Pearl Harbor Betrayed (24 page)

Neither would be surprised over a Japanese surprise attack. From many angles an attack on the Philippines would be the most embarrassing thing that could happen to us. There are some here who think it likely to occur. I do not give it the weight others do, but I included it [in the warning of the twenty-fourth] because of the strong feeling among some people. You know I have generally held that it was not time for the Japanese to proceed against Russia. I still do. Also I still rather look for an advance into Thailand, Indo China, Burma Road area as the most likely.

I won't go into the pros and cons of what the United States may do. I will be damned if I know. I wish I did.
44

The letter arrived at Pearl on 3 December.

After that nearly yearlong litany of portents and lamentations—Kimmel called it the “plethora of premonitions, generalized warnings and forebodings”—sent via official ciphered radiograms or by personal mail on board the weekly China Clipper, Kimmel was not likely to be startled by 27 November's opening sentence, or by the text that followed. It fell right in with the rest of Washington's literature. It had, as Admiral King (later COMINCH and CNO) complained in November 1944, a “sameness of tenor” that failed to set it apart from previous messages.
45
But King was not exactly an objective critic. He had been in Stark's office when the final language of the warning was drafted, and had said nothing.
46
What was more important, it can be argued, was what Kimmel (and Short) had
not
been sent: raw Magic intercepts, of which more later. They had not even been sent news of the Japanese deadline dates of 25 and 29 November.

*   *   *

In examining the language of the Navy warning of the twenty-seventh, one finds that it is just as vague and open to conflicting interpretations as the Army warning of the same date. Even Turner's “war warning” sentence could be understood as a catch basin for any and all events to come, as assembled by hindsight. But there are certain specific differences between the two messages, starting with their reports on the status of American-Japanese negotiations. In the Army message it was stated that negotiations “appear to be terminated for all practical purposes with only the barest possibilities” of continuance. In the Navy message the negotiations had “ceased”—a statement that was to puzzle Kimmel over the next nine days as he read about continuing negotiations in the Honolulu newspapers. Not learning of Japan's 29 November deadline when “things [were] automatically going to happen” until 1944, Kimmel commented before the JCC, in January 1946: “So far as Japan was concerned, the talking which went on after November 26 was play-acting. It was a Japanese stratagem to conceal a blow which Japan was preparing to deliver.… The Navy Department knew the scheme [and did not tell me].”
47
Where the Army warning stated that future Japanese moves were “unpredictable,” the Navy warning made site-specific predictions (“indications”) of attacks against “either the Philippines, Thai, or Kra Peninsula or possibly Borneo.” That the “United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act” was a vital condition that found no mention in the Navy message; nor did the Navy message enjoin Kimmel (as the Army message did Short) to undertake “reconnaissance.” The “Do-Don't” Army message commanded:

Do be on guard.

Don't alarm civilians.

Do take measures deemed necessary.

Don't disclose intent.

Do carry out tasks assigned in Rainbow Five.

Don't commit the first overt act.

The Navy message contained no Don'ts and two Do's: (1) “Execute an appropriate defensive deployment preparatory to carrying out the tasks assigned in WPL-46,” and (2) “Inform district [Bloch] and Army [Short] authorities.” While U.S. mainland naval districts as well as Guam and Samoa were directed to take measures against sabotage, no such directive was addressed to Oahu in the Navy message. “Spenavo” in the second to last sentence was special Naval Observer in London, Admiral Robert Ghormley. The Navy message asked for no acknowledgment. What is most striking about both warning messages is that neither mentioned Hawaii as a probable or even possible target, though in the later Pearl Harbor investigations both Marshall and Stark averred that their respective messages were intended to prompt all-out alerts in Hawaii against such an attack. Marshall stated in December 1945 that, “I feel that General Short was given a command instruction to put his command on the alert against a possible hostile attack by the Japanese. The command was not so alerted.”
48
When asked in the JCC hearings what additional dispositions he had expected Kimmel to make beyond those he had already taken after the 16 October warning, Stark answered: “Full security measures [presumably Condition I], not only for ships in port but for ships at sea; measures regarding the safety of Pearl Harbor; distant reconnaissance”—that last despite the fact that, in compliance with WPPac-46, as Stark well knew, long-range aerial reconnaissance was not to be mounted until W-Day, the day that war began with Japan.
49

Much popular (and some published) criticism of Short and Kimmel since 7 December seems to have assumed that explicit and unmistakable warnings were sent them of probable Japanese attacks on their positions. If anything, the NCI concluded in 1944, the Navy's 27 November warning “directed attention away from Pearl Harbor rather than toward it.”
50
The meanings that afterward were read into these messages by the War and Navy Departments were in them only indirectly or obscurely. Turner testified in the NCI that the Navy message meant what it said.
51
But did it say what it meant? Stark's defense of the Navy message in the JCC hearings consisted of saying that “there was grave danger of Japan striking anywhere.… The words ‘war warning' had never before been used in any of my dispatches to the commander in chief, Pacific Fleet.… That certain signs indicated an amphibious expedition against either the Philippines, Thai, or the Kra Peninsula, or possibly Borneo … did not, in our opinion, rule out or preclude an attack elsewhere. Our dispatch of the 24th … warned against a surprise aggressive movement in any direction.”
52

Kimmel's and Short's most severe critic in the JCC was staff member Edward P. Morgan, an attorney and investigator from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, appointed by committee chairman Senator Alben W. Barkley, Democrat of Kentucky, upon the recommendation of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Morgan produced a 266-page (printed) report that was generally hostile to the two commanders. In the matter of the war warnings, Morgan advised the committee (his italics): “
The more the evidence is considered, the more apparent becomes the realization that the only thing to have altered the defensive picture would have been to tell both the responsible commanders that a surprise air attack was to be visited on Pearl Harbor by Japan
.”
53
His sarcasm aside, Morgan was more right than he knew. Remembering the Marshall-Herron alert of 1940, it is not difficult to construct the language of what would have been an adequately explicit and unmistakable joint warning to Short and Kimmel:

IMMEDIATELY GO ON HIGHEST LEVEL ALERT AGAINST POSSIBLE TRANS-PACIFIC RAID X EXECUTE JOINT COASTAL FRONTIER DEFENSE PLAN INCLUDING DISTANT RECONNAISSANCE ALL SECTORS AND AIRCRAFT WARNING SERVICE MAXIMUM HOURS X ISSUE ALL AMMO X UNITED STATES DESIRES JAPAN COMMIT FIRST OVERT ACT X AVOID BOTH PUBLIC HYSTERIA AND INCIDENT OCCURRING IN LOCAL POPULATION THAT JAPAN MIGHT TAKE AS PRETEXT X GUARD AGAINST SABOTAGE AND SUBVERSION X MAINTAIN ALERT UNTIL FURTHER ORDERS X REPORT IN DETAIL

MARSHALL STARK

It is not too much to suggest that the Army-Navy cooperation that Pearl Harbor critics wanted to see practiced in Hawaii might also in this instance be desirable in Washington. Marshall and Stark enjoyed a close professional and personal association. They served together on the Joint Board. Stark assisted in the drafting of the Army warning. Gerow knew Marshall's thinking. If the War Plans and Operations people could have set aside their prerogatives and traditions of sending separate and different messages to their respective commanders, and if the drafters could have asked the help of a service publication editor (from, say, the U.S. Naval Institute
Proceedings
or the
Field Artillery Journal
) to assist them in
writing exactly what they meant to say,
perhaps the warnings of 27 November would not have gained status as tragically obscure military communications.

At 0110 on 29 November (but under the date 28 November) OpNav sent Kimmel a copy of the Army message No. 472 for “information.” Kimmel already had a copy of No. 472 via courier from Short. (And Kimmel had shared his “war warning” in paraphrase with Short.) But OpNav added to the Army message an order it had omitted from its own warning of the twenty-seventh: “Undertake no offensive action until Japan has committed an overt act.”
54
This was stronger than the “United States desires” language in the Army message, and the offensive nature of Kimmel bristled at having to conform to its “paralyzing” stricture.
55

*   *   *

Kimmel might have been sent a different, if not more specific, kind of warning if Commander Arthur H. McCollum had had his way. McCollum was head of the Far Eastern Section in the Foreign Intelligence Division of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in the sixth wing on the second deck of the Navy Department at Constitution Avenue and 17th Street in Washington. On 4 or 5 December, as he recollected, when convinced that “everything pointed to an immediate outbreak of hostilities between Japan and the United States,” he drafted a warning message for transmission to the fleet. After showing it to his immediate chief, Captain William A. Heard, he took it to Wilkinson, the director of ONI, who told him it had to be approved by Kelly Turner, who by that date was reserving all evaluation of intelligence to himself.
56
Turner showed McCollum the warning messages of 24 and 27 November and asked McCollum if he didn't think those were enough. McCollum gushed, “Well, good gosh, you put in the words ‘war warning.' I do not know what could be plainer than that, but, nevertheless, I would like to see mine go too.” Turner then struck through several passages of McCollum's text and said that if it went out it would have to go as edited. McCollum testified that he left the altered draft with Wilkinson and did not know what happened to it thereafter. No copy survives.
57
A different version of its fate was given by Turner, who claimed that, upon seeing the 24 and 27 November warnings, McCollum tore up his proposed dispatch.
58

Neither of the two principals here, Turner or McCollum, should be released without further examination. After the war, “Terrible” Turner claimed that, in the first week of December 1941, his belief was that Hawaii was directly at risk:

I was satisfied in July that we would be at war with Japan certainly within the next few months. I believed during the first part of December that the probability of a raid on Hawaii was 50-50.… I felt that there were two methods, two strategic methods that the Japanese Fleet would pursue. One was to go down and base their fleet in the Mandates with the hope that our fleet would go after them, and they would be in a good position. The other was to make a raid on Hawaii. There were two major methods and without evaluating it too much, too greatly, I thought it was about a 50-50 chance of the raid on Hawaii.
59

But, as Turner's biographer points out, “no specific mention of this belief appeared in the final version of any dispatch which he drafted for the CNO to send to CINCPAC”; although, in a different context, Turner suggested that Pearl Harbor was mentioned in one of the preliminary drafts of the 27 November warning.
60

On 7 October 1940, then Lieutenant Commander McCollum sent a memorandum to the director of ONI, Captain Walter Stratton Anderson. Four pages in length, on legal-size paper, the memorandum proper was followed by an additional page of summary. From the main text and seven-point summary we may draw a condensation of McCollum's thinking: The United States faces hostile powers in both the Atlantic and the Pacific; British naval power currently insulates the United States from assault by Germany; Japan may threaten British lines of communication in the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean; and the U.S. Pacific Fleet is capable of harassing and nullifying Japanese assistance to Germany and Italy in their war against the British. McCollum then suggests the following course of action for the United States:

A. Make an arrangement with Britain for the use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore.

B. Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies.

C. Give all possible aid to the Chinese Government of Chiang Kai-Shek.

D. Send a division of long-range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines, or Singapore.

E. Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient.

F. Keep the main strength of the U.S. Fleet now in the Pacific in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands.

G. Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil.

H. Completely embargo all U.S. trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.

McCollum concluded: “If by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better.” Or, as he expressed it in his summary, “It is to the interest of the United States to eliminate Japan's threat in the Pacific at the earliest opportunity by taking prompt and aggressive action against Japan.”
61