Pearl Harbor Betrayed (26 page)

In the JCC hearings, war plans chief Soc McMorris testified that, after receipt of the 27 November warning, Kimmel and his staff carefully considered the availability of flyable patrol planes, the status of training, the patrol wings' responsibility for supplying trained personnel for new squadrons, the tasks assigned the wings in WPPac-46, and the fact that, given aircraft shortages and maintenance limitations, seaward patrols would be “largely token searches.” The question was one on which Kimmel and his staff had gone up and down the scale many times. The conclusion, McMorris stated, was that “training would suffer heavily and that if we were called upon to conduct a war, that we would find a large proportion of our planes needing engine overhaul at the time we most required their services.” Exhaustion of crews was another consideration. Kimmel therefore decided to concentrate on expansion training until more aircraft, or more information, became available.
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No witness in later investigations or hearings cited a specific order given after the reconnaissance matter was deliberated upon and decided, although Bloch stated that Kimmel made his decision on 27 November.
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For his part, Kimmel said, simply, “However, I want it clearly understood, it was my responsibility and I would give the orders to the planes.”
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The Navy court in 1944 judged that the “the mission of this reconnaissance was not due to oversight or neglect. It was the result of a military decision, reached after much deliberation and after weighing the information at hand and all the factors involved.”
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Halsey, the senior Navy air commander in the Hawaiian area, said after the war, “Any Admiral worth his stars would have made the same choice.”
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Kimmel's critics have drawn attention to the fact that he did not share knowledge of, or consult about, the 27 November warning with Rear Admiral Bellinger, his commander of Patrol Wings 1 and 2, as though that was a serious negligence. Several observations might be made in that connection. Bellinger already had his marching orders within the narrow confines of his fourfold mission: daily reconnaissance over the operating area; training; distant reconnaissance beginning on W-Day; and departure of the wings for the Marshalls raid prior to J-Day plus five. He had rarely been engaged in broad-based executive decisions at the staff level and probably did not come to Kimmel's mind as a necessary consultant now. His remarks to Kimmel made in the memorandum of 19 December reveal that his mind was at one with Kimmel's on the inadvisability of attempting a 360-degree search over an extended period, a fact that was already well known to Kimmel, thus obviating any need for further consultation. In any event, Bloch, Bellinger's immediate superior, was in regular consultative contact with Kimmel. Finally, Bellinger was not alone among officers to whom neither the existence nor the content of the war warning was communicated by Kimmel. As the latter stated before the JCC: “[Bellinger] was not the only air man we had there. He was rear admiral in charge of this patrol wing.… I did not tell a great many other admirals about the war warning. I did not tell a great many other people in Hawaii about the war warning. But Admiral Bellinger was there directly under my orders, and I felt capable of giving him any orders that he required.”
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Kimmel's critics have furthermore argued that while Oahu may not have had sufficient patrol aircraft for a 360-degree search, it did have enough for an arc of lesser scope. Following the Marshall-Herron alert of June 1940, Kimmel's predecessor, Admiral Richardson, for a brief time had increased the regular training searches out of Oahu from a distance of 180 nautical miles to 300. Since only six aircraft were employed, it was only a very partial search, and, in Kimmel's view, “At no time did [Richardson] have, in my opinion, any real reconnaissance flying from Pearl Harbor that would have been successful, except by chance, in discovering an attack in time to be of any real use.”
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In his fourth endorsement to the findings of the NCI, dated 13 August 1945, Secretary James V. Forrestal expressed his opinion that “there were sufficient fleet patrol planes and crews, in fact, available in Oahu during the week preceding the attack to have flown, for at least several weeks, a daily reconnaissance covering 128 degrees to a distance of about 700 miles.”
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His opinion raises a number of questions. A 128-degree sector is just over one-third of the compass rose, but which one-third would be covered? Richardson did not cover 128 degrees but his small patrol concentrated on a sector from west to northwest. Those happened to be the sectors from which Pearl Harbor had been successfully “attacked” by air at dawn on 30 March 1938 during the U.S. Navy's Fleet Problem XIX. Two carriers, USS
Saratoga
(CV-3) and USS
Ranger
(CV-4), launched the attacking SBU-1 biplane aircraft. (USS
Lexington
[CV-2] was scheduled also to participate, but was forced to make for Honolulu when an epidemic throat infection afflicted 500 of her company.) Under the overall command of Vice Admiral Ernest J. King, commander, aircraft, Battle Force, who had broken his three-star flag in
Saratoga,
and had chosen Bellinger for his chief of staff,
Ranger
advanced on Oahu from French Frigate Shoals to west-northwestward, while
Saratoga
steamed from the northwestward behind an eastward-moving front of bad weather.
Ranger,
we know, launched at 0500. The aircraft from both carriers caught patrolling Army Air Corps aircraft at low altitudes and achieved what was declared to be a successful attack. The Navy's postproblem report concluded that “with the forces then based on Hawaii it would be impossible to defend the area.”
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But if Kimmel had relied on that example and deployed a partial search from the west to northwest, his scout planes would have missed the Mitsubishis, Nakajimas, and Aichis that descended from due north on 7 December.
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Prior to the Japanese attack, Kimmel, his senior air commander Halsey, and his intelligence chief Layton all expected that any air attack attempted against Oahu would be made from the Marshalls, to the southwest. If a partial search sector were designed to include the southwest, as seems likely, the patrols would have been even farther removed from due north. Of course, the sector searched daily could have been rotated around the compass rose, in a kind of Russian roulette, but such a plan as that would not have avoided the second major question: how would a maximum effort around 128 degrees have averted the physical attrition of planes and crews that undermined the full compass search? As Kimmel told the JCC: “I decided that I could not fritter away my patrol-plane resources by pushing them to the limit in daily distant searches of one sector around Oahu—which within the predictable future would have to be discontinued when the patrol planes and crews gave out.… Had I directed their use for intensive distance searches from Oahu, I faced the peril of having these planes grounded when the fleet needed them and when the war plan was executed.”
89

Some Kimmel critics have asked why he did not mount at least a narrowly conducted search employing just a few aircraft over some arguably “more dangerous sector” as a way of covering his behind in the event a Japanese attack did materialize. Kimmel anticipated that meretricious argument during the JCC hearings: “Now I might have made a token search and I might have been able to come here and say I made a token search. It was not worth anything but I made it, and therefore I am all right. I did not do that. I have never done that kind of thing, and I will not do it.”
90

Had a daily patrol been run due north to a range of seven hundred miles, what might the pilots and crews, who had no radar, been able to see with their Mark I eyeballs, even when enhanced by 7×50 binoculars? Not very much or very clearly, particularly if they did not know what to look for. Going north from Oahu there is an extensive weather belt characterized generally by low ceilings, squalls, rain, and low visibility. A Pacific region meteorologist in Honolulu told the writer that intense low pressure systems cross the area north of Oahu west to east, one after another, during December. And a meteorologist-forecaster at the National Weather Service Forecast Office at the University of Hawaii said that typical of weather systems to 600 miles north of Oahu in December are stratocumulus cloud bases of 2,000 feet, and tops of 6,000 to 7,000 feet.
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Aircraft having to fly below 2,000-foot cloud bases would have a drastically reduced radius of visibility. Japanese pilots who participated in the attack reported later that on 6 and 7 December the skies north of Oahu were overcast. Vice Admiral David C. Richardson, USN (Ret.), longtime Navy pilot and, in his last assignment, deputy commander in chief, Pacific Fleet, has written about those latitudes in a letter:

The areas to the north are in the tradewinds. 15 to 25 kt. wind strength is usual. Seas are normally choppy. Cumulus clouds scud. These weather factors strongly affect visibility required to see even large ships like carriers at sea. Wakes rapidly disappear. I can't begin to count the times I have searched for my carrier on return leg and suddenly spotted it looming large and near. (Nor my feeling of relief.) Widespread rain squall conditions were more to be feared than Japanese fighter pilots.
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We know something about the conduct of a daily intensive air search out of Oahu in this period of history, because, in the wake of the events of 7 December, distant reconnaissance was immediately undertaken there utilizing surviving patrol aircraft strength and PBY-5 as well as B-17 reinforcements that were rushed to the island from the mainland. Kimmel's replacement as CINCPAC, Admiral Nimitz, was convinced that “the attack of 7 December will be followed by others.”
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He was proved wrong in that, but the distant reconnaissance flights he commanded brought together some reliable data pertinent to what might have been attempted prior to 7 December, if Kimmel had thought the flights advisable. On 7 January 1942, Nimitz had a total force of 67 PBYs and 42 B-17s, but each day, because of maintenance and crew rest requirements, he could only send out 25 of the former and 12 of the latter. The result was that, while he had hoped to cover 360 degrees, his long-range aircraft were covering only 290 degrees to a range of 700 nautical miles. Neither the PBY-5s nor the B-17s, it turned out, could achieve a radius beyond 700 miles, with reasonable margin for safe return, while carrying bombs, as they were mandated to do under a war alert—depth charges against submarines in the case of the PBYs. The remaining 70 degrees of the compass rose was covered, inadequately, by B-18s, Vought OS2U-3 Kingfishers and VJs to distances of 200–300 miles.

Aircraft departed on search daily at 0600. The ground speed of a two-engined PBY during search averaged 100 knots, taking into account that one of the aircraft's legs, outbound or inbound, had to contend with headwinds, particularly in the northern quadrants. Average ground speed of the four-engined B-17 at low altitudes was 150 knots. Flight time per search for a PBY was 16.5 hours; that for a B-17 11.7 hours. Average radius of visibility for the PBY was 15 miles; for the B-17 25 miles. The pilot's rule of thumb was that the separation between his outbound and inbound tracks at the extremity of his range was double the distance of his visibility. If visibility was 15 miles, he would travel a 30-mile leg along the outer rim of the search perimeter before turning home to base. The divide narrowed as he approached base. In the month of January the PBY flew its last 550 miles in darkness.
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Applying these data to what is known of the Japanese strike force's approach to Oahu yields interesting material for speculation. It is a given that visual detection of that force on the night of 6–7 December was not possible because of darkness. But, it may be asked, could the Japanese carriers have been sighted during the
daylight
hours of the
day before,
by a patrol aircraft flying the 0-degrees (north) sector to the maximum scouting range of a PBY or B-17? The answer is dependent, of course, on the known position times of the Japanese carriers. The “Japanese Attack Plan” reconstructed from postwar U.S. military interrogations of Japanese naval officers specified that the striking force was scheduled to rendezvous for refueling and supply on 3 December at point C, latitude 42 degrees north, longitude 170 degrees west, well northwest of Oahu. The force was then to proceed from the rendezvous point southeast to point D, latitude 31 degrees north, longitude 157 degrees west, arriving at that position, about 575 nautical miles north of Oahu, at 1130 on the sixth. From that point, following a topping off of fuel tanks, the carriers would begin a sprint south down the 158 degree meridian at twenty-four knots toward a launch position at point E, latitude 25 degrees north, longitude 158 degrees west, or 230 nautical miles due north of Oahu.
95
Twilight on the sixth began at 0508, sunrise was at 0626, sunset was at 1719, twilight ended at 1838. Moonrise was at 2005.

From the tracking chart we can calculate that a PBY-5 taking off on the sixth at 0600, an average time to be “on the step” in Kaneohe Bay, and flying north along the 158 degree meridian at 100 knots would reach 31 degrees north, 158 degrees west at approximately 1145 on the clock while the carriers were refueling to the east outside the PBY's visibility range; though a flight along the 157-degree meridian would intercept the refueling carriers at approximately 1204. Similarly, we can calculate that a B-17 lifting off from Hickam Field at 0600 and proceeding north along the 158-degree meridian would pass west of point D at approximately 0952 when the carriers were still to the northwest outside the aircraft's twenty-five-nautical-mile visibility range; however, a flight north along the 157-degree meridian would place the B-17 within its visibility range of the still southeast-bound carriers for a window of approximately seventeen minutes, from 1010 to 1027. These positions and times are highly speculative. Assuming that the Japanese carriers lay within the PBY's average fifteen-mile radius of visibility, or the B-17's average twenty-five-mile radius, what was the likelihood of their being sighted? Weather conditions would go far in determining the answer. From Japanese aviators—the official records, including deck logs and war diaries, were largely destroyed shortly before the Japanese surrender
96
—we have partial meteorological information. Captain Fuchida Mitsuo, who led the air attack, wrote in 1952, “We had maintained our eastward course in complete secrecy, thanks to thick, low-hanging clouds. Moreover, on 30 November, 6 and 7 December, the sea, which we feared might be rough, was calm enough for easy fueling.” After a presunrise takeoff of the attacking air fleet on the seventh, Fuchida set a flight course due south at 0615. “We flew through and over the thick clouds which were at 2,000 meters [6,562 feet].… But flying over the clouds we could not see the surface of the water, and, consequently, had no check on our drift.”
97
From other sources we learn something about conditions before the sixth. Captain Genda Minoru, who planned the attack, and was aboard the flagship
Akagi,
told interrogators that during the passage to Hawaii the fleet “didn't expect to meet any shipping, and fog and stormy weather would impair visibility conditions, anyway.”
98
A prisoner of war told U.S. interrogators that the weather was closed in until the afternoon of the fifth.
99
From interrogation of a carrier pilot U.S. intelligence learned that during the fleet's passage, at least up to 2 December, “the weather was foggy part of the time.”
100
Sadao Chigusa, chief ordnance officer of the destroyer
Akigumo,
recorded in his diary that “stormy weather” had attended the fleet's passage as far as 5 December (Hawaii time).
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