by Toland, John
“I’m taking off tomorrow morning.”
“If you want to be there when the war starts, I suggest you take off right now.”
That afternoon the final draft of the notification to Hull, together with general instructions for the Japanese embassy in Washington, was turned over to Kazuji Kameyama, chief of the Foreign Ministry’s Cable Section. He was told to cable the instructions so they would arrive about 8 A.M., December 6, Washington time. This would be followed an hour later by the first thirteen parts of the notification—in English to prevent mistranslation. For security purposes the final part, the fourteenth, which would break off diplomatic negotiations, should not arrive until 4 or 5 A.M. on December 7.
Communications to Washington were generally good and never took more than an hour. Allowing additional time for further messages of correction and unforeseen difficulties, Kameyama sent the instructions and the first thirteen parts to the Central Telegraph Office at 8:30 P.M. Forty minutes later the instructions were cabled to Washington, and an hour after that, the first thirteen parts were on their way.
Kameyama went home well satisfied that the messages would surely arrive long before the deadline. The next afternoon he would send the crucial fourteenth part, followed half an hour later by a final cable instructing Kurusu and Nomura to deliver all fourteen parts to Hull at 1 P.M. on December 7, Washington time.
Kido Butai, completely blacked out, was speeding southeast at 20 knots through gales and high seas. Several of the exhausted lookouts had already been swept overboard and the fog was so thick that it was often impossible to see the ship ahead. But in spite of this and constant changes in course, the warships were still maintaining good formation.
Never before had the Japanese military custom of using Tokyo, not local, time been much of a problem, since cruises had invariably been to north or south in approximately the same time zone. Now it was disconcerting to find light at night and darkness in the day. The clock had to be forgotten and meals served according to the sun.
Alarms were keeping Nagumo in a state of anxiety that day. First came a report from Tokyo that a Russian ship was in the area. Six fighter planes on the decks of Kaga were warmed up and their pilots given orders to stand by, but nothing was sighted and the planes never took off. After dark a general alarm sounded on the flagship when someone noticed a light soaring overhead. Men ran to their battle stations and antiaircraft batteries of several ships zeroed in on the mysterious light. It was an illuminated balloon sent up by Kaga itself to determine wind direction.
Before retiring, Kusaka tried to reassure his commander with another “Daijobu.”
“I envy your optimism,” said Nagumo with a sigh.
4.
In Washington it was still Saturday, December 6, and there was concern among officials over a detailed British Admiralty report that a Japanese fleet of thirty-five transports, eight cruisers and twenty destroyers was moving directly toward the Malay Peninsula.d At his daily top-level naval meeting, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox asked, “Gentlemen, are they going to hit us?”
Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, regarded as Admiral Stark’s spokesman, said, “No, Mr. Secretary. They are going to hit the British. They are not ready for us yet.”
There was no dissenting voice.
The Navy’s Cryptographic Section was getting ready to relax for the weekend. Most of the staff would leave at noon. One translator, Mrs. Dorothy Edgers, with time on her hands, began sifting through untranslated MAGIC intercepts of low priority—those involving Hawaii that had been piling up. She’d only been on the job a few weeks and was still fascinated by everything around her. One message from Tokyo to Consul General Kita in Honolulu, dated December 2, asked about ship movements, antitorpedo nets and barrage balloons at Pearl Harbor. Intrigued, she picked up another, dated December 3, from Kita to Tokyo. She became excited as she read a lengthy report from Yoshikawa describing in detail how Otto Kühn would transmit information about the fleet in Pearl Harbor to Japanese ships lying off Oahu by putting lights in windows, burning garbage as a smoke signal or placing want ads on the radio.
Suspicions aroused, she passed on the messages to Chief Ship’s Clerk H. L. Bryant, but he said she could never translate the long intercept by noon and to let it ride until Monday. Mrs. Edgers refused to be put off and worked overtime, finishing the translation at 3 P.M. Just then Lieutenant Commander Alvin Kramer, chief of the Translation Branch, checked in for duty but instead of sharing her excitement, he merely criticized her work and began editing it. Finally he put it aside, telling her to run along; they could finish editing the long message sometime the next week. When Mrs. Edgers protested, Kramer said, “We’ll get back to this piece on Monday,” and once more discovery of Operation Z was narrowly averted.e
At the Japanese embassy on Massachusetts Avenue the telegram of instructions (in Japanese) and the first thirteen parts of the long message to Hull (in English) had both come in. Late in the afternoon the cipher staff quit work to attend a farewell party for an embassy official who was being transferred to South America. They had only completed about eight parts.
First Secretary Katsuzo Okumura was personally typing out the deciphered parts which were too secret for any office typist to handle. When he finished he went to the basement playroom to relax. Two correspondents were playing ping-pong and one, Masuo Kato, came over to query Okumura about the liner Tatsuta-maru, which had left Yokohama five days earlier and was due to reach Los Angeles on the fourteenth.
“I’ll bet you a dollar the liner never gets here,” said Okumura enigmatically.
President Roosevelt—perhaps influenced by Dr. Jones or Baruch or both—had finally made up his mind to send a personal message to the Emperor. Drafted by the White House, it reminded the Emperor that almost a century previously another President of the United States, Millard Fillmore, had sent a personal message to the Emperor of Japan offering friendship. After years of peace, war threatened because of the Japanese occupation of southern Indochina, and the people of the Philippines, Malaya, Thailand and the Dutch Indies now feared they too would be taken over.
None of the peoples whom I have spoken of above can sit either indefinitely or permanently on a keg of dynamite.
There is absolutely no thought on the part of the United States of invading Indochina if every Japanese soldier or sailor were to be withdrawn therefrom.
I think that we can obtain the same assurance from the Governments of the East Indies, the Governments of Malaya and the Government of Thailand. I would even undertake to ask for the same assurance on the part of the Government of China. Thus a withdrawal of the Japanese forces from Indo-China would result in the assurance of peace throughout the whole of the South Pacific area.
I address myself to Your Majesty at this moment in the fervent hope that Your Majesty may, as I am doing, give thought in this definite emergency to ways of dispelling the dark clouds. I am confident that both of us, for the sake of the peoples not only of our own great countries but for the sake of humanity in neighboring territories, have a sacred duty to restore traditional amity and prevent further death and destruction in the world.
He signed the letter “Franklin D. Roosevelt” and sent it to Hull along with a handwritten note:
Dear Cordell: Shoot this to Grew—I think can go in gray code—saves time—I don’t mind if it gets picked up.
F.D.R.
At about 7:40 P.M. the State Department announced to the press that the President was sending a personal message to the Emperor, and the message itself was dispatched.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson was still in town at Woodley, his estate above Rock Creek Valley. He had decided not to go to Long Island for the weekend, since, as he wrote in his diary, the “atmosphere indicated that something was going to happen.”
The U. S. Navy cryptographers were more industrious than the cipher staff at the Japanese embassy and by 8:30 P.M. all thirteen parts of the Togo message were typed and ready for distributio
n. Realizing how important it was, Commander Kramer began phoning those who should get copies. “I have something important that I believe you should see at once,” he told Navy Secretary Knox; he also called the Director of Naval Intelligence, the Director of the War Plans Division and the White House. One man on his list couldn’t be reached—Admiral “Betty” Stark was not at his quarters on Observatory Circle.
A little after 9 P.M. Kramer left his office and was driven by his wife to the White House grounds. In the mailroom of the office building near the White House he handed over a locked letter pouch containing a copy of the message to the man on duty, Lieutenant Robert Lester Schulz.
Schulz brought the pouch to the President’s study, where Roosevelt was sitting at his desk talking to Harry Hopkins. After Roosevelt read the thirteen parts he silently handed the papers to his adviser. When Hopkins finished reading, Roosevelt said, “This means war.”
While Schulz waited they talked about the crisis. “Since war is undoubtedly going to come at the convenience of the Japanese,” said Hopkins, “it’s too bad we can’t strike the first blow.”
“No, we can’t do that. We are a democracy and a peaceful people.” Roosevelt raised his voice. “But we have a good record.” He reached for the phone to call Stark, but when told he was at the National Theater, hung up and said, “I’ll call Betty later; I don’t want to cause public alarm by having him paged in a theater.”
Stark was taking a rare night off. He was watching the perennial Student Prince, but it made so little impression on him that later he couldn’t even remember where he’d been on the night of December 6. War was imminent but what puzzled him was where the Japanese would strike. The troop convoy heading into the Gulf of Siam suggested Singapore, but it could be the Philippines or the Panama Canal. In any case he didn’t have to worry about Hawaii. The Joint Army-Navy Hawaiian Defense Plan for protection of Pearl Harbor against a surprise air attack was so good that he had sent it to all his district commanders as a model.
General Sherman Miles, chief of Military Intelligence, happened to be at a dinner party given by Captain Theodore S. Wilkinson, the Director of Naval Intelligence, and he too read the thirteen parts. But to Miles they had “little military significance” and he was not particularly apprehensive. He phoned Colonel Bratton, his Far Eastern expert, and told him there was “no reason for alerting or waking up” General Marshall, who was spending a quiet evening at his quarters in Fort Myers with his wife. Miles went off to bed so unconcerned he didn’t plan to go to his office the next morning.
It was past midnight, the first minutes of December 7. Some high officials were still awake, wondering when the Japanese would jump—and where. Not one—Roosevelt, Hull, Stimson, Knox, Marshall or Stark—expected it could be Pearl Harbor.
In Oahu it was still early Saturday evening. Like Marshall and Stark, the Army and Navy commanders of Hawaii had no worry of an air attack on Pearl Harbor. General Walter Short was on the lanai of his home at Fort Shafter holding an emergency meeting with his intelligence and counterintelligence officers. They were discussing the transcript of a telephone conversation monitored by the FBI from a local Japanese dentist to a Tokyo paper. Its editor had a strange curiosity about Hawaii: planes, searchlights, weather, even the flowers. Had the dentist-correspondent’s remark that the hibiscus and poinsettia were in bloom any significance? Was it some code?
For almost an hour the general’s wife had been waiting impatiently outside in a car, and at last Short told his visitors that nothing could be done until morning and joined his wife. It was fifteen miles to the Schofield Barracks Officers Club, which was putting on a special benefit show that Saturday night. They would have to hurry.
Admiral Kimmel was trying to relax at a private dinner party at Honolulu’s “House Without a Key,” but he was a dynamic, dedicated man who was only content when working. At nine-thirty he excused himself after drinking his usual single cocktail. He wanted to get to bed. He was to play golf in the morning with General Short, which belied the gossip that they were not on speaking terms. It would be one of the rare Sundays the admiral didn’t spend at his desk.
Both Kimmel and Short were of the opinion that constant alerts were unnecessary. Warnings from Washington had not specifically implied any air attack on Pearl Harbor even as a remote possibility. Kimmel was prepared for submarine attacks; Short was ready for saboteurs. Neither had been significantly concerned by reports that the Japanese consulate in Honolulu had been burning papers the past two days and the Joint Army-Navy Hawaiian Defense Plan—the one so admired by “Betty” Stark—was not in effect on the night of December 6. In fact, normal peacetime liberty had been granted to men and officers that evening.
Only routine and limited air patrols were planned for the next morning; and aircraft batteries in the Pearl Harbor area were lightly manned. Most of the men aboard the ninety-four ships moored in the harbor, except the watch crews, were getting ready for bed. It was just another lazy, uneventful tropical evening.
The FBI agents who had so assiduously been tracking the innocent dentist still had no suspicion that a minor official at the Japanese consul, Tadashi Morimura, was actually an Imperial Navy secret agent named Yoshikawa. That night he was working late at the consulate on his final report. He had already cabled Tokyo a few hours earlier that he did not believe the battleships had antitorpedo nets and there was no barrage-balloon equipment near Pearl Harbor.
… IN ADDITION, IT IS DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE THAT THEY HAVE ACTUALLY ANY. HOWEVER, EVEN THOUGH THEY HAVE ACTUALLY MADE PREPARATIONS, BECAUSE THEY MUST CONTROL THE AIR OVER THE WATER AND 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 OF A SURPRISE ATTACK AGAINST THESE PLACES.…
Now he was at his desk writing that the following ships had just been observed at anchor: nine battleships, three light cruisers, three submarine tenders and seventeen destroyers, as well as four light cruisers and two destroyers at docks. Then he added that the heavy cruiser and carriers had left port and that it appeared “no air reconnaissance is being conducted by the fleet arm.”
He buzzed for the radio-room code clerk, gave him the message and went for a stroll around the spacious consulate grounds. In the distance he could see a bright haze over Pearl Harbor but could hear no patrol planes. He went off to bed.
Tatsuta-maru, the passenger ship en route to Los Angeles, should have been near Hawaii at that moment but it had already, to the puzzlement and concern of its passengers, swung around and was heading back home. First Secretary Okumura was going to win his dollar bet with correspondent Kato.
In Manila, it was late afternoon of December 7. It had been a hot, clear day. Here apprehension was greater than in either Washington or Hawaii, for the Philippines could be a battlefront any minute. Unidentified aircraft were again reported over Clark Field.
That night the 27th Bombardment Group was giving a mammoth welcome party at the Manila Hotel in honor of Major General Lewis H. Brereton, commander of MacArthur’s recently established Far East Air Force. It was a gala affair long to be remembered as “the best entertainment this side of Minsky’s.” But the guest of honor’s mind was on war and his sadly inadequate air force. During the party Admiral Hart’s chief of staff told him, “It’s only a question of days or perhaps hours until the shooting starts,” and a moment later MacArthur’s chief of staff said the War Department believed hostilities might begin at any time.
As a precaution Brereton phoned his own chief of staff and told him to put all airfields on combat alert. Fortunately heavy air reinforcements were on the way. One convoy, carrying fifty-two dive bombers and two regiments of artillery as well as ammunition, was due January 4. In addition, thirty Flying Fortresses would arrive in a few days and almost double his puny force. Twelve had already taken off from California and would land at Hickam Field, next door to Pea
rl Harbor, soon after dawn.
At Clark Field, fifty air miles to the northwest, sixteen Flying Fortresses were lined up ready for flight. The wide field, rimmed by a few trees and waist-high cogon grass, was honeycombed with revetments, foxholes and slit trenches. To the northeast, cone-shaped Mount Arayat, named after the final resting place of Noah’s Ark, rose dramatically out of the plains, weird and unworldly in the moonlight.
In a nearby barracks Staff Sergeant Frank Trammell was trying to contact his wife Norma in San Bernardino, California, by ham radio. It was queer. The air was dead. All he could raise was a city he was forbidden to talk to—Singapore.
This 220-square-mile island was sixteen hundred miles to the southwest, about the same distance and direction as a flight from New York to New Orleans. It was the keystone of the Allied defense system in Asia and if it fell, not only Malaya but all of the rich Dutch East Indies with its oil, tin and rubber would be lost.
That night the probing fingers of searchlights lit the sky above Singapore. Great 15-inch guns protected its sea approaches. And in the sprawling naval base—a labor of twenty years at the cost of £60,000,000—were moored the two mighty warships so feared by Council President Hara—Repulse and Prince of Wales.
The code warning “Raffles” had just been signaled throughout the Malayan Command, and British, Australian and Indian soldiers were standing to arms, prepared and confident. Singapore was an impregnable fortress.
About 1,650 miles to the north-northeast was Great Britain’s other fortress in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong. This island was just a few minutes’ ride by ferry from the mainland of southern China. Its 11,319 defenders were on the alert.
By midnight the spacious harbor—except for its usual patchy regatta of ketches, proas, junks and sampans—was almost empty. The previous night, pages had ranged the bars and ballrooms of hotels telling all officers and men of the merchant marine to report to their ships. The announcement about the Japanese convoy in the Gulf of Siam signified one thing alone in Hong Kong: the balloon had gone up. But, like Singapore, Hong Kong was ready and confident.
