Pearl Harbor: From Infamy To Greatness

by Craig Nelson

  Also on December 3, the FBI’s telephone tap intercepted the Japanese consulate’s chef telling someone in Hawaii that the consul general was burning his papers. FBI agent Robert Shivers sent this information to the navy’s Mayfield and the army’s Bicknell, and Bicknell said he’d revealed this news at the December 6 staff meeting.

  That very same day, CNO Stark’s office cabled its commanders: “Highly reliable information has been received that categoric and urgent instructions were sent yesterday to Japanese diplomatic, and consular posts at Hongkong Singapore Batavia Manila Washington and London to destroy most of their codes and ciphers at once and to burn all other important confidential and secret documents.”

  That night, a British intelligence agent in the Philippines—probably Colonel Gerald Wilkinson—sent an urgent cable to Honolulu British intelligence: “We have received considerable intelligence confirming following developments in Indo-China. A. 1. Accelerated Japanese preparation of air fields and railways. 2. Arrival since Nov. 10 of additional 100,000 repeat 100,000 troops and considerable quantities fighters, medium bombers, tanks and guns (75mm). B. Estimate of specific quantities have already been telegraphed Washington Nov. 21 by American military intelligence here. C. Our considered opinion concludes that Japan envisages early hostilities with Britain and U.S. Japan does not repeat not intend to attack Russia at present but will act in South. You may inform Chiefs of American Military and Naval Intelligence Honolulu.”I Bicknell, Mayfield, and FBI agent Shivers were duly informed, but this cable, as well as the FBI’s report, never made it back to the Navy Department. For all of Kimmel’s complaints that his superiors hadn’t adequately informed him about every bit of MAGIC, the admiral himself never forwarded to Washington the intelligence he acquired independently.

  After receiving Safford and Stark’s memos, Kimmel immediately asked Edwin Layton what this Purple machine was, and Layton said that he didn’t know, but he would find out. He asked Fleet security officer Lieutenant Coleman, who explained, “It was an electrical coding machine . . . that was used in the passing of messages between Japanese consuls and diplomats and the home office. The word purple was to designate the type of the machine is an improvement over the old one called the red.”

  Navy intelligence’s Richmond Kelly Turner assumed the admirals in Hawaii would comprehend the severity of the news: “We all considered that that was an exceedingly important piece of information to send to Admiral Kimmel and Admiral Hart, because the destruction of codes in that manner and in those places, in my mind and experience, is a definite and sure indication of war with the nations in whose capitals or other places those codes are destroyed. . . . It indicates war within two or three days. . . . The enemy codes at Washington and Manila were to be destroyed, which definitely indicates war against the United States.” But in Hawaii, after Layton told Kimmel what PURPLE was, the admiral didn’t understand the significance of a hostile nation destroying cipher machines. Neither did Bloch, and neither commander forwarded the message to Short, as both assumed he had received something similar directly from Marshall.

  Colonel Rufus Bratton, G-2’s Far Eastern Section chief, felt similarly to Safford, telling his staff that since “something was going to blow in the Far East soon,” the section would “henceforth remain open on a twenty-four-hour basis.” Bratton asked McCollum about the Pacific Fleet: “Are you sure these people are properly alerted? Are they on the job? Have they been properly warned?”

  McCollum confidently said, “Oh, yes, the Fleet has gone . . . to sea.”

  The cavalcade of warnings continued the following day when Treasury Secretary Morgenthau reported to FDR, “At five forty-five this evening I received word that the representative of the Bank of Japan in New York is closing their office tomorrow under instructions from Japan. The representative will leave New York on December 10 for Japan.”

  A friend of the president’s, Methodist pastor Eli Stanley Jones, visited the White House that December 4 to deliver a secret message from a secretary of the Japanese consulate, Hidenari Terasaki. Three days before, Kurusu had asked Togo for permission to begin a dialogue between Roosevelt and Hirohito, a notion the privy seal had dismissed out of hand. Now desperate, and knowing time was running out, Kurusu begged Terasaki to “approach the president through an intermediary . . . and suggest that he send a cable directly to the emperor appealing for peace . . . over Tojo’s head.” At his meeting with Reverend Jones, Roosevelt said that he had been thinking about a direct appeal to the Chrysanthemum Throne, but worried that he might “hurt the Japanese here at Washington by going over their heads to the emperor.” Jones said that, in fact, the embassy was requesting it, but since they were going behind the backs of both their foreign and prime ministers, their participation would have to be kept secret, that the president must “never refer to Mr. Terasaki in connection with the message.” Roosevelt said, “You tell that young Japanese he is a brave man. No one will ever learn of his part in this from me. His secret is safe.”

  That same day, Nomura was informed that the majority of his staff, including Terasaki, were immediately being transferred. The ambassador asked for a postponement in the case of Terasaki’s departure so he could complete his “intelligence work,” but the foreign office refused. Kurusu immediately responded with a desperate plea: “I feel confident that you are fully aware of the importance of the intelligence setup in view of the present conditions of the Japanese US negotiations. I would like very much to have Terasaki, who would be extremely difficult to suddenly replace because of certain circumstances, remain here until we are definitely enlightened as to the end of the negotiations. I beg of you as a personal favor to me to make an effort along these lines. I shall have him assume his post as soon as his work here is disposed of.”

  In the MAGIC version of this message, OP-20-G’s Translation Branch chief Captain Alvin Kramer footnoted the name Terasaki with “Second Secretary, is head of Japanese espionage in Western Hemisphere. He and his assistants are being sent to South America.” Kramer considered this “a very significant point,” since US naval intelligence had identified Terasaki as “an especially trained espionage man and he had a number of specially trained men with him. His chief concern during the summer wasn’t setting up an espionage establishment in Latin America. The fact that he was directed to leave was a further straw in the wind.” Bratton said almost exactly the same thing about this transfer order: “It meant that the time was running out, that the crisis was approaching.”

  • • •

  The Kido Butai’s size and the state of its technology led to a number of startling incidents. Secrecy was so important that plane radios were disabled, and parts of each vessel’s transmitters were locked away. The ships could only communicate with each other through blinker lights and signal flags. On December 5, in one of the great remaining Pearl Harbor mysteries, the task force had its only meeting with a foreign vessel: Soviet trawler Uritsky, sailing between Portland and Vladivostok. We know that the First Air Fleet and the trawler spotted each other, but we don’t know why Nagumo didn’t order the Uritsky attacked until sunk. Or if Uritsky reported sighting Nagumo’s fleet, and, if she did, what Moscow told Washington, if anything. One theory is that Stalin knew a great deal about the Japanese government through his Sorge spy ring. Though Stalin was fighting Germany, he was not yet at war with Japan, and it might have been worth keeping this information from Roosevelt if it meant peace on Stalin’s eastern border.

  Between 0230 and 0330 on the morning of Friday, December 5, US destroyer Selfridge made underwater contact with an unidentified vessel in waters near Hawaii, but lost it. Another destroyer, Ralph Talbot, picked it up about five miles from Pearl Harbor, identified it as a submarine, and asked permission to drop depth charges. The squadron leader aboard Selfridge refused, insisting the intruder was an orca. Talbot replied, “If this is a blackfish, it has a motorboat up its stern!”

  That same day the Japanese consular officials in Honolulu received an
urgent message from Tokyo asking its spies about “the movements of the fleet subsequent to the fourth.” Takeo Yoshikawa returned to the tea parlor’s telescope to jot down the latest details on Kimmel’s fleet: 8 battleships, 2 heavy cruisers, 6 light cruisers, 43 destroyers, and 4 submarines. At that time, 106 American vessels plied the Pacific, from Alaska to the Solomon Islands, but as before, with Saratoga in California, Lexington bringing marine planes to Midway, and Enterprise on the way back to Hawaii after delivering her cargo of planes to Wake, Yoshikawa saw no aircraft carriers.

  Leaving his tea parlor perch, Yoshikawa taxied to the outskirts of Pearl Harbor, where he strolled about in his tourist camouflage, taking notes. By 1300 he replied to Tokyo, “At the present time there are no signs of barrage-balloon equipment [blimps hanging from metal cables to interfere with low-flying pilots]. In addition, it is difficult to imagine that they actually have any. However, even though they have made preparations, because they must control the air over the water and the land runways of the airports in the vicinity of Pearl Harbor, Hickam, Ford, and Ewa, there are limits to the balloon defense of Pearl Harbor. I imagine that in all probability there is considerable opportunity left to take advantage for a surprise attack against these places. In my opinion the battleships do not have torpedo nets. The details are not known.”

  Does the mention of “a surprise attack against these places” mean that he and others at the consulate in Hawaii knew in advance what was to come? Yoshikawa—who returned that night to Aiea Heights and Pearl City for one last cable that included, “It appears that no air reconnaissance is being conducted by the fleet air arm”—later insisted the “surprise attack” comment was just a coincidence.

  As always, these cables were coded in PURPLE and then transmitted to Tokyo commercially, by either Mackay Radio and Telegraph or by the Radio Corporation of America—RCA. MAGIC intercepted all three December 6 messages, decrypting and processing Tokyo’s on December 12, and Yoshikawa’s reply on the eighth. On top of MAGIC’s institutional delays, the phrase “I imagine that in all probability there is considerable opportunity left to take advantage for a surprise attack against these places” was translated as “The whole matter seems to have been dropped.”

  At a White House meeting that Friday, Hull said of Nomura and Kurusu, “With every hour that passes, I become more convinced that they are not playing in the open, that what they say is equivocal and has two meanings. . . . I am convinced they don’t intend to make any honorable agreement with us.” Frances Perkins recalled of that same meeting: “No expression of concern over Japanese attack on US. More concerned over how Japan may attack Britain through Singapore. According to Secretary of War Stimson, ‘The Philippines are indefensible. We have always known it.’ There was a complete sense of confidence in the American Navy. Nobody asked where it was or how it was dispersed [i.e., positioned]. It would have been extraordinarily bad form to have asked.”

  * * *

  I. A detailed explanation of how the Navy Department told its field commanders about information derived from MAGIC without revealing its secret is in Henry C. Clausen and Bruce Lee’s Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  * * *

  DECEMBER 6

  At about 0800 on the morning of December 6, Kimmel’s intelligence officer Edwin Layton told his admiral about the alert from Washington concerning Japanese troop movements, and that this was to be taken seriously. Kimmel referred Layton to the War Plans Division officer who had drafted Plan Orange against Japan, Vice Admiral William Pye. On California, after Pye and his chief of staff, Captain Harold Train, had read the memo, Layton raised his key concern: “The problem is whether the Japanese will leave their flank open or whether they will take out the Philippines on their way south.”

  “Do you think they will leave their flank open?” Pye asked.

  “They never have,” Layton said.

  “The Japanese will not go to war with the United States,” Pye insisted. “We are too big, too powerful, and too strong.” He turned to Train. “Harold, do you agree?”

  “Emphatically!” Train said.

  Kimmel concurred with Pye’s viewpoint and dismissed any worries about enemy submarines attacking as “nil—nothing.” Besides Pearl Harbor’s being too shallow for torpedoes, he believed that enemy submarines couldn’t fully submerge inside it. Kimmel did not even have an antisubmarine net at the entrance to the harbor, merely a crinoline that prevented torpedoes from being fired up the channel. When great ships arrived at his anchorage, in fact, they found a waterway too small for maneuvering and so anchored with bows facing landward. To prepare the Fleet for a sortie on Monday, December 8, tugboats spent all of December 6 maneuvering the great ships seaward.

  At 0830, Nagumo’s Kido Butai finished her last refueling, left her slow-moving oilers behind, and began ratcheting up to a full-speed bore straight south toward Oahu, her tombstone-gray warships flying the flag of a bloodred sun.

  • • •

  Ambassador Nomura was strolling down Massachusetts Avenue that morning in Washington when he was picked up by Vice Admiral William Smedberg, driving incognito in civilian clothes, and taken to the home of Smedberg’s boss, Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark. Smedberg: “When they came out, Nomura had tears in his eyes. Stark told me afterward that Nomura was extremely worried about the possibility of the war party in Japan making some drastic decisions.” The diplomat had told Stark, “If the US doesn’t ease up on these sanctions against Japan, the military men in my country are going to do something desperate, in my opinion.”

  At the same time that Nomura and Stark were meeting secretly, a pilot cable from Togo arrived, giving Nomura advance notice that the ministry would be telegraphing a fourteen-part message in reply to the November 26 Hull Note: “I imagine you will receive it tomorrow. However, I am not sure. The situation is extremely delicate, and when you receive it, I want you to please keep it secret for the time being.” Instructions as to when to present this to Hull would arrive later. “However, I want you in the meantime to put it in a nicely drafted form and make every preparation to present it to the Americans just as soon as you receive instructions. . . . There’s really no need to tell you this, but in the preparation of the aide-mémoire be absolutely sure not to use a typist or any other person. Be most extremely cautious in preserving secrecy.”

  The Bainbridge Island naval station on Puget Sound across from Seattle intercepted the fourteen-part message—Telegram No. 902 from Togo to Nomura and Kurusu, the reply to the Hull Note, written in English. Starting around noon, the first thirteen parts were forwarded, via Teletype, to Washington.

  From the beginning, Imperial Japanese Army officers planned to invade Singapore without giving prior notice to Britain, but the Imperial Japanese Navy felt differently about the United States and Operation Z. After the imperial conference on December 1, in fact, the emperor told Prime Minister Hideki Tojo repeatedly that he was not to attack the United States without warning. Naval attaché Yuzuru Sahematsu explained the sense of honor that was a hallmark of Japanese military history: “Japanese warriors never tried to assassinate a person who is sleeping. When they tried to kill him, they first kicked the pillow and woke him up. And then killed him. The same principle applied to the attack. The required time to wake America up would be approximately thirty minutes.”

  The story of Japan’s failed warning with Togo’s fourteen-part message would lead to cries of infamy in the United States—one shocked sailor on the Monaghan would comment, “Hell, I didn’t even know they were sore at us!”—while for decades Japanese historians have explained it as wholly due to Nomura and Kurusu’s inept mishandling of a simple cable. Today we know that these are not the facts. From the start, Tokyo set too tight a schedule between the cable’s dispatch and the hour for presentation, with no provision for human error or mechanical interference. Togo’s advance notice revealed no urgency and no time limit. Tokyo dispatched the cable in a jumble, with parts
four, one, two, three, and nine sent simultaneously, followed by the pilot cable “in the late afternoon or early evening,” as Colonel Bratton remembered, coming in “all mixed up.” After a two-hour pause, parts six, seven, eight, eleven, twelve, and thirteen arrived together at 1451, the final pages not appearing until “sometime between nine and ten that night.”

  When it was finally decoded and distributed, only two Washington officials—one of them Roosevelt—interpreted the cable as a threat of war. At military intelligence, Bratton judged it as “not an ultimatum, it was not a declaration of war, nor was it a severance of diplomatic relations,” and General Miles agreed: “These thirteen parts had little military significance. They concluded only with a Japanese refusal to accept the American proposal of November 26 as a basis of negotiation—a result which had been expected and discounted for some time.”

  That afternoon, Stark and Marshall told Stimson and Roosevelt that the army and the navy needed more than a few months before they would be ready for war, and that the Japanese sanctions needed to be eased. Smedberg: “As we left the office one of us said, ‘Well, the British are sure going to catch it tomorrow at Singapore.’ We didn’t have the slightest suspicion that there was any threat to Pearl Harbor.”

  When Navy Secretary Frank Knox saw in his December 6 daily briefing that the Japanese had launched troops, he asked, “Gentlemen, are they going to hit us?” Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner replied, “No, Mr. Secretary. They are going to attack the British. They are not ready for us yet.”

  • • •

  By 1130 Nagumo’s task force had reached a speed of twenty knots. Ten minutes later, Akagi raised the same Z flag that the great Admiral Togo had unfurled at the Imperial Japanese Navy’s finest moment: Tsushima. Akagi then signaled to the other ships Yamamoto’s rescript ordering his men to be “firmly determined to fulfill the responsibility entrusted them by the Emperor, by destroying the US Pacific Fleet with utmost efforts. . . . The rise and fall of the Empire depends upon this battle. Every man will do his duty.” As the actual attack would be inflicted by airmen two hundred miles from the fleet, for Chief Engineer Tanbo, listening on voice tube from the Akagi’s engine room, this was the most dramatic moment of the entire operation.