Pearl Harbor Betrayed (16 page)

For the full impact of the President's order to be appreciated, it should be noted that Japan's own oil wells and synthetic plants produced less than 12 percent of her annual civilian and peacetime military consumption. About 88 percent of her petroleum needs was imported, and 80 percent of that came from the United States.
50
The Navy held about two years' worth of operating oil in reserve, but for all of Japan's ambitious undertakings she would need oil resources in far greater measure than that, which could only be found now in the NEI. The Indies capital city of Batavia understandably shuddered with apprehension but bravely joined the American action by sharply reducing her own oil exports to Japan.

The reader may wish to pause at this oak-cleaving moment to reflect on what has happened. An aggressor state, Japan, has presented the Western powers with a third (after China and northern Indo-China) flaunting of international law. What is more, it has placed itself in a position to threaten the American Philippines. The United States has responded by placing the tightest possible tourniquet on those unjust purposes. But a Rubicon has been crossed, since after 26 July there were
no more peaceful sanctions
at American disposal. Meanwhile, neither side could, or had shown a willingness to, back down from their standoff. Absent a truly creative diplomatic intervention, the Japanese-American collision, if history will permit the interpretation, was now on automatic.
51

Over the next four months there would be at least two clear opportunities to sever auto from matic, but they would not be taken, by either side.

FIVE

AN AIR OF INEVITABILITY

Dear Kimmel: I have [had] a talk with Mr. Hull who has asked me to hold it very secret. I may sum it up by saying that conversations with the Japs have practically reached an impasse. As I see it we can get nowhere toward a settlement and peace in the Far East until and unless there is some agreement between Japan and China—and just now that seems remote.

Betty
23 September 1941

 

The Japanese cabinet had a slightly different appearance as it entered the final months of peace. The independently acting, inconsistent, and vainglorious Foreign Minister Matsuoka was gone. His last offense had been to consult repeatedly with the Emperor without Premier Konoye's prior knowledge or consent—most recently, following Germany's invasion of Russia on 22 June, for the purpose of pressing Hirohito to authorize an attack on the country with which Matsuoka had, just ten weeks before, concluded a nonaggression pact. To remedy that behavior, the entire cabinet resigned, on 16 July, and re-formed two days later with Konoye nominally still at the helm and Matsuoka replaced as foreign minister by the stable and politically more moderate Admiral Toyoda Teijiro.

Konoye now attempted a creative act of diplomacy. He would personally meet with Roosevelt on U.S. soil, at, for example, Hawaii. In proposing the meeting to his cabinet he stated his intention to hold firmly to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which included a continued military presence in China, while seeking an American recognition of Japan's peaceful intentions. It was hard for the Navy to say no to that. And even the Army, in the person of General Tojo, minister of war, grudgingly agreed that probably no harm would come from such an initiative—provided the prime minister understood that, if his talks failed, he would be expected to lead his country into war against America. Even thus constrained, Konoye may have expected, naively, that somehow in the warm course of personal conversation the ice would melt and he would return home with a formula that both appeased the militarists and saved the peace. He even told Ambassador Grew, at a private dinner on 6 September, that he could agree in theory with Hull's “Four Principles” of the previous 16 April, though they would require “adjustments” and their implementation would take time.
1

From 10 to 15 August President Roosevelt met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill aboard the battleship HMS
Prince of Wales
(soon to be sunk off Malaya) anchored at Argentia Harbor, Newfoundland. The publicly announced result of their conversations was a somewhat euphonious Atlantic Charter that testified to the unity of Anglo-American purpose and to the commitment of both their nations to peace. Secretly, however, the two heads of state drafted strong statements rejecting Japanese attempts to dominate East Asia, which each pledged to deliver. Roosevelt, for his part, asked Hull to arrange for Ambassador Nomura to be present at the White House on Sunday, 17 August, when he returned from Argentia. That afternoon, with a now healthy Hull in attendance, he heard out Nomura's transmittal of Konoye's offer to meet in Hawaii. Without acknowledging the invitation, Roosevelt read aloud a stiff rebuke of Japanese pretensions to military domination of East Asia; followed by a craftily phrased (by Sumner Welles) second statement of the United States' desire to remain friends with Japan.

It was eleven days later, when Ambassador Nomura handed him a second message from Premier Konoye suggesting that they meet, and very soon, since Japanese-American relations were mutating rapidly, that Roosevelt responded, and affirmatively, suggesting that the two meet for as much as three or four days, and perhaps at Juneau, Alaska, which was not quite as far for him. That evening, at Hull's apartment, the secretary told Nomura that certain matters had to be settled before such a meeting could take place, for instance, Japan's withdrawal from China, so that it was known by both parties in advance that an agreement would in fact be signed. Nomura balked, suggesting that matters
other than
China be settled beforehand, in order to get both countries over a presently difficult patch. Hull demurred. He would not have the Chinese believe that the United States had sold them out. The sticking point, again.
2

On 6, 23, and 27 September, Nomura presented Hull proposals from Tokyo that, he thought, Roosevelt and Konoye could agree upon before a personal meeting took place between the two. He also suggested 10–15 October as a suitable conference date, and said that Konoye, together with a full admiral, a full general, and a staff of twenty, were standing by, waiting to depart. But, as happened so often before in these negotiations, none of the Japanese proposals approached the irreducible standards of the “Four Principles.” Hull had learned through the medium of Magic that Konoye's professed acceptance of the principles was a sham. Intercepts of diplomatic traffic revealed that the Japanese government was proceeding apace with plans for conquest while talking peace in the White House and in Hull's apartment. Furthermore, the proposals received through Nomura permitted Japan to:

(1) refuse to renounce aggression and territorial aggrandizement;

(2) refuse to withdraw troops from northern China and Inner Mongolia; and

(3) refuse to state that she would not make war against the United States if war broke out between the America and Germany.

Finally, while in her proposals Japan suggested that she might undertake certain behavioral changes
over time,
what she asked from the United States was that it
immediately:

(1) lift all economic sanctions against Japan;

(2) discontinue the shipping of American troops, planes, and other war material to the Philippines; and

(3) halt all military aid to China, British Malaya, and the NEI.

An agreement based on that imbalance, Roosevelt and Hull knew, would never be acceptable to the American people, who had their own pride. If instead Japan had offered, as she never did in these penultimate papers, to permit the United States a gradual adjustment of policies and operations to match the gradualism she demanded for herself, there
might
have been the possibility of a truce of sorts, of a softening of wills, of deep breaths taken by both sides. And if, on the other hand, the United States had not played so much the role of stern, moralistic headmaster, and had, as historian Herbert Feis expressed it, been willing “to ease Japanese failure” by granting limited concessions, there
might
have evolved a Camp David–type understanding that allowed both parties to step back from the brink. But all that is speculation in hindsight, and not very well grounded, since on 16 October the Konoye cabinet fell, and on the next day, the premiership was conveyed to the pro-Axis General Tojo, for whom the search for peace was a matter of no concern.
3

CNO Admiral Stark in Washington sent a warning to Admiral Kimmel in Hawaii, Hart in the Philippines, and King in the Atlantic:

The resignation of the Japanese Cabinet has created a grave situation.… Hostilities between Japan and Russia are a strong possibility. Since the U.S. and Britain are held responsible by Japan for her present desperate situation there is the possibility that Japan may attack these two Powers. In view of these possibilities you will take due precautions including such preparatory deployments as will not disclose strategic intentions nor constitute provocative actions against Japan.
4

Kimmel responded to the warning with an eleven-point report on the special dispositions he made at base and at sea. Among these dispositions, he had put the Battle Force on twelve-hour sailing notice; delayed the sailing of
West Virginia
to Puget Sound for overhaul; dispatched two submarines to Wake Island; dispatched additional Marines to Wake, Johnston, and Palmyra Islands; dispatched twelve patrol planes to Midway; and placed six submarines on short notice for departure to Japanese home waters. These orders and deployments would remain in force through the next such warning, which would come on 24 November. Biweekly air raid drills and twenty-four-hour-manned machine guns on battleships continued as before. From Stark he received an “OK on the dispositions which you made in connection with the recent change in the Japanese cabinet.”
5

The language of the 16 October message, particularly its inclusion of a possible Japanese attack on Russia, shows the hand of Kelly Turner, director of war plans (OP-12), who had arrogated to himself the functions of naval intelligence (Office of Naval Intelligence), about which he seemed to know little. It was Turner who had predicted on 19 July that a total trade embargo, such as was imposed on Japan seven days later, “would probably result in a fairly early attack by Japan on Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies, and possibly would involve the United States in early war in the Pacific,” none of which happened.
6
In the same month, Stark wrote to Savvy Cooke: “We have felt that the Maritime Provinces [of Russia] are now definitely Japanese objectives. Turner thinks Japan will go up there in August. He may be right. He usually is.”
7
He usually was wrong.

In a more fundamental error, with calculable consequences for Kimmel, Turner assured Stark that Hawaii was equipped with Magic, and that Kimmel, his fleet intelligence officer, Commander Edwin T. Layton, and Commander Joseph J. Rochefort's Combat Intelligence Unit were “receiving the same decrypted information” that was available in Washington. Though Magic decryption equipment had been sent to Admiral Hart in the Philippines, and even to cryptographers at Bletchley Park in England, none had been sent to the Army and Navy commanders in Hawaii! “I inquired on two or three occasions as to whether or not Kimmel could read certain dispatches when they came up,” Stark later testified, “and which we were interpreting and sending our own messages and I was told that he could.”
8
During the postwar Joint Congressional Committee Hearings on the Pearl Harbor Attack (hereafter JCC), Stark was asked, “Who was it that told you that they had a system out in Honolulu or Pearl Harbor of decoding and decrypting Jap messages?” He answered: “Admiral Turner.” Asked the same again, Stark replied, “Well, Admiral Turner told me he [Kimmel] could do it. I did not consider it necessary to go further.”
9
For both Stark and Turner this was a telling admission. For Kimmel it may explain why certain information vital to his sea and air defenses was never sent to him by the Navy Department. CINCPAC had been told by Stark that the Army and Navy had broken certain Japanese codes and ciphers, and various paraphrases of Magic-originated information had been sent to him prior to the July embargo, but none afterward, until the first week of December. When Turner was asked in the same proceedings, “Did you ever tell Admiral Stark that Admiral Kimmel was getting that [Magic] information?” Turner answered, “Yes, sir, on three occasions.… I asked Admiral Noyes [Rear Admiral Leigh Noyes, director of naval communications] about it and so reported to Admiral Stark.”
10
Then, the question was posed to Noyes: “Did you ever inform the Chief of War Plans Division, Captain Turner, that the Commander of the Pacific Fleet was decrypting intelligence information of a character similar to that which you were receiving in the Navy Department?” To which Noyes answered, “No.” He added: “I would never have made the statement that all ciphers could be translated in Pearl Harbor.” A month before 7 December, Secretary Knox's aide Captain Frank E. Beatty asked Turner, in Knox's name, “Is Admiral Kimmel getting these ‘magic' messages?” Turner replied, “Beatty, of course he is. He has the same ‘magic' setup we have.”
11

In 1961, after two decades of reflection on the Japanese attack of 7 December, Rear Admiral (Ret.) Samuel Eliot Morison, official U.S. Navy historian of naval operations during World War II, considered the various officers who had been blamed on the U.S. side, and concluded, in a letter to Vice Admiral John F. Shafroth (Ret.), that “If I were pushed to name one person as being more careless or stupid than all the rest it would be Kelly Turner.” He went on to say: “I have come out of this study with a more charitable feeling toward Gen. Short and Adm. Kimmel than I felt before.… If you and your friends are getting up any sort of petition to have Admiral Kimmel's status restored or record changed, you can count on me to sign it.”
12
At this date, the obvious question that remains is, Why instead of taking Turner at his word did Stark not ask
Kimmel
if he was receiving Magic? (Not until 1944 would Kimmel learn the nature of the intercepted material affecting his command that Magic contained.) At the least he could have asked Noyes directly or asked Rear Admiral Theodore S. Wilkinson, director of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), or asked Wilkinson's predecessor, Captain Alan C. Kirk. But, content apparently with secondhand information on such a centrally important matter, and perhaps being under the spell of his vicar, Turner, he put the question to none of those men.