Pearl Harbor Betrayed (48 page)

37
. KC, Roll 3, OT of Admiral Husband E. Kimmel's Statement Before the NCI [hereafter Kimmel Statement], pp. 1–3.

38
. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 29, Stark to Kimmel, 13 January and 29 January 1941.

39
. Ibid., Boxes 2 and 18, Pacific Fleet Confidential Letter No. 2 CL-41, 15 February, revised 14 October 1941. Captain Willard A. Kitts, fleet gunnery officer, testified that “The letter [2CL-41] was issued again by Admiral Nimitz, with Admiral Kimmel's name on it, in middle of summer 1942. He used this letter as an enclosure to be sent to Fleet and merely stated in the letter that the former letter was to remain in effect.… Plans that Kimmel made prior to Pearl Harbor were to be used after Pearl Harbor. Instructions as to watches and states of conditions of readiness did not change.” KC, Roll 4; PHA, Pt. 32, p. 400.

40
. KC, Roll 3, Kimmel, Memorandum with Respect to Security of Fleet in Port, 5 July 1944, pp. 1–13. Fleet gunnery officer Kitts testified that on 29 April 1941 Vice Admiral William S. Pye, Commander, Battleships, Battle Force, made modifications on the manning of guns that made AA preparedness on battleships “equal to or better than the condition of readiness 3” laid down in Port Security 2CL-41; PHA, Pt. 32, p. 397. The Battle Force consisted of all battleships; Cruiser Divisions 3 and 9; Carrier Divisions 1 and 2; Mine Squadron One (Divs. 1, 2, and 3); and Destroyer Flotillas 1 and 2. Kimmel's appeal for Bofors and Oerlikon AA armament is in NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 25, Kimmel to Stark, “Survey of Conditions in the Pacific Fleet,” 26 May 1941, p. 9. The normal antiaircraft armament of battleships was eight 5-inch ≠.25-caliber guns, six to eight 3-inch ≠ .50-caliber guns, and about twelve .50-caliber machine guns; that of cruisers, eight 5-inch ≠ .25-caliber guns, except for two which had 5-inch ≠.38-caliber guns, and eight to twelve .50-caliber machine guns. Percentages of officers and crews aboard are given in PHA, Pt. 22, p. 537; and in KC, Roll 4, Memorandum Prepared for Vice Admiral Pye, Commander Battle Force, Pacific Fleet, Air Raid, December 7, 1941; n.d. but probably late in the same month. Testimony about sobriety is found in ibid., Pt. 32, pp. 315, 339; Pt. 23, p. 747.

41
. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 25, Kimmel to Nimitz, 16 February 1941. On 3 March Nimitz replied, pointing out that so many ordnance plants were opening up to provide weapons and ammunition for the British Royal Navy that it was necessary to detach trained officers from the fleet.

42
. Quoted by Kimmel in his Statement Before the Joint Congressional Committee [hereafter JCC] on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack; OT in KC, Roll 1, p. 16.

43
. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 37, the Chief of Naval Operations to the Secretary of the Navy, 10 June 1941.

44
. Kimmel, Statement Before the JCC, OT in KC, Roll 1, pp. 14–15.

45
. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 48, 19 May 1941, Commander Arthur C. Davis, Fleet Aviation Officer, to Chief of Staff William Ward Smith, “Subjects for Possible Discussion with the Secretary of the Navy.” There was also a continuing shortage into December of .50-caliber ammunition for the fleet's AA machine guns, necessitating such economy in training as limiting the number of rounds an individual gunner could fire in drills. PHA, Pt. 32, p. 392.

46
. Ibid., Box 29, the Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics to the Chief of Naval Operations, 5 March 1941.

47
. Gordon W. Prange interview with Bloch, 28 November 1962; cited in Gordon W. Prange,
At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story at Pearl Harbor
(New York: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 68

48
. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 29, Stark to Kimmel, 13 January 1941.

49
. Ibid., Stark to Kimmel, 29 January 1941.

50
. KC, Roll 4, Exercises for the Combined Training of Aircraft, Sky Lookouts, and Antiaircraft Batteries in the Hawaiian Area—Promulgation of; 3 July 1941.

51
. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 14, Memorandum of the Under Secretary of the Navy reporting information given by Rear Admiral Roscoe F. Good, who (as a commander) had been an assistant operations officer on Kimmel's staff.

52
. Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton, USN (Ret.), “Admiral Kimmel Deserved a Better Fate,” in Stillwell, ed.,
Air Raid, Pearl Harbor!
, p. 277.

53
. PHA, Pt. 32, p. 398.

54
. William F. Halsey,
Admiral Halsey's Story
(New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1947), pp. 70, 82.

Chapter Three: Opposite Numbers

1
. Hiroyuki Agawa,
The Reluctant Admiral: Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy,
translated by John Bester (Tokyo, New York: Kodansha International Ltd., 1979), p. 220. Oikawa may have burned Yamamoto's letter, as requested. But a copy, in a sealed envelope, was left by Yamamoto with an academy classmate, Vice Admiral Hori Teikichi, who made the document public on 9 November 1949. See Professor Jun Tsunoda, Kokushikan University, Tokyo, and Admiral Kazutomi Uchida, JMSDF (Ret.), “The Pearl Harbor Attack: Admiral Yamamoto's Fundamental Concept,”
Naval War College Review,
vol. XXXI, no. 2 (fall 1978), pp. 83–88.

2
. This scenario is best presented in Stephen E. Pelz,
Race to Pearl Harbor: The Failure of the Second London Naval Conference and the Onset of World War II
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 34–39. Pelz interviewed a number of Japanese naval strategists from the pre–Pearl Harbor period. Though the scenario cited represented traditional Japanese naval thinking, it should not be thought that it excluded any thought of a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Lt. Comdr. Kusaka Ryunosuke, an instructor at the Kasumigaura Aviation Corps, committed such a Pearl Harbor plan to writing in 1927 or 1928. See Agawa,
Reluctant Admiral,
p. 193.

3
. Quoted in Gordon W. Prange,
At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor
(New York: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 16. Cf. Tsunoda and Uchida, “Yamamoto's Fundamental Concept,” pp. 84–85.

4
. Tsunoda and Uchida, “Concept,” p. 85. See also p. 88: “To do so they [the Japanese Navy] must, first of all, clear both sides of the route to the south, which meant the occupation of the Philippines as well as of Singapore.” “Hawaii Operation” would be the Japanese Imperial Headquarters' official, not so secret, code name for the Pearl Harbor attack.

5
. Quoted in Agawa,
Reluctant Admiral,
p. 220. The writer has taken the liberty of altering the third person, as given by Agawa, to the first person.

6
. Ibid., p. 65.

7
. Ibid., p. 28.

8
. Asada Sadao, “The Japanese Navy and the United States,” in Dorothy Borg and Shumpei Okamoto, eds.,
Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations, 1931–1941
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), p. 232; Pelz,
Race to Pearl Harbor,
pp. 14–16.

9
. Agawa,
Reluctant Admiral,
p. 33.

10
. Pelz,
Race to Pearl Harbor,
p. 40. On the clear superiority in this period of Japanese cruisers and destroyers, torpedoes, star shells and parachute flares, optics for night work, regular issue binoculars, and possibly also gunnery, navigation, ship-handling tactics, and fighting spirit, see Samuel Eliot Morison,
History of United States Naval Operations in World War II
, Vol. III,
The Rising Sun in the Pacific, 1931–April 1942
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1948), pp. 22–24.

11
. Agawa,
Reluctant Admiral
, p. 51; Sadao, “Japanese Navy,” p. 243.

12
. Pelz,
Race to Pearl Harbor
, pp. 159–64.

13
. Agawa,
Reluctant Admiral
, p. 8.

14
. Construction of these two superbattleships began in secret, in 1937. The
Yamato
was launched in December 1941, the
Musashi
in August 1942. Their main gun turrets bristled with 18.1-inch guns that fired 3,200-pound projectiles over a greater range than that achieved by 16-inch guns. Armor plate 25.5 inches thick protected the hulls of these “unsinkable” monsters.
Musashi
would be sunk on 24 October 1944 during the Battle of Leyte Gulf;
Yamato
would go down on 7 April 1944 during the Battle of Okinawa.

15
. Sadao, “Japanese Navy,” pp. 237–38.

16
. Ibid., p. 237. Vice Foreign Minister Shigemitzu Mamoru had earlier expressed concern that the Navy wanted to “fight with the United States around 1936”; ibid., p. 240.

17
. By 7 December 1941, the U.S. Pacific Fleet consisted of nine battleships, three aircraft carriers, twelve heavy cruisers, nine light cruisers, sixty-seven destroyers, and twenty-seven submarines. An advance force, named the Asiatic Fleet and commanded by Admiral Thomas C. Hart, USN, was based at Manila, in the Philippines. It consisted of three cruisers, thirteen destroyers, and twenty-nine submarines. British, Dutch, and Free French naval forces in the South Pacific consisted of two battleships, one heavy cruiser, eleven light cruisers, twenty destroyers, and thirteen submarines. The Japanese Combined Fleet consisted of ten battleships, ten carriers, eighteen heavy cruisers, twenty light cruisers, one hundred and twelve destroyers, and sixty-five submarines.

18
. John Deane Potter,
Yamamoto: The Man Who Menaced America
(New York: The Viking Press, 1965), pp. 34–36.

19
. Agawa,
Reluctant Admiral
, p. 6.

20
. Ibid., p. 189.

21
. Ibid. A more familiar rendering of the original Japanese of Prince Konoye's
Memoirs
(a “Japanese-schoolboy translation,” Samuel Eliot Morison called it) goes: “If I am told to fight regardless of consequence, I shall run wild considerably for the first six months or a year, but I have utterly no confidence for the second and third years”; Morison,
Rising Sun
, p. 46.

22
. Agawa,
Reluctant Admiral,
p. 192.

23
. Vice Admiral Shigeru Fukudome, “Hawaii Operation,”
U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings
, Vol. 81 (December 1955), p. 1317.

24
. Ibid., p. 1318.

25
. Ibid.

26
. Kimmel Family Papers [hereafter KFP]. A miscellaneous collection of Admiral Kimmel–related papers, including a three-page biography of the admiral, is in the possession of the admiral's only surviving son (of three), Edward R. Kimmel, of Wilmington, Delaware. During an interview with Mr. Kimmel on 22–23 May 2000, the writer received a copy of the biographical statement, examined genealogical entries in the family bible, and recorded Mr. Kimmel's personal recollections of his father. Another short biographical statement, titled “Brief Biography of Rear Admiral H. E. Kimmel, U.S. Navy, Commander, Cruisers, Battle Force,” appears in Roll 23 of the KC. The same collection contains items of Kimmel's early personal correspondence, most of it to and from family members, from 1907 to 1909, but, unaccountably, none from 1909 to 1924. In the latter year there begins a comprehensive collection of both official and personal correspondence that continues until his death in 1968. Additional important biographical material was collected by Donald Grey Brownlow, who conducted numerous interviews with Admiral Kimmel in the 1960s, and published his gleanings in a book,
The Accused: The Ordeal of Rear Admiral Husband Edward Kimmel, U.S.N.
(New York: Vantage Press, 1968).

27
. Peter Karsten,
The Naval Aristocracy: The Golden Age of Annapolis and the Emergence of Modern American Navalism
(New York: The Free Press, 1972), p. 41. The author cites two sources for this finding. Historian Ronald H. Spector has summarized the academic situation: “The naval academy [at the turn of the century] was parochial, spartan, intellectually sterile, and pedagogically backwards”; Spector,
Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan
(New York: Vintage Books, 1985), p. 18.

28
. Karsten,
Naval Aristocracy
, pp. 40, 42.

29
. Dorothy and Thomas Cassin Kinkaid were children of Admiral Thomas Wright Kinkaid (class of 1880).

30
. Brownlow,
The Accused
, p. 35.

31
. Quoted in ibid., p. 74. Husband E. Kimmel,
Admiral Kimmel's Story
(Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1955), p. 6. Concurrently with Kimmel's appointment, the Navy Department created three separate fleets: Pacific, Asiatic, and Atlantic.

32
. Ibid., p. 6. A mischievous rumor circulated in Washington to the effect that Kimmel owed his appointment to a relationship that his wife, Dorothy, had with Senator Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky. But Dorothy was not related to the majority leader, nor had she ever met him; KC, Roll 1, “Statement of Rear-Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, U.S. Navy Retired, May 1942,” p. 37.

33
. Nimitz, personal letter to Brownlow, 25 February 1962;
The Accused
, p. 69.

34
. Stark, interview with Brownlow, Washington, D.C., 23 April 1966;
The Accused,
p. 69.

35
. Ibid., pp. 69–70. Kimmel asserted in 1962 that he considered turning the job down, but decided that that would be “foolish.” Besides, with close friends like Stark and Royal E. Ingersoll as CNO and assistant CNO, respectively, he would be kept “completely informed of all developments;” ibid., p. 75.

36
. PHA, Pt. 15, Exhibits, p. 1601.

37
. Interview with Edward R. Kimmel, Wilmington, DE, 23 May 2000.

38
. Thomas K. Kimmel, personal letter to Brownlow, 18 June 1966;
The Accused
, pp. 169–70.