Pearl Harbor Betrayed (45 page)

Unfortunately for Kimmel, on that same Tuesday a dispatch arrived from Stark ordering him to relinquish his command effective 1500 on the following day. The blow was not unexpected. On the day after the attack, while talking in his office with Soc McMorris and operations officer Captain DeLany, Kimmel said, “If I were in charge in Washington I would relieve Kimmel at once. It doesn't make any difference why a man fails in the Navy, he has failed.”
31
Both men protested that nothing like that would happen. In public Kimmel had kept up his spirits, and had tried to do the same for others. On the eleventh he had issued a joint statement with Bloch:

We Americans can receive hard blows but can deliver harder ones. In these days when we face the task that lies ahead with calm determination and unflinching resolve, it is truly great to be an American.

Victory for us is assured.

Never have we been so proud as when we saw Sunday's magnificent response to the call of duty by civilian employees of the government and contractor firms—whom we call un-uniformed fighters—and officers and men of the Navy, Marine Corps, and Army.
32

In private, however, it was clear to his closest associates that Kimmel's spirits had flagged. Rear Admiral Walter S. Anderson, who as commander, Battleships, Battle Force, had his own reasons to be downcast, became particularly distressed about the emotional state of his friend:

I used to go over to see ol' Kimmel and try to cheer him up because I was worried about him, you know, because he was awfully depressed. I talked to “Poco,” and he showed me some of the files and there was that well-known telegram [of 27 November] which, paraphrased, ordered “You must allow the Japanese to attack first.” “Poco” had written on it “They did!”
33

Kimmel's removal from command was owed to the self-serving report of findings that Knox presented to Roosevelt immediately upon his arrival in Washington, at 2000 on the fourteenth. While granting that “neither Short nor Kimmel, at the time of the attack, had any knowledge of the plain intimations of some surprise move, made clear in Washington, through the interception of Japanese instructions to Nomura, in which a surprise move of some kind was clearly indicated by the insistence upon the precise time of Nomura's reply to Hull, at one o'clock on Sunday,” three times Knox stated that Short and Kimmel were not in “a state of readiness” for an air attack. He praised the fighting spirit of the crews aboard ships, which he called “superb,” and pointed out that the ships' AA batteries were firing within four minutes after the first torpedo was dropped, “and this fire grew rapidly in intensity.” At the same time, he wrote critically of the Army's AA performance: “All Army personnel were in their quarters and the guns were not manned or in position for firing, save only those in fixed positions.” In a summing-up a sentence he wrote, “Army preparations were primarily based on fear of sabotage while the Navy's were based on fear of submarine attack.”
34

On the fifteenth Roosevelt decided that a “formal investigation” should be conducted to determine if there had been “any dereliction of duty prior to the attack.” He also directed that Knox and Stimson should give press conferences and release those parts of Knox's report that would not give helpful information to the enemy. The services were to accept equal responsibility and blame. Accordingly, Knox told the press that six warships had been sunk:
Arizona
(hit by a bomb “said to have literally passed down through the smokestack”),
Utah,
three destroyers (
Cassin, Downes,
and
Shaw,
all heavily damaged but not in fact sunk), and minelayer
Oglala; Oklahoma
had capsized, he also reported. He omitted mention of Magic intelligence that had been withheld. The Army and Navy, he said, “were not on the alert against the surprise air attack on Hawaii.” He claimed that, nonetheless, forty-one Japanese planes (as against twenty-nine actual) were destroyed. Knox stated that any action taken against the Hawaiian commanders would be “dependent on the facts and recommendations made by [an] investigating board.”
35
But that restraint lasted just one day.

At the order of Roosevelt, who wanted to restore the public's confidence in the two services as quickly as possible, the Navy and War Departments issued simultaneous orders on the sixteenth relieving Admiral Kimmel of his command and displacing General Short as well as his Hawaiian Air Force commander General Martin. Yielding both CINCPAC and CINCUS, Kimmel was assigned to “temporary duty in the Fourteenth Naval District.” Rear Admiral Chester W. Nimitz was assigned to CINCPAC and (temporarily) to CINCUS with the rank of admiral. Pending Nimitz's arrival at Pearl, temporary command of the Pacific Fleet would be held by Vice Admiral Pye, commander, Battle Force. The Army replaced its ground and air commanders in Hawaii with two Air Corps officers, Lt. Gen. Delos C. Emmons and Brig. Gen. Clarence L. Tinker, respectively. Martin apparently paid the price for Short's decision to bunch up his aircraft on the ground, where many were easily destroyed. Altogether,
The New York Times
declared, the changes in command constituted “one of the most drastic shake-ups in American military and naval history.”
36

Knox's published report of Navy losses at Pearl combined with the relief of Kimmel had the effect of fixing Kimmel in the public mind as the principal miscreant in the debacle, however weak the evidence against him. The Army, which had primary responsibility for protecting Pearl and the fleet, was barely mentioned in the recriminations that now swept the country. Nor were the War and Navy Departments cited as having any particular responsibility for the defeat. The lion's share of the blame belonged to Kimmel, the country was led to believe, because he was the one who lost the ships and most of the lives. Kimmel's discharge from command before the “formal investigation” even began had the further effect of branding him publicly as derelict in his duty.

*   *   *

In CINCPAC headquarters, at 1500 on the seventeenth, Rear Admiral Kimmel and Vice Admiral Pye read their orders to each other and shook hands. Kimmel said good-bye to his downhearted staff and retired to his quarters. Pye now inherited direction of the Wake relief expedition being led at sea by Fletcher in
Saratoga
. At 1000 on the twenty-first (Wake time) Wake radioed that it was under heavy air attack by carrier-borne dive-bombers; at noon it reported severe damage inflicted by seventeen heavy bombers. Certain to follow in a day or two was a second and larger landing force. By 2000 on the twenty-first Fletcher was just 500 miles distant from the beleaguered atoll. But instead of pressing forward at twenty knots to be in position to attack such a landing force at or before dawn on the twenty-third he took a time-out—ten hours—on the twenty-second to refuel four of his eight destroyers from the fleet oiler USS
Neches,
which Kimmel had dispatched ahead. As a result, by 0800 on the twenty-third
Saratoga
was only ninety miles closer to Wake than she had been twenty-four hours earlier. Meanwhile, the bombing of Wake continued, and, as expected, a formidable invasion force, attended by carriers
Soryu
and
Hiryu
as well as by heavy cruisers
Tone
and
Chikuma,
all detached from Nagumo's
Kido Butai
on its homeward voyage, assembled offshore. Landings began at 0235 on the twenty-third and by 0500 an overwhelming number of Japanese troops controlled a solid beachhead.
37

At Pearl, Pye, his chief of staff, Rear Admiral Milo F. Draemel, and Soc McMorris deliberated on what further could be done. All three concluded that Wake could no longer be relieved. But should
Saratoga
proceed to engage the enemy, regardless? The country needed a victory. Pye decided no. He ordered Fletcher to retire. To Stark he reported, “The conservation of our naval forces became the first consideration.” On
Saratoga
the order to withdraw angered officers from the bridge to the flight deck; Marine pilots bent on saving their service-mates on Wake raged at the pusillanimity. But it was too late for Wake, which surrendered directly after Pye's order.
Saratoga'
s aircraft may not have reached the Japanese carriers and cruisers even if they tried, since that supporting force began retiring to the westward shortly after the landings. Even so, the withdrawal of
Saratoga
left a bitter taste in the mouths of many Navy and Marine personnel—more bitter for some than what had happened on the seventh. Samuel Eliot Morison, the official historian of U.S. naval operations in World War II, concluded in his account of the fiasco, “If Admiral Kimmel had been allowed to retain the Pacific Fleet command a few days longer, Wake might have been relieved, and there would certainly have been a battle.”
38

*   *   *

On 16 December Roosevelt appointed a five-man commission consisting of two Army officers, two Navy officers, and a civilian “to investigate the losses and to make recommendations.”
39
White House press secretary Stephen Early stated that “if it [commission] finds that negligence contributed to the losses it will fix responsibility for them.”
40
Upon the recommendation of Stimson, Roosevelt chose for the chairman Owen J. Roberts, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Roberts had gained national attention as a prosecutor in the Teapot Dome oil scandal. As the only member of the Court who had not been appointed by Roosevelt—Herbert Hoover named him in 1930—Roberts was thought to be a neutral, objective choice, and press reaction was favorable. For the Navy members Knox chose Admiral William H. Standley, Retired, chief of Naval Operations from 1933 to 1937, and a member of the United States delegation to the London Disarmament Conference in 1934; and white-whiskered Rear Admiral Joseph M. Reeves, Retired, holder of the Navy Cross and first naval aviator to serve as Commander in Chief, United States Fleet, from 1934 to 1936. Stimson chose Maj. Gen. Frank R. McCoy, Retired, holder of the Silver Star, veteran of campaigns in Cuba and the Philippines, and member of the general staff in France (1918); and General Marshall selected an airman and the only actively serving officer on the commission, Brig. Gen. Joseph T. McNarney, a World War I Army Air Service veteran.

The commission got off to a questionable start on 17 December by accepting Stimson's invitation to meet privately with him and Knox in the former's office. Their conversation was unsworn and unrecorded. Conversations of the same character took place the next day between the commission members and such key witnesses as Marshall, Stark, Turner, Gerow, Wilkinson, Miles, and Bratton.
41
It is unlikely that the leadership of the War and Navy Departments did not exploit this unusual opportunity to prepare the ground for the commission's deliberations, if not its findings. Certainly, in unsworn and unrecorded testimony, the temptation to deflect blame from the departments in Washington to Hawaii would have been strong.

In the course of those meetings, somewhat surprisingly, the commissioners were briefed on Magic, though the import of the decryptions seems not to have impressed Roberts: “The magic was not shown to us,” he told the JCC in 1945. “I would not have bothered to read it if it had been shown to us. All I wanted to know was whether the commanders had been advised of the criticalness of the situation.”
42
As Robert Neuleib has pointed out, Roberts's 1945 testimony implied “that he viewed the purpose of the commission much like that of a grand jury investigation. He was to see if there were enough facts to indict, and it would be up to someone else to gather the proper evidence for an actual trial.” Roberts thus had set a low threshold for damaging statements to be made and accepted against the Hawaiian commanders without any care for their probative value. The fact that the decrypted intercepts
existed
and that, on their basis, Kimmel and Short had been sent a warning, “was sufficient for an indictment.”
43

*   *   *

The Roberts Commission, as it came to be called, commenced sworn, recorded hearings in Hawaii on 22 December. Short was the first major witness, on the twenty-third. Kimmel's first appearance was on the twenty-seventh. Both former commanders made strong, confident defenses of their performances. At the same time, both acknowledged that they had made mistakes. Short said, “I think that we [the Army] made a very serious mistake when we didn't go to an alert against an all out attack.”
44
Kimmel conceded that he underestimated the importance of the code burning message, and that his judgment on torpedoes running in Pearl's shallow water had been “entirely wrong.”
45
The commanders' testimony, and that of other principals, has been considered in the Pearl Harbor literature many times and need not be repeated here. But one constant refrain in the commission's questioning does bear mention: it was the charge advanced time and again that Kimmel and Short failed to confer with each other about the meaning of the warning messages sent them on 27 November by the War and Navy Departments and about the specific actions that each intended to take in the light of those messages. No single matter is dealt with at greater length in the commission record than that one.
46
Although it recognized that the two men did confer at length on 27 November, 1, 2, and 3 December, the commission observed that the subjects of their conversations seemed not to include the defensive deployment each had made, with the result that each was unaware of the other's exact alert status; as specific examples, Kimmel did not know that Short's radar was operating only for a limited number of hours each day, and Short did not know that Kimmel was not conducting distant aerial reconnaissance.