Pearl Harbor: A Novel of December 8th

by Newt Gingrich

  “So you want me back, sir?” James asked.

  He wasn’t sure just how to react. Yesterday morning he had left campus having finished his syllabi for the next semester. Wrestling as well with whether he should take the dean’s offer of a promotion to department chair, an extra four hundred a year, which they could use, but a job with endless headaches and petty squabbles, especially since he only held a masters in higher mathematics and probability theory and the younger PhDs in the department would surely kick up a squawk about his “qualifications.”

  “Definitely want you back,” Bloch said enthusiastically, and he made it a point of picking up a file folder and opening it.

  “Annapolis, 1914, eighth in your class, MIT, 1921, your advanced degree in probability theory and statistics,” he put the folder down for a moment, “definitely not a career builder but interesting I daresay.”

  “Just one of those things,” James said with a smile, “and the navy was willing to spring for it. They saw some uses for it.”

  “Several sea tours, the Oklahoma, Lexington as their signals officer…” he paused, “and that interesting assignment in London in 1918. Something called Room Forty.”

  He looked over the folder at James.

  “Interesting experience?”

  James smiled and said nothing. Though the story of Room Forty was no longer classified, still he was always reticent to talk about it.

  He put the folder back down.

  “How are you physically?”

  “Fit as a fiddle.”

  “Well, James, I’ll be blunt. I didn’t call you in here to reactivate you for sea duty.”

  Again, a mix of feelings. He let it register for several seconds. No, sea duty was out; besides, even as he drove over here, he dreaded the thought of telling Margaret he was going back to sea. He knew though that the prospects of that were absurd. It had been a long time since one-handed sailors had put to sea.

  “I didn’t expect that, sir.”

  “Fine then. I wanted to make that clear at the start. You’ll be behind a desk, and from what little I understand of the job, a lot of hours behind a desk most likely bored silly or driving yourself half mad.”

  Bloch smiled.

  “Still interested?”

  “Well, sir, you aren’t giving me much of a lead.”

  Bloch leaned back in his chair.

  “Funny position I’m in, Watson. You see, your name’s come up several times for this, shall we say, thing. The problems are twofold. First of all, there isn’t a medical board out there that would pass you based on current standards, but I can pull that string easy enough. Second, until you say yes, I can’t say a word; and then when you do say yes, you’ll have to go through some clearances and even then they might wind up saying no, and that can take weeks.”

  Watson leaned back in his chair now and stared out the window, which gave a panoramic view of the fleet. More Liberty Boats were plying the narrow channel to the mainland, sunlight reflecting off the water, a sparkling glorious “winter” day for Hawaii. And the war, the threat of war seemed a million miles and a million years away.

  “It’s going to come to us,” James finally said, breaking the silence. “Anyone with their eyes open can see that; before the year is out we’ll be in it up to our necks.”

  Bloch nodded in agreement.

  “I’m not offering glory, James. It’s a job, a very important job, but from what I’ll call the team you’ll be working with, and believe me they’ve looked at hundreds of files, you fit the job.”

  “What about my professorship? The semester starts next week. Mobilizing up or not, it’ll put the university in a tight spot finding a replacement.”

  “I can give the dean a call, he’s an old golf buddy.”

  “Good enough.”

  James did a quick mental calculation. Tenured, offer of department chair, it was going to be a tough hit financially.

  “I can make the patriotic appeal,” Bloch said. “Don’t worry, I already know what you are making now, and it isn’t all that much for a man with your knowledge. Back in the forty-eight you’d be making double, triple in some industries right now, but I know that’s not where your heart is.”

  James looked back out at the fleet and took a deep swallow. “Let’s get started,” he said softly, taking his glasses off and pulling out a handkerchief to wipe them clean, doing so adroitly with his one good hand.

  It was turning into a very long day and he was exhausted. The life of a prof had indeed softened him, perhaps too much for what was going to be expected. Once he said yes, the interview with Bloch was over, his chief petty officer came in, led James out, marched him over to the infirmary, and without fanfare, twenty minutes later, he was standing stark naked, being poked and prodded, the admiral’s chief standing to one side, staring at the ceiling during some of the more humiliating moments of this “interview.”

  “The admiral really wants him passed?” the doctor asked.

  The chief simply nodded.

  Sighing, the physician scratched a signature on a form and handed it back to the chief.

  “Get dressed, drop this with the nurse at the front desk on the way out. You are passed for limited duty and, frankly, God save this country.”

  From there it was over to administration to get started on the mountains of paperwork, though the petty officer, with thirty years of hash marks on his sleeve, finally just scooped them up and said someone in the Admiral’s Office would take care of them later.

  Back to the Admiral’s Office, and it was now one in the afternoon and he was starving. Standing in the Admiral’s outer office, the petty officer wished him luck, dropped the mountain of paperwork on a desk, and walked out, and James stood there for a moment, thoroughly confused. Hell, one doesn’t just go up to an admiral’s closed door and knock on it uninvited and ask what he should do next. Was the day over? Was he to go home and wait?

  “Mr. Watson, I presume?”

  He turned sharply, half expecting the absolutely wearisome jokes about Sherlock Holmes to now start. The sight that greeted him was a bit startling. The officer, a captain, extending a greeting hand was several inches shorter than James, eyes enlarged by thick glasses, dark mustache with flecks of gray not at all neatly trimmed. His uniform was rumpled, as if he had been sleeping in it for days, a very visible coffee stain on his pants. He was every bit the antithesis of what a naval officer should look like.

  “I’m Captain Collingwood, Tom Collingwood. Figured you might be hungry,” and he held up a battered lunch box and two opened bottles of Coke.

  A bit taken aback, James simply nodded and followed Collingwood out of the building, his guide walking past security as if they didn’t exist and, in turn, they didn’t even take notice of him.

  “Nice little spot down by the waterfront,” Collingwood said, pointing the way. They weaved their way across the base, Collingwood barely acknowledging the salutes of enlisted personnel, a couple of lieutenants passing, faces deeply tanned, snapping off salutes and then one loudly saying after they passed so that he and Collingwood could definitely hear the comment, “I’d love to see his ass at sea; do that slob some good.”

  Collingwood ignored them. They reached the waterfront, a small parklike area shaded by a few trees and a couple of benches to sit on. The two settled down.

  “A couple of ham sandwiches, hope that’s okay, wife always packs the same.”

  James nodded his thanks, opened the wax paper and looked a bit suspiciously at the offering. It looked to be a day or two old. Suddenly he had a real longing for the faculty dining room on campus–always a good selection of Western and Asian food to chose from, and darn good conversations to be found. Here he now sat with a disheveled captain who, he suddenly realized due to the direction of the wind, was in serious need of a good shower.

  He ate half the sandwich and politely put it down. It definitely was a day or two old, maybe more. Collingwood ate his without comment, looking out across the na
rrow loch to the battleships anchored along the east shore of Ford Island.

  Finishing his sandwich, he finally stirred. “Tell me about your work in London during the last war,” Tom asked, smiling in a friendly manner.

  “I’m not really sure if I can discuss that…”

  Tom waved his hand dismissively.

  “Let’s spare ourselves the walk back to the Admiral’s Office to review what I should know. I’m more than cleared for anything you might have inside you.” He smiled openly. “And no, this is not some sort of trick test to see if you are a blabbermouth or not. Scout’s honor.”

  Disarmed by the boyish gesture of Collingwood raising his hand in the Boy Scout pledge, he nodded.

  “I was part of a joint team in London. Sort of an experiment actually. We and the Brits never really did work well on those sorts of things in the last war but a few wiser heads made a stab at it. Seems that our undersecretary of the navy,” he paused, “now our president, suggested it to someone in the Admiralty.”

  “Churchill?”

  “No. From what I understood those two didn’t see eye to eye at the same time then. Churchill was gone from the Admiralty before we came into the war. But anyhow, rather than being out to sea, I was stuck in a basement for the duration.”

  “You missed being at sea?”

  James was silent for a moment. To give the truth would almost be like a priest saying he did not believe in the Trinity.

  “Honestly, most of my time at sea I was sick as hell. The thought of patrolling the North Atlantic in winter?”

  Watson chuckled softly.

  “Same here, and remember, the great Alfred Thayer Mahan, praised forever be his name,” and he made a half-joking gesture of praying at the mention of the famed naval strategist, “would damn near die sitting in a rowboat on a mill pond. He threatened to retire rather than accept sea duty.”

  “And your job in that basement?”

  James hesitated but then relented. Hell, the information was over twenty years old, and when he retired from the navy, there had been no cautioning even then about talking. It was just he felt naturally reticent about it.

  “Trying to crack the German U-boat codes in 1918.”

  “Any luck?”

  “I suspect you know as well as I do.”

  “Go on.”

  “I was assigned as an American liaison to what was called ‘Room Forty.’ The Brits had gotten lucky right from the start. The German navy relied on code books. They got a copy from a spy out of Brussels early on in the war. Later, divers actually made it to a sunken U-boat and recovered the code book. Finally, of all things, the Brits captured another code book in Persia, and just what the hell a naval code book was doing with a German consulate officer in Persia is beyond me.

  “But then, in 1918, the sources dried up. They actually built an encrypting machine, primitive, but effective for those days. So that’s how I got into it all.”

  “And how is that?” Collingwood asked, eyes fixed on him owl-like.

  “Statistical analysis was my field, running calculations, trying to find statistical linkages between messages that might lead to the coding source. If you know the language, know the syntax, structure, even the metaphors and have a good analysis of probabilities of word usage you at least have a start.

  “Some thought they might have gone back to old-style code. Very simple actually. Take a copy of Wuthering Heights, for example, same editions in the boat and back at headquarters. Numbered to a page, then numbered to a line and word. You can even jumble it any number of times. Number one actually means number 99 on Tuesday and number 65 on Wednesday, and so on. Simple, but clumsy to use, slow to transfer, prone to mistake, and it’s breakable.”

  “How so?” Collingwood asked quietly.

  “Statistical analysis of course. Guess that’s where I came in. Have a knowledge of the language, percentage of word usages, get a handle on some of the code words, for example whale means battleship, dolphin means cruiser, et cetera. A previous message says whale, we’ve figured that out and we figure out the latitude and longitude, those usually stand out, and sure enough one of our battleships is there. So whale equals battleship and we have a word broken. Cipher that out from one message and you got a few holes filled in on another. Ideally, you can go on and crack the book they are using. Absurd example, but say someone on our team has pretty well memorized Moby-Dick, or Goethe’s Faust, and someone on the other side’s code room gets lazy and uses four words in a row. One of our whizzes remembers the quote, cracks that, and we have the book. But that’s the stuff of bad spy novels. No one is stupid enough these days to use book codes anymore or for that matter even specially designed code books–too prone to espionage. Fair to assume everyone is using some sort of encoding machine now, though for lower priorities code books still might be done temporarily.

  “Oh, Room Forty was an amusing place, Oxford literature dons mixed in with biblical experts, and statistician types like me. It was all very interesting, but it wasn’t book codes. We finally figured out that it actually was an encrypting machine. Got our hands on it after the Armistice. Primitive but believe me, we were impressed. It drove us near to distraction in the final months of the war.”

  “You have a thing for languages, don’t you, James.” He smiled and nodded.

  “I was hated at Annapolis, you know. I don’t know why, but hear a language once and it sticks. Give me a few months and I can read it. Maybe not speak it like a native but can read it. Whizzed through German and French and could nearly sleep in the class. Was first in my class in both languages and boy did the other guys resent that, especially because I never had to study. I just read it and it stuck. Maybe it hurt me in the long run; had a reputation for being something of a grind, as they used to call my types.”

  “Eighth in your class.”

  “Men five years behind me are now captains and angling for commodore and rear admiral now with this expansion.”

  Collingwood nodded sympathetically. “We serve as we are able to serve.”

  James said nothing, stomach growling with hunger. He looked at the half-eaten sandwich but decided against it. “I understand your Japanese is rather good. You even speak it with some of your students at the university.”

  “How do you know that?” James asked, a bit defensively.

  Collingwood smiled. “Don’t ask.”

  “Well, it’s in the family, my wife and mother-in-law speak it all the time, and even when we were dating I was curious if they were talking about me or not,” and he waited a moment. “My wife is half-Japanese, is that a problem?”

  “No, James, no problem at all. That’s been checked.”

  Though Hawaii was a place where races did so freely mix, the prejudice was still there. In some ways it could be said it was not helped by the local population who had immigrated directly from Japan in recent years. The local Japanese-language newspaper actually referred to the campaigns in China as “another victory,” and to the Japanese army as “our army.” Some families had actually sent their sons back to the homeland to serve. Rumors were rampant about alleged tourists down by the harbor every day, taking photographs, with families conveniently posed to one side of course, if questioned.

  “Margaret’s mother came over back in ’ninety-six as a girl. She has absolutely no contact with any relatives back there, for that matter she doesn’t even know if she has relatives there.”

  “It’s okay, James, relax,” Collingwood said. “Just the question was raised and had to be answered.”

  “What question? Why? Frankly, I think it’s time I got to ask a few questions.”

  “Shoot.”

  “What the hell are we talking about? Am I being recruited for cryptanalysis?”

  “I can’t say yet.”

  “Well, I’d like to know.”

  “Hypothetically, let’s say you were. Would you take it?”

  “I don’t know. It was migraine work. Bust your ass for weeks staring a
t hundreds of pages of numbers, trying to trace patterns, you start to crack it, and then the bastards on the other side change the game around and everything is for naught. Sleepless nights ’cause you can’t get it out of your head. It makes you crazy.”

  Collingwood smiled and looked down at the coffee stains on his lap in a bit of a self-deprecating manner.

  James added, “And, my God, to do it in Japanese? A pictograph language converted to Western alphabet just within the last hundred years? Unique letterings that we don’t have, idioms and complex syntaxes unknown to any Western language, definitions of words absolutely blurred, at times nearly impossible to translate effectively. It makes cracking German look like a breeze, which it is in comparison. Plus, I’m willing to bet they’ve created hundreds of obscure metaphors for everything related to naval affairs. The Japanese love poetic metaphors that we would never dream of using. You’re talking a code-breaker’s nightmare.”

  Collingwood just looked at him, hands clasped between his legs, head half lowered, looking at James over the rim of his glasses.

  His gaze lifted from James to the battleships, more Liberty Boats coming in, excited young sailors whooping and hollering.

  “Some think that’s our first line of defense out here,” Collingwood said softly, nodding to the tethered ships, anchored to their moorings.

  He looked back at James.

  “But it’s not.”

  “That’s what this job is, isn’t it?” James asked.

  Collingwood simply smiled.

  PART TWO:

  The Countdown

  EIGHT

  Battleship Nagato, Flagship of Admiral Yamamoto

  Kure Harbor, Japan

  3 February 1941

  Saluting stiffly, Commander Genda stood in the open doorway to Admiral Yamamoto’s private quarters. The room was plain in its appointments; a standard table covered with green cloth dominated the center of the room, surrounded by eight chairs, charts laid out upon the table. The portrait of the Emperor hung upon the inner bulkhead wall, a bookshelf beneath it filled with works both in Japanese and English. Yamamoto looked up from the far end of the table, acknowledged the salute, and motioned for Genda to enter and close the door. The admiral was sitting comfortably, wearing a heavy quilted kimono rather than standard uniform, the steam heat turned down so that the room was cool. It was frigid outside, the wind blowing a mixture of sleet and snow straight down from Siberia, and Genda had felt he would freeze to death during the open launch boat ride across the harbor to where Nagato was anchored. He had neglected to wear an outer coat and gloves, and was now somewhat embarrassed as he removed his cap and slushy water ran off it, splattering the floor.