Pearl Harbor Betrayed (22 page)

MARSHALL
4

The message's path on the twenty-seventh can be tracked as follows: it was received in the War Department [WD] code room for encryption at 6:00
P.M
. Washington time (12:30
P.M
. Hawaii time); filed in the WD signal center at 6:11
P.M
. Washington time (12:41
P.M
. Hawaii time); received in the Hawaiian Department signal center at 6:46
P.M
. Washington time (1:16
P.M
. Hawaii time); decrypted in Hawaii at 7:52
P.M
. Washington time (2:22
P.M
. Hawaii time); and was placed in the hands of Chief of Staff Colonel Walter C. Phillips, who presented it to General Short about 2:30
P.M
. Hawaii time. Short talked it over with Phillips and, after “a very few minutes,” decided to place the Hawaiian Department on No. 1 Alert. The alert was in effect thirty minutes later. He imposed a heavy guard around all military installations as well as vital civilian structures such as power stations, highway bridges, and telephone exchanges. At 5:40
P.M
. Hawaii time, Short had an acknowledgement encrypted for transmission to Washington. The wire was received in the WD code room at 5:57
A.M
. on the twenty-eighth, Washington time. Its passage thereafter through the War Department will be considered below. Short's reply in its entirety, addressed to “Chief of Staff,” read as follows:

NO. 959

REPORT DEPARTMENT ALERTED TO PREVENT SABOTAGE PERIOD LIAISON WITH NAVY REURAD [
with reference to your radiogram
] FOUR SEVEN TWO TWENTY SEVENTH

SHORT
5

On the same day, Short's chief intelligence (G-2) officer, Lt. Colonel Kendall J. Fielder, was sent a sabotage/espionage message, No. 473, by Brigadier General Sherman Miles, assistant chief of staff, G-2, in the War Department. It read:

JAPANESE NEGOTIATIONS HAVE COME TO PRACTICAL STALEMATE STOP HOSTILITIES MAY ENSUE STOP SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITIES MAY BE EXPECTED STOP INFORM COMMANDING GENERAL AND CHIEF OF STAFF ONLY

MILES
6

Fielder showed the message to Short and Phillips about the same time that the No. 1 Alert was ordered. Then, on the following day, the twenty-eighth, Short personally received two more sabotage alerts from Washington. The first (No. 482), from the adjudant general, Major General Emory S. Adams, urged “that you initiate forthwith all additional measures necessary to provide for protection of your establishments comma property comma and equipment against sabotage comma protection of your personnel against subversive propaganda and protection of all activities against espionage stop.” But Adams added the caution that Short should not take actions that were illegal or that violated civil rights.
7
The second message (No. 484), from Major General Henry H. Arnold, commander in chief of the Army Air Forces, and marked for the attention of Major General Frederick L. Martin, commander of the Hawaiian Air Force, repeated the substance of Adams's message.
8

Since the Marshall warning message (No. 472) made no mention of a possible Japanese military strike at Hawaii, Short considered the message's phrase “hostile Japanese action” to mean, in his case, sabotage and uprisings. With three warnings of such activities, Short concluded both that the greatest danger facing his command was internal and not external, and that the three latest messages, all sent
after
the receipt of his No. 959 acknowledgment of No. 472, confirmed the appropriateness of the alert he had ordered.
9
Alert No. 1 was defined as “a defense against acts of sabotage and uprisings within the islands, with no threat from without.”
10
It was the lowest of three levels of alert in the Hawaiian Department. Short sent a copy of the 27 November warning from Marshall to his Navy opposite number, Admiral Bloch, and advised him that the Army had gone on Alert No. 1. This caused some misinterpretation in Bloch's headquarters, as well as in Kimmel's, where, because the maximum Navy state of alert was Condition I, just the reverse of Short's No. 1, everyone seemed to understand that Short had declared an all-out alert. Short's all-out, or No. 3, required “the occupation of all field positions by all units, prepared for maximum defense of Oahu and the Army installations on outlying islands.”
11
Not surprisingly, when Kimmel's intelligence officer Lieutenant Commander Edwin T. Layton looked out his window on the evening of the twenty-seventh and saw Army trucks moving, troops marching, and, he thought, weapons being deployed, “I presumed that they were going into full condition of readiness, including the emplacement of anti-aircraft and other mobile weapons around Pearl Harbor and other important points on Oahu.”
12
But those movements were to protect installations and equipment against ground sabotage. When, in the JCC proceedings of 23 January 1946, Short was asked why Kimmel and Bloch were under the misapprehension that the Alert No. 1 meant all-out alert instead of alert against sabotage only, he snapped: “The only way I can account for that would be poor staff work on the part of the staff of the Fourteenth Naval District.… We had furnished them with ten copies of our staff operating procedure, which somebody in that naval staff must have dug into and known what it meant.” Apparently, it did not occur to anyone on either Bloch's or Kimmel's staffs to ask a Hawaiian Department staff member what the Army was
doing
during its alert. And Kimmel admitted in 1944 that “I did not inquire into the particular details.”
13

Short had, he thought, good reason for expecting local attempts to inflict damage on Army and Navy assets. Thirty-seven percent (about 161,000 persons) of the population of Oahu was of Japanese descent. Of those about 40,000 were aliens. Many were suspected (unfairly as it turned out) of disloyalty. Furthermore, Short had to worry about 239 registered Japanese consular agents, as well as 70 or 80 more Japanese who were thought to be informants to the Japanese consulate. With a sizable number of Japanese living in close proximity to airfields, Short regarded his aircraft as particularly vulnerable. Dispersed in scattered bunkers, their fuel tanks, gas-filled engines, and ammunition could easily be torched by fifth column saboteurs sneaking across the unfenced airport perimeters. (Funds for fencing airfields had finally been allocated by the War Department, but not in time to have the barriers erected by November–December.) Short was mindful that an Army inspector's report, dated 9 July, had pointed up the vulnerability of Hickam Field, adjacent to Pearl Harbor, to “a few bold, ruthless and intelligent saboteurs.”
14

Rear Admiral Bloch, who had responsibility for defense of Navy assets in the yard proper, already had armed naval personnel patrolling the two tank farms, upper and lower. The upper farm, adjacent to a public highway, had an “unclimable” fence; it was also protected by three elevated sentry stations equipped with searchlights. Marines alternated with the Army in maintaining constant guard over the water supply and electric power lines. It was thought impossible, by Bloch, to achieve absolute security of the Pearl yard without disruption of its work. Though an elaborate system of photograph passes and random surprise searches was in effect, there was no guarantee that a saboteur might not successfully penetrate the yard among the 5,000 employees of civil contractors, the 5,000 civil service employees, and the several thousand naval personnel who entered the yard each day.

*   *   *

Short stated after the war that he did not believe the 27 November war warning message (No. 472) had been authored by Marshall, though his name was affixed to it. He was correct in that, since, as shown above, Marshall was in North Carolina observing maneuvers when the message was drafted by Gerow, Stimson, and Stark. Marshall had worked with Gerow the day before on language for a warning to MacArthur in the Philippines, but it was not he who inserted the caution “not to alarm civilian population.” That, it appears, was Stimson's doing. On his own, Gerow might have included the words “needed measures for protection against subversive activities should be taken immediately,” but he was persuaded by the deputy chief of staff (Major General William Bryden), Miles, and Colonel Charles W. Bundy, chief of the War Plans Group, to send that particular warning as a separate G-2 dispatch: that would be Miles's No. 473 on the twenty-seventh.
15

What tipped Short off to the absence of Marshall's hand was the directive to undertake reconnaissance. Marshall would have known that, by agreement with the Navy on 31 March, aerial reconnaissance of the approaches to Oahu was the responsibility of the Navy. Army aircraft flew regular inshore patrols, but distant (six hundred miles out) air patrols were a Navy function, by signed agreement well known to, and signed off on, by Marshall. Short stated in his testimony before the JCC that, “This message was written basically for General MacArthur in the Philippines and then adopted to the rest of us, and in the Philippines they had no such agreement. The Army was responsible for reconnaissance and they got together with the Navy and agreed upon what sectors that each would cover.”
16
(It is not recorded that Short knew this in November 1941.) In response to that part of the directive, Short did order Aircraft Warning Service radar reconnaissance daily from 0400 to 0700—the most dangerous three hours (the two and a half hours preceding dawn and one half hour after) for a dawn air attack, as specified in the Martin-Bellinger estimate. He placed the Army's Interceptor Command and Information Center on the same schedule. In addition, radar would operate daily,
except Sundays,
from 0700 to 1100 and from 1200 to 1600, except Saturdays and Sundays, for training and maintenance work. (The Japanese aircraft would make their approach
after
the predicted 0400–0700 window, and on a Sunday.) At this time, and through December, Short had only six mobile radar stations; three planned fixed stations were not yet operative, their booms and antennas still on a pier in Oakland, California.

That Short did not think himself obligated to go beyond the No. 1 Alert was owed, he said later, to two known facts about Marshall: first, at the time Short was appointed to the command in Hawaii, Marshall “had definitely indicated his intention to direct personally any genuine prewar alert.”
17
Second, the one previous Marshall-authored alert to Hawaii had been so overt in language and intent that no one could mistake its meaning. On 17 June 1940, when there was information in Washington suggesting that Japan might make a military move against the United States, but hardly the amount of intelligence and threat that existed in November 1941, Marshall wired an alert to the then commander of the Hawaiian Department, Major General Charles D. Herron. The wire may stand as a model of what a war alert should look like:

JUNE 17, 1940.
NO. 428
IMMEDIATELY ALERT COMPLETE DEFENSIVE ORGANIZATION TO DEAL WITH POSSIBLE TRANS-PACIFIC RAID, TO GREATEST EXTENT POSSIBLE WITHOUT CREATING PUBLIC HYSTERIA OR PROVOKING UNDUE CURIOSITY OF NEWSPAPERS OR ALIEN AGENTS. SUGGEST MANEUVER BASIS. MAINTAIN ALERT UNTIL FURTHER ORDERS. INSTRUCTIONS FOR SECRET COMMUNICATION DIRECT WITH CHIEF OF STAFF WILL BE FURNISHED YOU SHORTLY. ACKNOWLEDGE.
18

Herron at once placed the department on the only alert he had in his procedures—total. Within the hour he conferred with his opposite number, Bloch and with Vice Admiral Adolphus Andrews, commander of the Hawaiian Detachment. There was no corresponding Navy Department warning. The same day, Herron wired the War Department an acknowledgment as unambiguous as Marshall's warning:

ALL ANTI-AIRCRAFT OBSERVATION [
posts manned
] AND DETACHMENTS IN POSITION WITH LIVE AMMUNITION AND ORDERS TO FIRE ON FOREIGN PLANES OVER RESTRICTED AREAS AND IN DEFENSE OF ANY ESSENTIAL INSTALLATIONS. SOME LOCAL INTEREST IN AMMUNITION ISSUES BUT NO EXCITEMENT. NAVY INSHORE AND OFFSHORE AIR PATROLS IN OPERATION.
19

The all-out Marshall-Herron alert remained in force until 20 June, when Marshall ordered it tapered down; it ended for all practical purposes on 16 July. Herron assured Marshall that the alert did not “dull the keen edge, or exhaust morale.”
20
When Herron was relieved by Short in February 1941, Herron briefed his successor on the 1940 alert, and, according to Short, “acquainted me with the relation which had existed between himself and General Marshall during the all-out alert which began June 17, 1940. In that alert, General Marshall had directed the alert and had closely supervised its continuance.”
21
Short argued before the JCC, in January 1945, that he had taken the Marshall-Herron alert as a “precedent” of what he might expect to receive if Marshall ever wanted him to go on all-out alert. He expected that the Chief of Staff, who had personally supervised the thirty-day-long 1940 alert, “would certainly have the time and interest not only to read and understand my succinct report … but to send further word in the event that he disagreed in any way with the measure I had taken in obedience to his November 27 directive.”
22
But no further communication was received from Marshall, corrective or otherwise.

Like the November 27 directive, the Marshall-Herron alert was a “do-don't” message:
do
take the following measures;
don't
excite the local population. But the
do
parts of the 1940 warning were explicit and unambiguous, starting with the verb
alert
. By comparison with the plain Army language of Marshall in June 1940, the November 1941 message, No. 472, was awkward in expression, abstract in tone, and unsure in intent. It did not seem to come from the same hand (which it did not). And it contained no warning whatever of a possible sea-air attack—“trans-Pacific raid”—on Hawaii. In fact, Short observed, among the military intelligence estimates prepared by G-2 at the War Department and sent to his department, “in no estimate did G-2 ever indicate the probability of an attack on Hawaii.”
23
And no Magic intercepts had been sent to him. There were other problems, Short contended: if the War Department had wanted him to upgrade his alert to No. 2, which read, “defense against sabotage and uprisings and, in addition, defense against an air attack or against an attack by surface and subsurface vessels,”
24
it would not be possible to obey the injunction to “limit dissemination [of the warning] to minimum essential officers.” If No. 2 were declared, he would have to inform officers all up and down the line—air, antiaircraft, coast artillery, and infantry. As it was, under Alert No. 1 Short informed only his staff, General Martin of the Army Air Forces, Major General Henry T. Burgin, commander of the coast artillery, and the two infantry division commanders. Furthermore, if Alert No. 2 or No. 3 had been ordered, there would have been no way to keep the warning secret, not to mention refrain from alarming the locals: