operation Number One. While Chuichi Nagumo’s First Air Fleet sped toward Hawaii to protect the Imperial Japanese Navy’s flank and cow the Americans from war, Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa’s Southern Expeditionary Fleet left Japan on November 20 in small squadrons to invade Malaya; Vice Admiral Ibo Takahashi’s Philippine Invasion Force of nearly one hundred warships headed for Luzon; Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue’s Fourth Fleet sailed for Guam; and Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo’s Second Fleet aimed for the Netherlands East Indies, Timor, and Burma. Packed into the holds of their transports on the way to conquest across the Pacific, Imperial Japanese Army recruits studied a pamphlet especially prepared for that night, saying their efforts in the coming days would release “a hundred million Asians tyrannized by three hundred thousand whites.”

  Americans in Washington hypnotized themselves watching this vast armada take shape, an operation so massive it effectively camouflaged the relatively small task force heading for Oahu. The attack on Pearl Harbor, such a vital part of American history, was for Japan at that moment merely a preemptive strike, a minor sideshow to Operation Number One. Admiral Yamamoto had predicted the empire’s great continental invasion “will lead to a war in which the nation’s very fate will be at stake” and remained behind with the main body of the Combined Fleet—six battleships, two light carriers, two light cruisers, and thirteen destroyers—to protect the homeland.

  Across the northern Pacific, Admiral Nagumo had to vary his formation depending on the weather. The default line was a forward squadron of four destroyers, followed by heavy cruisers Tone and Chikuma, and behind them, the six carriers in two columns—Akagi, Kaga, and Shokaku to starboard; Soryu, Hiryu, and Zuikaku to port—accompanied by the three submarines. Tankers and more destroyers followed, with battleships Hiei and Kirishima in the rear. Since the slowest vessel was the oiler Toei Maru, at sixteen knots, that set the fleet’s speed.

  Since Nagumo’s forces crossed the date line that day, they would have two December 3s. At the same time, the First, Second, and Third submarine fleets, along with the Special Attack Unit, were within a three-hundred-nautical-mile radius, completely encircling Hawaii. Nine subs meanwhile began prowling the West Coast of the United States, preparing to strike targets of opportunity once they heard Fuchida’s signal beginning the attack on Hawaii.

  At the White House that Wednesday, FDR insisted that “he had the Japanese running around like a lot of wet hens because he had asked them why they were pouring military forces into Indochina. . . . I think the Japanese are doing everything they can to stall until they are ready.” The next day Roosevelt’s naval aide brought him the MAGIC intercept ordering Japanese embassies to burn nearly all their “telegraphic codes,” destroy one of their code
machines, and to shred all confidential papers. FDR wondered when Japan would strike, and the aide suggested, “Most any time.” Harold Stark would later remember that day: “We felt that war was just a matter of time.”

  • • •

  Concerned that even after being dispatched a war warning, the Pacific Fleet command didn’t fully understand the Japanese threat, OP-20-G’s Captain Laurance Safford decided to send a message on the third to Kimmel and the Fourteenth and Sixteenth Naval Districts, an action that overstepped his role as an intelligence officer, broke national security by revealing a MAGIC decrypt, and even mentioned PURPLE by name: “Circular twenty four forty four from Tokyo one December ordered London, Hongkong, Singapore and Manila to destroy Purple machine. Batavia machine already sent to Tokyo. December 2 Washington also directed destroy Purple, all but one copy of other systems, and all secret documents. British Admiralty London today reports embassy London has complied.”

  Henry Clausen interpreted Safford’s urgent cable as saying “without equivocation that Tokyo has ordered its consulates to destroy their codes and code machines. Once code machines were destroyed, there could be no turning back potential Japanese attacks. The consulates could no longer communicate effectively with Tokyo. War had to follow; it was inevitable.”