Codebreakers Victory (22 page)

The Americans in Washington who saw these decrypts understood their meaning. Roosevelt himself said, "This means war." But from that point on, an incredible series of mistakes blocked effective response to the warnings.

FDR, failing to notice that the one p.m. deadline was just past dawn at Pearl Harbor, followed the general line of thinking that the attack would come on Southeast Asia. So, while he could have called Hawaii on his scrambler phone, he did not, because Pearl Harbor seemed an unlikely target for the Japanese.

Admiral Harold Stark, chief of Naval Operations, could have called Kimmel, but not realizing that the Hawaiian commander was no longer receiving Purple decrypts, he presumed Kimmel was as fully informed about the crisis as he was.

General Marshall could have used his scrambler phone to call General Walter Short, his commander in Hawaii. Not trusting the phone's security, however, he asked that his warning message be sent by radio. It happened that radio interference that morning was bad; Marshall's message went by commercial telegraph to San Francisco and from there was relayed seven, hours later. A messenger on a motorcycle delivered it to General Short only after the Japanese planes had completed their first run.

In Hawaii, as well, the alarm was nullified by slipups and errors of judgment. Two privates manning a radar station on Oahu detected the oncoming Japanese planes and phoned in their report. But the lieutenant on duty knew that the flight of B-17s from the mainland was due to arrive that morning, presumed that these were causing the blips on the privates' screen and told them to forget it. The navy had both air and ship patrols operating. Both reported seeing unescorted submarines and launched attacks against what were later revealed to be Japanese midget subs trying to augment the mayhem at Pearl Harbor. The officer in the Naval Operations office, hearing these reports, knew immediately that "we were in it." Before he could rouse an official response, though, the Zeros were already incoming.

One possible warning in which the cryptanalysts of OP-20-G in Washington placed great store came to be known as the "winds execute" message. The Japanese had signaled to their outposts that in the case of an emergency, such as cutting off diplomatic relations, they would add to regular radio weather forecasts a "hidden phrase code" calling for the destruction of code machines and materials. The code for the termination of relations with the U.S. was "east wind rain," that for the USSR "north wind cloudy," and that for Britain "west wind clear." Ralph T. Briggs, then a twenty-seven-year-old U.S. Navy communications intelligence technician in Washington, has sworn that he did receive the fateful words
"higashi no kase ante"
—"east wind rain"—embedded in a Tokyo weather broadcast on the morning of December 4. Briggs recalled recognizing the message's importance and reported that with his "heart pounding and adrenaline flowing," he informed his superiors and received the congratulations "Well done" from Captain Laurance Safford, founder of the navy's Communications Intelligence operation. Together, Briggs and Safford thought they had produced the bit of vital information that would alert the navy to the coming attack.

From that point on, however, the story of Briggs's intercept becomes clouded in mists of confusion and, it would appear, deliberate cover-up. Higher officials in the chain of command failed to act on the message and later denied receiving it. Briggs's report on the message disappeared from the files.

In planning the Pearl Harbor raid, Admiral Yamamoto saw it as the way out of a personal dilemma. A blunt bullet of a man who had been a language student at Harvard and had served as a naval attache in Washington, he understood America and the Americans better than his colleagues and had argued in prewar councils that to provoke war with the U.S. was folly. "The United States would never stop fighting," he was quoted as saying, "and ultimately we would not be able to escape defeat." Yet he also came to realize that the momentum toward war could not be stopped. He persuaded himself that by destroying the U.S. fleet in Hawaiian waters, he could strengthen the isolationist spirit in the U.S. and weaken the will to fight, generating a desire for a negotiated peace. As Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison wrote in his multivolume
History of United States Naval Operations in World War II,
Yamamoto "knew that he must annihilate the United States Fleet in 1942 or lose the war."

The attack on Pearl Harbor, carried out by a task force under the command of Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, achieved nearly everything Yamamoto had hoped for. His planes sank or seriously damaged eighteen U.S. naval vessels, including eight battleships at anchor. Because General Walter Short, the army commander, had interpreted the warnings from Washington as orders to guard against sabotage from within the islands rather than attacks from without, he had grouped his aircraft in tight circles to make them easier to guard, allowing Yamamoto's raiders to destroy them en masse. And the Japanese admiral could take satisfaction in knowing his planes had put out of action broad ranks of servicemen who died or were seriously wounded.

Yamamoto had secured
nearly
everything he sought. He remained discontent, however, for two reasons. He had been led to believe the leaders in Tokyo would declare war before his planes struck. That was the plan, but it was thwarted by a series of blunders and delays. The admiral felt his honor had been sullied, and he knew the effect on Americans would be the opposite of desiring to negotiate a peace settlement. His second disappointment was that the U.S carriers were absent—they were on their plane-delivering mission to Midway and Wake.

The Japanese celebrated Pearl Harbor as a great victory. As for the U.S., the wound to the American psyche seemingly could be healed only by the cashiering of Kimmel and Short, the injustice of which is richly documented in Layton's memoir, and by the interminable investigative commissions and embittered congressional hearings that filled thirty-nine volumes of discordant testimony.

Yet in the long sweep of history it was a huge miscalculation by the Japanese. Admiral Morison's history summed up the attack as a "strategic imbecility." To have an enemy plot a vicious sneak attack even as its diplomats were carrying out a pretense of polite negotiations united the American people as nothing else could have. Pearl Harbor cleaned the decks of questionable commanders and brought in bright, energetic new leaders. It accelerated the American productive machine in turning out the masses of materiel that in the end would overwhelm the enemy's resources. It dashed the Japanese hope that they could achieve in the 1940s what they had accomplished in the 1905 settlement with the Russians: an advantageous peace without any attempt at invading enemy territory. As for its real effect on American naval power, the Japanese, as a U.S. admiral told Gordon Prange, "only destroyed a lot of old hardware." In fact, the raid failed to accomplish even that. The shallow waters of the anchorage permitted the salvage and repair of most of the crippled vessels; only two battleships—
Arizona
and
Oklahoma
—were beyond recovery. And the obvious surprise of the attack confirmed the Japanese in the belief that their codes were inviolable.

An odd corollary to the Pearl Harbor raid came in the Philippines, where Douglas MacArthur was the commander in charge. The Japanese planned their raid on the American bases on Luzon to follow as soon after Pearl Harbor as they could manage. But there was a two-hour time zone difference. In addition, fog delayed the departure of the mission. Consequently, MacArthur and his aides had nine hours to prepare for the Japanese assault. Yet they were strangely dormant, not even dispersing the aircraft lined up on their airfields. Dwight Eisenhower subsequently told an interviewer that MacArthur, his former commander, had some notion that the Japanese would not attack the Philippines. But attack they did, and their surprise was complete. "We still could not believe," a Japanese flier later recalled, "that the Americans did not have fighters in the air waiting for us." The U.S. lost more than one hundred planes—a good portion of the Philippines force—and suffered more than two hundred casualties. Admiral Layton has tartly pointed out that for this dereliction, in contrast to the treatment of Kimmel and Short, MacArthur was not even censured.

Though a smashing victory, Pearl Harbor's effects were so temporary that Yamamoto felt compelled to begin quickly the planning of another surprise strike—one whose outcome would be entirely opposite to his success at Pearl. Japanese Admiral Tadaichi Hara perhaps summed it up best in his postwar analysis: "We won a great tactical victory at Pearl Harbor and thereby lost the war."

They lost it in good part because of the harsh light the Pearl Harbor raid cast on the inadequacies of the U.S. intelligence system. The lack of a Purple machine in Hawaii has already been noted. Also highlighted were the system's ridiculously slow methods of gathering information. Sigint results from Oahu and Cavite were often dispatched to Washington in weekly bundles aboard a Pan American clipper; if the flight was canceled, they went by surface ships. The list of high-level recipients was also seen as far too restrictive: commanders with the strongest of all needs to know were not included. In Washington the methods for disseminating the information were cumbersome in the extreme. Copies of that vital fourteenth part of the final Japanese series to its embassy, for example, were locked into dispatch boxes and hand-carried by two officer-couriers making the rounds of the White House, the State Department and the offices of the military chiefs.

Japan's Pearl Harbor raid had two powerful effects on Station Hypo and Joe Rochefort. First, it left him with a profound sense of guilt that he had been unable to warn his admiral of the coming attack. Despite the fact that he had not been assigned the code from which he, with his deep knowledge of the Japanese mind and the Japanese language, might well have extracted the information, he felt that he had let his boss down. As he said in his oral reminiscence recorded in 1969, "An intelligence officer has one task, one job, one mission. That is to tell his commander, his superior, today, what the Japanese are going to do tomorrow. . . . We did not inform Admiral Kimmel prior to December 7th that the Japanese were going to make the attack. . . . Therefore we failed." His wounded conscience drove him and his closest associates to work twenty-hour days to make sure nothing like it happened again.

The second result was that just days after the raid, Washington had second thoughts about Hypo. Rochefort and his team were ordered to drop their work on the flag officers' code and join in the attack on JN-25b, the latest version of the Imperial Navy code. That change would make all the difference.

 

 

Purple and the Obliging Baron

 

When the cryptanalysts of Friedman's Signal Intelligence Service distributed their replicas of the Purple machine, they could not have imagined that Purple's decrypts of diplomatic traffic would ever throw more than an indirect light on military affairs, especially in Europe. Yet, by an odd twist, Purple decrypts became a vital contribution to military intelligence in the European theater.

The reason for this unexpected cryptanalytic plum was Hiroshi Oshima, the Japanese ambassador to Germany. Both a baron and a general, he was also ardently pro-German. William L. Shirer wrote of him that he was "more Nazi than the Nazis." His strong advocacy of German interests won him the approval of top Nazi officials, including Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Hitler himself. Speaking fluent German, Oshima had hours-long interviews in which Hitler disclosed his innermost thoughts and plans. The Germans took him and his military attaches on tours of German production facilities, defense installations and frontline attack formations. An excellent reporter, Oshima prepared multipage summaries of his observations, which his subordinates encoded on his Purple machine. And of course Allied analysts in Washington and Bletchley read his transmissions almost as quickly as they were decoded in Tokyo.

Moreover, the Japanese reports from Berlin were not the only rich sources of inside information for the U.S. and Britain. The Japanese ambassador in Moscow kept Washington and London advised on their less-than-forthcoming Soviet ally. The ambassador in Rome used his Magic machine to report what he could learn of Mussolini and the Italians. Japanese ambassadors and military attaches in the neutral countries of Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal and Latin America were eager to transmit their findings.

General Marshall said of Oshima's reports that they were "the main basis of information regarding Hitler's intentions in Europe."

As early as January 1941, for example, the baron began informing Tokyo of Hitler's plans to attack the Soviet Union. He tried to persuade Japanese leaders that when this happened they, too, should declare war on the Soviets. Later, he persuaded Hitler to pledge that, in Oshima's words, "if a clash occurs by any chance between Japan and the United States, Germany will at once open war against the United States."

He, Ribbentrop and Hitler liked to get together and dream of the time when Japan would gain mastery over Burma, India and the Indian Ocean while Germany pushed through Ukraine and the Middle East for a linkup in Asia that would presage "a new world order." Oshima's persistence in urging this dream on Tokyo eventually drew a sharp rebuke from a new foreign minister, who let him know that any such idea was completely unrealistic.

Oshima was bold enough to offer criticism to the short-tempered führer. When the Germans did invade Russia and sent in the SS troops to liquidate masses of Russian citizens, he told Hitler what a serious mistake this was. It had turned the conflict into "a war of the peoples" when it could have become a struggle to free the Russian masses from Bolshevism. How much better, he said, if Germany had followed Japan's example in seizing Manchukuo, where they had granted the people a degree of independence that included the formation of a puppet government. How much wiser to have allowed a share of autonomy to Ukraine instead of savagely eradicating masses of its people. His advice fell on deaf ears.