Fighting to Lose

by John Bryden

  It appeared to confirm earlier intelligence. On May 22, a magic decrypt had provided Roosevelt with “proof positive” that Japan was planning the conquest of Southeast Asia and the southwest Pacific. Then, on July 24, another decrypt revealed that Japan had ordered its merchant shipping to withdraw from the Indian Ocean and the southwest Pacific. Such action is a classic prelude to armed conflict on the high seas. The Japanese also had recently obtained permission from Vichy France to set up air bases in French Indochina, giving them control of the sky over Malaya and Singapore. Evidently, Japan was poised to attack Britain in the Far East. Churchill and Roosevelt talked on the transatlantic scrambler telephone that very evening and agreed they had to meet face-to-face.16

  They had something else on their minds that needed urgent discussion, as well. British scientists had just concluded that a super-bomb based on the heavy element uranium was theoretically possible. This was ominous news, as German scientists had led the world in nuclear physics before the war.17

  Two weeks later, the White House pretended to the Washington press that Roosevelt was leaving on a yachting holiday, but once over the horizon he boarded the battle cruiser USS Augusta to sail for Argentia, the newly constructed U.S. Navy air base overlooking Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. There, on August 9, the two ships and the two leaders met, accompanied by some of their most senior army, navy, and air force chiefs.

  Over seventy years later, most contemporary documents that could describe the content of their talks remain under lock and key. Records of their discussions and many of those involving their military staffs, all of which must exist, have never been released. Even Roosevelt’s personal account of the meeting has been scissored in half, his description of his four days with Churchill left behind in the vault at the Roosevelt Library.18 By design, surely, rather than accident, the meeting is known to historians mainly by the press release at its conclusion announcing that the two leaders were resolved that their two countries would respect the right of peoples of all nations to self-determination. This became known as the Atlantic Charter.

  More important to Churchill, they also publicly pledged that they were jointly committed to “the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny.” This last statement was a stunning victory for the British. It went far beyond anything Roosevelt had so far said about the Nazi regime, and it flew in the face of the virulent anti-war opposition in Congress. Churchill must have done something fairly dramatic to achieve such a result.19

  The prime minister, so it appears, had played two trump cards. First, wireless messages recently deciphered by the Government Code & Cipher School indicated that the Nazis in Russia were systematically killing innocent civilians by the thousands.20 Second, he was able to produce a spy questionnaire that showed the Germans were gathering intelligence on the defences of Pearl Harbor, obviously for the Japanese.

  Churchill, it should be explained, never allowed himself to be cut off from his daily cocktail of secret intelligence. Before he left on the sea voyage, arrangements were made for him to continue to receive the day’s most important German armed forces “telegrams” and “BJs” — “British Japanese” diplomatic decrypts — as selected by Major Morton, Churchill’s personal assistant. BONIFACE was dealt with by Menzies, and the hottest items after Churchill sailed on August 4 must have been the decrypts detailing Nazi atrocities in Russia and the novelty of a double agent being given a whole series of microscopic photographs containing questions about the defences of Hawaii. Copies of the decrypts and a copy of the questionnaire would certainly have been among the deliveries of secret papers air-dropped to the Prince of Wales every day by weighted bag.21

  Menzies, of course, could have had the contents of the decrypts and Popov’s questionnaire radioed to the Prince of Wales, but hard copies with German fingerprints all over them, so to speak, would have been more desirable for the show-and-tell to follow.

  Churchill had a flair for the dramatic and, given that no official record has ever been released of these talks with Roosevelt, one can only imagine how he might have made his presentation.

  The two leaders normally conferred in the wardroom of the Augusta. Churchill would have asked that the room be cleared because he had something of utmost importance to share with the president. Because what he had to say pertained to cryptographic intelligence and to the security of the United States, it is probable that the chiefs of the army and the navy, General George C. Marshall and Admiral Harold R. Stark respectively, would have been asked to remain. It is unlikely there was anyone else present, not even a secretary to take down the conversation.

  Churchill would have begun by saying that for some time now the British had been intercepting and decrypting the enciphered wireless messages of German police and SS special forces, which, up to the German attack on Russia in June, had been of small value. Starting in mid-July, however, these messages revealed that the Nazis were carrying out mass executions in the east. As proof, he would have been able to show a July 18 decrypt reporting the execution of 1,153 Jewish “plunderers” in Belorussia, and two others, of August 4, from the SS cavalry brigade reporting the liquidation of some 3,274 partisans and “judische Bolshevisten” and another “90 Bolshevisten und Juden” shot. Since British claims of German atrocities in Belgium during the First World War had been afterward found to have been pure propaganda, Churchill would have made sure he had on hand the actual decrypts to convince his listeners.22

  The impact of this information on Roosevelt would have been considerable. The Nazis had certainly demonstrated that they would resort to murder to achieve their political ends, but this was vastly worse. Hitler had said in his book, Mein Kampf, that the Germans needed lebensraum — “living space” — in the east. Here was proof that he intended to get it, not just by conquest, but by exterminating unwanted elements of the population. To make his point, Churchill probably used rhetoric similar to what he used in an international radio broadcast he gave when back in Britain two weeks later:

  As his armies advance, whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands — literally scores of thousands — of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by German police troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the sixteenth century there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale, or approaching such a scale…. We are in the presence of a crime without a name.23

  By this time the tally in the decrypts was well over ten thousand.

  Roosevelt would have been especially sensitive to Churchill’s report on the killings. Images of the Japanese army’s massacre of thousands of Chinese civilians during the “Rape of Nanking” would have still been vivid in his mind. During his previous term, he had repeatedly warned of a growing danger from Japan and was vindicated when the Japanese seized the Chinese capital in late 1937 and went on a six-week killing spree before the eyes, and cameras, of the resident European community. The photographs and reports were horrific. He would have pictured similar scenes enacted in Russia.24

  Of all the American presidents, Roosevelt must be rated as one of the most compassionate. He had introduced an array of socialist reforms in the early 1930s in his New Deal program to rescue Americans from the effects of the Great Depression. These included the pioneering Social Security Act, which introduced unemployment and old age benefits for the first time, but his concern for his fellow human beings was not isolationist. In his State of the Union address for 1941, he had passionately expounded to Congress his belief that all mankind was entitled to four basic freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. This is the kind of person who six months later was receiving Churchill’s news of Nazi atrocities.

  As Roosevelt listened, the prospect of Nazi murderers getting hold of a weapon of unimaginable power may also have figured in his thoughts. Since 1939, after he received a warning letter from the renowned physicist Albert Einstein, Roosevelt had been actively supporting
American research aimed at determining whether a super-bomb based on nuclear fission was possible. British scientists now said they believed it was. Even though the prospect was still only theoretical, both leaders must have shuddered at the thought of Hitler getting his hands on such a weapon.25

  The reason for the meeting, however, was Japan. Undersecretary of State Sumner Wells left one of the few eyewitness accounts of their discussions, a session in which the central theme was the certainty that the Japanese intended soon to seize Britain’s Far East possessions. Churchill vigorously sought some guarantee from Roosevelt that this would prompt U.S. intervention. At another session, when neither Wells nor perhaps anyone else was present, Roosevelt probably reminded him that neither Congress nor America at large could be expected to back a declaration of war against Japan to save Britain’s empire. It would have been then, perhaps, that Churchill produced a carbon copy of the English-language portion of Popov’s Pearl Harbor questionnaire — the German section having been retained in London. It would have been on “onion-skin,” a very thin, semi-transparent type of paper used for multiple carbon copies in the days of the typewriter.26 One can picture it hanging limp, tissue-like, in Roosevelt’s hands. Churchill would have watched as he read, the president’s expression fading from polite interest to grim realization as he absorbed what it was that the Germans wanted.

  HAWAII

  Munition dumps and mine depots

  Naval units, munition and mine depots on the Island of Kusha. (Pearl Harbour) Where possible drawings or sketches. Naval and munition depots in Lualueai. Exact position. Railway connections. The exact munition … reserve of the army believed to be in the crater Aliamanu. Information regarding exact position required. Ascertain if the crater Punchbowl at Honolulu is being used as a munition depot. If not, what other military depots are there?

  AIR BASES

  Lukefield Airdrome. Details if possible with sketches, showing the positions of hangers, workshops, bomb depots and tank fields. Are there any underground tank depots? Exact position of naval air station.

  Naval air support base at Kaneohe. Exact details of position, number of hangers, depots and workshops. Equipment.

  Army air base at Wicham Field and Wheeler Field. Exact position. Number of hangers, depots and workshops. Are there underground depots?

  Bodger Airport. Will this depot be taken over by the Army or the Navy in wartime? What preparations are being made? Number of hangers; are there Possibilities of landing seaplanes here?

  Pan American Base. Exact position, sketches. Is the airport identical with Rodgers Airport, or is it a part of it? (A radio station belonging to PA is on the Monapuu Peninsula.)

  Naval base at Pearl Harbor

  Exact details and sketches of the position of the shipyards, piers, workshops, oil tanks, drydocks and new drydocks believed to be under construction.

  Where is the minesweeper depot? How far has work developed in the east and southeast lock? depth of water; number of moorings. Is there a floating dock at Pearl Harbour or is it intended to have one there?

  Details regarding new British and American torpedo net defenses. To what extent are these in use? British and American anti-torpedo defense apparatus on warships and other ships. How used at sea? Details of construction….27

  A curious aspect of this English-language version of the questions is the Canadian word usage and spellings. Canadians, then as now, tend to interchange American and British idioms and spellings: radio for wireless, airdromes for aerodromes, harbour for harbor, (gasoline) tanks for petrol installations, and so forth. Some textual peculiarities also suggest the translator’s first language was not English. As it happens, the veteran Abwehr spy Paul Fidrmuc was then at KO Portugal; he had lived in Canada before the war working as a freelance magazine writer. This would also account for the tight, newspaper-style composition, and for the typos, which surely would not have been present had the writing been done in Berlin or London.28

  The document recalled the famous Zimmermann telegram of the First World War. It was proof positive that Japan and Germany were pretending friendship with the United States while secretly plotting against it. The references to sketches, drawings, exact positions, depth of water, and torpedo nets indicated that Pearl Harbor was being mapped out for air attack. Roosevelt could only have concluded that the Japanese were allowing that war with Britain could include war with the United States, and were planning accordingly.29

  The implied threat to Hawaii would have resonated with the president because of a report submitted earlier in the year by Joseph Grew, the U.S. ambassador in Tokyo. In January he wrote that a number of sources in Japan were saying that in the event of trouble breaking out between the United States and Japan, the Japanese intended to make a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor. Although the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) dismissed Grew’s information, Admiral Stark, chief of naval operations and America’s top sailor, took it seriously enough to suggest that the secretary of the navy warn the secretary of war that they should jointly take steps to ensure that a surprise attack could be withstood.30

  Admiral Stark was aboard the USS Augusta along with the two leaders, and when his opinion was sought — as surely it would have been — he would have told Roosevelt that in fact the defences of Pearl Harbor were still weak and its ability to detect an approaching enemy inadequate. As for the Pacific Fleet, provided its aircraft carriers were not lost, the remainder were expendable. Battleships, as Roosevelt himself well knew, had lost their supremacy to air power.31

  All this would have presented a tempting prospect, one that would not have escaped the two leaders. The Constitution forbade the United States from throwing the first punch when war seemed inevitable. Both Grew’s report and the Popov questionnaire indicated that Japan was exploring the possibility of a Taranto-style raid on Pearl Harbor. If Japan could be provoked into carrying out such an attack as a first act of war, the problem of getting America into the war with Germany might be solved.

  Roosevelt already had Japan in a squeeze. In July he had frozen the country’s assets in the United States in protest over the air bases it was building in French Indochina. This effectively halted all trade between the two countries, denying Japan most of the American oil and scrap iron it needed to run its economy.

  As Undersecretary of State Wells looked on, the two leaders now worked out a plan whereby the president would draw the economic noose even tighter, while insisting that Japan withdraw from both Indochina and China. The chances of the Japanese agreeing to quit China were on the underside of nil. Churchill calculated the United States and Britain could be at war with Japan in about three months.32

  There is separate indication that Churchill thought that war with Japan was fairly certain. Just as the meeting was winding up on August 12, Canada and Australia were sent a secret message from the British government telling them that if war with Japan should be imminent, the BBC would broadcast the code phrase “We hope to include in our programme a talk on the development of air communications in the Far East.” If the BBC also gave a date and time, that would be when the hostilities were expected to begin.

  Also, in his report on the Atlantic meeting to the War Cabinet on August 19, Churchill said Roosevelt was determined to get into the war, by provocation if necessary. “Everything is to be done to force an incident,” the president vowed according to him. The Cabinet minutes recorded this as meaning an incident involving Germany, but Japan, not Germany, had been the principal object of the talks between the two leaders. But then again, no one present would have wanted the truth on the permanent public record, to be gawked at by future generations.33

  Several days later, on August 27, the following Abwehr wireless message was intercepted, deciphered, and read by the British. It was undoubtedly seen by the Americans, as well:

  Berlin to Spain

  Following rumour is for further circulation as may be suitable, also for 7580 and 7591. In Japanese naval circles the possibility of a clash
with the American and English fleet is looked forward to with utmost calm. It is explained in these circles that even reckoning with a union of the American fleet with the English, the strength of the Japanese fleet is today so great that the ratio of strength would be 2 to 1 in favour of Japan.34

  The Abwehr office in Madrid was connected to Berlin by telephone, teletype, and courier. There was no reason for sending such a sensitive message by wireless in an easy-to-break cipher unless it was intended that the British and Americans read it.35

  The SS and German police messages depicting the atrocities in Russia also appear to have been made available to the British deliberately. When Churchill’s BBC speech on the killings was picked up in Germany, the SS immediately concluded that the double transposition cipher they were using was compromised. They demanded another and the armed forces cipher bureau, OKW/Chi, quickly complied. They were given a double Playfair system, well-known to professional cryptologists and even easier to break. OKW/Chi was housed next door to Canaris’s office on the Tirpitzuferstrasse and was an agency of OKW’s communications chief, General Erich Fellgiebel. Fellgiebel was an open critic of the Nazis, but was tolerated by Hitler because of his perceived irreplaceable expertise.36

  As the summer turned to fall, the decrypts reporting on the killings in Russia multiplied. They went straight to Churchill, and by diplomatic bag or secure transatlantic undersea cable on to the United States, and, surely, to the White House.37 Meanwhile, the trade embargos, plus the barring of Japanese ships from the Panama Canal, slashed Japan’s import trade by 75 percent, leading to serious shortages in food and fuel.

  The Japanese were in a quandary. If Japan did not take up arms soon, it would be too weak to fight.

  13

  August 1941