Pearl Harbor Betrayed (55 page)

72
. Ibid., p. 237.

73
. Ibid., Pt. 6, p. 2765, Pt. 14, p. 1408.

Chapter Eight: Imperiled

1
. Ibid., Pt. 12, pp. 154–55. The phrases given are from the first messages. They are reduced to single words in the second message: HIGASI, KITA, NISHI.

2
. Wohlstetter,
Warning and Decision,
pp. 217–18.

3
. PHA, Pt. 9, p. 4347.

4
. Layton,
“And I Was There,”
p. 219.

5
. Wohlstetter,
Warning and Decision,
pp. 62, and n. 138, 181, n. 25, 186.

6
. PHA, Pt. 36, p. 81.

7
. See SRH 210, Collection of papers relating to the “Winds Execute Message, U.S. Navy 1945,” 80 pp., NARA, RG 457, Records of the National Security Agency; Graydon Lewis, “Higashi No Kaze Ame,”
Cryptolog,
vol. 8, no. 1 (fall 1986), pp. 1, 2, 21; Layton, “
And I Was There,
” pp. 219–20, 264–69, 517–23, 568 n. 46; Prange,
At Dawn We Slept,
pp. 360–61, 457–59, 665–66, 680–81, 713–19; Wohlstetter,
Warning and Decision,
pp. 51, 214–19, 307–08; NARA, RG 80 PHLO, Box 19, correspondence of Comdr. Baecher re: futile search for winds code prompt cards, 9, 17, 23 April 1946; Morgan, “Confidential Report,” Appendix C, “The ‘Winds Code,'” pp. 285–302.

8
. PHA, Pt. 39, p. 514. Prange wrote: “Why the ‘winds' message caused such a stir when the much more significant ‘bomb plot' series did not is another of the Pearl Harbor mysteries. Certainly no one in Washington needed the Japanese Foreign Ministry to tell him that diplomatic relations with Japan were ‘becoming dangerous';”
At Dawn We Slept,
p. 361. Wohlstetter wrote: “An authentic execute would have told Washington nothing that it did not already know on December 4”;
Warning and Decision,
p. 219.

9
. PHA, Pt. 12, p. 251.

10
. Ibid., Pt. 36, p. 308. See Wohlstetter,
Warning and Decision,
pp. 224–25.

11
. A transcript of the Mori conversation appears in PHA, Pt. 35, pp. 274–76. Layton and Prange maintain that the Honolulu conversant was Mrs. Mori; Wohlstetter states that it was Dr. Mori.

12
. Ibid., Pt. 28, p. 1542; Pt. 22, p. 175. Layton did not learn of the Mori transcript until a year later; “
And I Was There,
” p. 276. See KC, Roll 3, The Dr. Mori Telephone Conversation, 5 pp.; also NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Statement of Evidence, pp. 581–86.

13
. Communication Intelligence Summary—1 November 1941–6 December 1941; NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 49. Comintel quotations that follow are from the same Pearl Harbor source. “Home waters” or “Empire waters” were understood to be the Inland Sea, the approaches to Kyushu, the Isai Bay area, the coastal offshore area out to forty or sixty miles surrounding Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu; but not Etorofu or sites in northern Japan such as Hokkaido and the Kuriles.

14
. PHA, Pt. 23, p. 680. Kimmel's chief of staff, Captain (later Vice Admiral) Smith, testified before Admiral Hewitt that he had found “nothing very alarming” in the Combined Fleet's radio silence: “Our own forces while at sea exercising maintained radio silence. We had a very large force, almost half [
sic
] of the Pacific Fleet, in May, 1941, proceed to the Atlantic and no traffic was heard from them for a period of some six weeks. So the absence of radio traffic from the forces at sea doesn't indicate anything to me.” PHA, Pt. 36, pp. 213–14.

15
. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 6, Japanese Fleet Locations, 1 December 1941, p. 2.

16
. Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton, USN (Ret.), “Admiral Kimmel Deserved a Better Fate,” in Stillwell, ed.,
Air Raid: Pearl Harbor!,
p. 281. Cf. Layton,
“And I Was There,”
p. 244.

17
. NARA, RG 457, SRH 355, Naval Security Group History to World War II, prepared by Captain J. S. Holtwick, Jr., USN (Ret.), June 1971, p. 398.

18
. Ibid.

19
. Ibid., p. 399; Layton,
“And I Was There,”
pp. 231–32, 534 n. 5.

20
. The most recent writer to make the claim that the United States was reading Japan's naval operational messages prior to Pearl Harbor is Stinnett,
Day of Deceit,
pp. 5, 21–23, 71–77, 83. Stinnett's claim is rejected by two noted authorities in cryptology, David Kahn, in a review of Stinnett's book in the
New York Review of Books
, 2 November 2000, pp. 59–60; and Stephen Budiansky, “Too Late for Pearl Harbor,” Naval Institute
Proceedings,
vol. 125/12/1, 162 (December 1999), pp. 47–51. See also Budiansky,
Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II
(New York: The Free Press, 2000), pp. 8–9, 364. Both Kahn and Budiansky draw the reader's attention to an archived official history of the cryptanalytic section of OP-20-G that reported the number of Japanese naval messages read in 1941. The number was “none.” Duane L. Whitlock, a veteran of Station Cast on Corregidor, attested in 1986: “The reason that not one single JN-25 decrypt made prior to Pearl Harbor has ever been found or declassified is that no such decrypt ever existed. It simply was not within the realm of our combined [U.S.-British-Dutch] cryptologic capability to produce a usable decrypt at that particular time.” Cited in Costello,
Days of Infamy,
p. 323 and n. 81. Costello provides a discussion of British and Dutch attacks on JN-25B in pp. 316–30.

21
. R. Adm. Mac Showers, USN (Ret.), “Comment and Questions,” in David F. Winkler, Ph.D., and Jennifer M. Lloyd, eds.,
Pearl Harbor and the Kimmel Controversy: The Views Today
(Washington, D.C.: Naval Historical Foundation, Washington Navy Yard, 2000), p. 42.

22
. Layton,
“And I Was There,”
p. 94; cf. Costello,
Days of Infamy,
p. 282.

23
. NARA, RG 457, SRH 355, p. 399.

24
. Leading the attack, besides Rochefort, were cryptanalysts Lt. Comdrs. Thomas H. Dyer and Wesley A. “Ham” Wright.

25
. “Pre–Pearl Harbor, Japanese Naval Dispatches,” dated 1946, declassified 21 October 1991, found in NARA, RG 457, SRH 406, p. 10.

26
. Ibid., pp. 9, 12.

27
. Ibid., pp. 12, 13, 18, 114.

28
. PHA, Pt. 36, pp. 48, 446–67; Pt. 18, pp. 3335–36.

29
. PHA, Pt. 4, p. 1676.

30
. Fuchida, “Air Attack,”
Proceedings,
p. 943.

31
. See Layton, “
And I Was There,
” pp. 260–61; Costello,
Days of Infamy,
p. 291 and n. 33.

32
. Agawa,
Reluctant Admiral,
p. 251.

33
. Layton,
“And I Was There,”
pp. 261–63. There is a fertile literature on alleged radio signals emanating from the mid-Pacific on either naval or marine frequencies during the first week of December. Those transmissions, never proven to have come from
Kido Butai
or from a Soviet merchant ship, are examined by Layton on pp. 261–62.

34
. Chigusa, “War Diary,” Goldstein and Dillon, eds.,
Pearl Harbor Papers,
p. 190.

35
. Cited in Layton, “
And I Was There,
” p. 273.

36
. Chigusa, “War Diary,” p. 191.

37
. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 3: General Headquarters, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, Additional Data with Reference to Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor, 13 December 1945, pp. 2–3.

38
. Agawa,
Reluctant Admiral,
p. 252.

39
. Fuchida, “Air Attack,” p. 944.

40
. Quoted in ibid., p. 944.

41
. Ibid.

42
. Ibid., pp. 944–45.

43
. Message No. 901, PHA, Pt. 12, pp. 238–39.

44
. Ibid., pp. 239–45.

45
. Ibid., Pt. 14, pp. 1238, 1240–45; Waldo H. Heinrichs, Jr.,
American Ambassador: Joseph C. Grew and the Development of the United States Diplomatic Tradition
(Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1966), p. 357.

46
. PHA, Pt. 10, p. 4662.

47
. Ibid., pp. 4662–63.

48
. Simpson,
Stark,
p. 112.

49
. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 4, Kramer questionnaire, filled out for Capt. Safford, 28 December 1943 and 22 January 1944, pp. 2 and 6.

50
. PHA, Pt. 8, pp. 3903–04, Pt. 4, pp. 1762–63.

51
. The reader who wishes to investigate the Army muddle, which includes charges of altered testimony, may consult Henry C. Clausen and Bruce Lee,
Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement
(New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1992), pp. 29–300
passim;
and Costello,
Days of Infamy,
pp. 204–15, 400–01.

52
. PHA, Pt. 3, pp. 1110, 1430; Pogue,
Ordeal and Hope,
pp. 223–24.

53
. Ibid., Pt. 3, p. 1121; Pt. 18, p. 2965; Pt. 22, p. 45, Pt. 27, p. 96; Arnold,
Global Mission,
pp. 266–69.

54
. Bratton testified that, “Nobody in ONI, nobody in G-2, knew that any major element of the fleet was in Pearl Harbor on Sunday morning the 7th of December … because that was part of the war plan, and they had been given a war warning.” PHA, Pt. 9, p. 4534. Washington's ignorance of the fleet's actual dispositions did not speak well of the two intelligence services. Judging from their testimonies in the various Pearl Harbor investigations and hearings, operations staffers seem to have been under the same misapprehension. It is one of Pearl Harbor's enduring ironies that Tokyo knew more about U.S. Pacific Fleet daily location of ships and aircraft than did the Navy Department.

55
. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 49, Japanese Aircraft Carrier Operations, Interrogations of Captains Kawaguichi Susuma, Nagaishi Marataka, and Aoki Taijiro; 4–5 October 1945.

56
. Ibid., Box 40, Weekly Intelligence, United States Pacific Fleet and Pacific Ocean Areas, Vol. I, No. 52 (9 July 1945), pp. 17–19. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 25, Kimmel to Betty, 12 December 1941.

57
. PHA, Pt. 12, p. 245.

58
. Ibid.

59
. Ibid., Pt. 11, p. 5274.

60
. Ibid., Pt. 12, p. 248. This is probably the single most critical Magic decrypt. Where most Magic information would have had little warning value for Kimmel and his staff except in hindsight, certain individual messages did have an immediate value. One thinks of the Japanese deadlines of 25 and 29 November; the “bomb plot” messages; the code destruction messages; the 14-part response to Hull's Ten-Point note; and this present message, which would become known as the “one o'clock” message—a something-is-going-to-happen message—Magic at its most vital moment.

61
. Ibid., p. 249. The nos. 908 and 909 were messages of thanks to Namoru and Kurusu for “all the efforts you two Ambassadors have been making,” and to the embassy's commercial attaché for the same.

62
. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 4, Kramer questionnaire, filled out for Capt. Safford, 28 December 1943 and 22 January 1944, pp. 5–7. It is important to acknowledge that Safford's role in eliciting answers to his questionnaire was not a disinterested one. For two years he had wondered why Kimmel had ignored the Magic information. In the fall of 1943, when he discovered that Magic-originated intelligence had, for the most part, not been sent to Kimmel, he set about to defend both the admiral and General Short. In a letter accompanying a second questionnaire on 22 January 1944, addressed to “My dear Kramer-san,” the newly converted advocate wrote: “I am just beginning to get things lines [
sic
] up on this end. No one in Op Nav can be trusted. Premature action would only tip off the people who framed Adm. Kimmel and Gen. Short, and will also get Safford [me] and Kramer [you] in very serious trouble … I knew Adm. Kimmel was a scapegoat from the start, but I did not suspect that he was a victim of a frame-up until about 15 Nov. 1943, could not confirm it until 2 Dec. 1943, and did not have absolute truth until about 18 Jan. 1944. Capt. Safford [I] has overwhelming proof of the guilt of Op Nav and the Gen Staff, plus a list of about fifteen reliable witnesses.” The Stark-Kramer conversation of 7 December quoted here may not have happened exactly as given. Safford composed it, apparently on the basis of an earlier conversation with Kramer. For his part, Kramer said at one point in the questionnaire that he could not “verify” the conversation, but later in the document stated: “There were undoubtedly a few words exchanged with the Admiral, most likely along the lines you quote as my last reply.… The quoted exclamation of Adm. Stark would have been typical in character, because he had used emphatic exclamation once or twice before during the fall when particularly ‘hot' items were being shown him.… With my mind focussed on the technical and messenger boy aspects that morning I simply do not recall the complete conversation in question.”

63
. Ibid., pp. 6–7. About this meeting Stimson recorded in his diary, “Hull is very certain that the Japs are planning some deviltry and we are all wondering when the blow will strike.…” Stimson Diary, 7 December 1941.

64
. PHA, Pt. 9, p. 4524.

65
. Pogue,
Ordeal and Hope,
p. 227.

66
. PHA, Pt. 9, p. 4525.

67
. Ibid.

68
. PHA, Pt. 9, p. 4534; Pt. 3, p. 1114.

69
. NARA, RG 80, PHLO, Box 49, Japanese Aircraft Carrier Operations; Fuchida, “Air Attack,” pp. 945–46; Prange,
At Dawn We Slept,
pp. 490–91; and exhibits in the USS
Arizona
Memorial at Pearl Harbor. By carrier and type the aircraft launched in the first wave were (T for torpedo, B for bomb):