Barnes - Pearl Harbor After a Quarter of a Century

Pearl Harbor After a Quarter of a Century

by Harry Elmer Barnes

Table of Contents

I.     The Lessons Of Pearl Harbor More Relevant Than Ever Before    9
II.    Roosevelt's Policies Prior To Pearl Harbor    14
III.    Washington Should Not Have Been Surprised When The Japanese Attacked Pearl Harbor    21
IV.    Keeping Short And Kimmel In Ignorance Of A Surprise Japanese Attack    42
V.    The So-Called Warnings To Short And Kimmel    48
VI.    The Blackout Of Hawaii On The Eve Of Pearl Harbor    69
VII.    The Overall Responsibility Of Roosevelt For The Surprise Attack    102
VIII.    How We Entered War With Japan Four Days Before Pearl Harbor    106
IX.    Roosevelt Luck!    121
X.    The Final Question    128
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I. THE LESSONS OF PEARL HARBOR MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER BEFORE


The surprise Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, is regarded by most persons who recall it at all as an isolated dramatic episode, now consigned to political and military archeology. Quite to the contrary, on account of our entry into the war, it became one of the most decisive battles in the history of the human race. It has already proved far more so than any of the "fifteen decisive battles" immortalized by Sir Edward Creasy.
The complex and cumulative aftermath of Pearl Harbor has played the dominant role in producing the menacing military pattern and political impasse of our time, and the military-industrial-political Establishment that controls

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this country and has sought to determine world policy. It created the four most likely focal points for the outbreak of a thermonuclear war which may lead to the extermination of the human race--Berlin, Formosa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East--unless future sudden flare-ups like that in Cuba in 1962 may turn the lethal trick. Hence, while Creasy's battles may have decided the fate of important political entities and alignments in the past, Pearl Harbor may well have deeply affected the fate of mankind. American entry into the war produced atomic and nuclear warfare as well as Russian domination of Central Europe and the triumph of Communist China in Asia.
Moreover, a detailed study of how Pearl Harbor came about provides ominous lessons as to the uncertainties of human judgment and the eccentricities in personal conduct that control the outbreak of wars, an ever more crucial consideration in determining the destinies of the human race as we move on in the nuclear era. The damage done to our Pacific Fleet, although its significance was exaggerated at the time, was impressive and devastating. But it was a trivial matter compared to the fact that the Japanese attack put the United States actively into the second World War. The personal and political ambitions. professional stereotypes, public deceit and mendacity (the credibility gap), ruts and grooves of thinking and action, and the martial passions that brought on Pearl Harbor would, if repeated in such a crisis as that raised by the Cuban incident of 1962, or a future one in Berlin, Formosa, Vietnam, or the Middle East might very well destroy civilization.
As the military episode that brought the United States into the second World War, the results of Pearl Harbor already indicate that this produced drastic and possibly ominous changes in the pattern of American relations to the rest of the world. We voluntarily and arbitrarily assumed unprecedented burdens in feeding and financing a world badly disrupted by war. The international policy of George Washington and the "fathers" of the United States, based on non-intervention but not embracing isolation, was terminated for any predictable period.
President Truman continued the doctrine of the interventionist liberals of the latter part of the 1930's, to the effect that the United States must be prepared to do battle with foreign countries whose basic ideology does not conform with that of the United States. He further elected to create and perpetuate a cold war until actual hot warfare

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breaks out, as it did in Korea in 1950 and in southeast Asia a decade later. The United States sought to police the world and extend the rule of law on a planetary basis, which actually meant imposing the ideology of our eastern seaboard Establishment throughout the world, by force, if necessary, as in Vietnam. By the twenty-fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the United States was being informed by both official policy and influential editorials that we must get adjusted to the fact that we face permanent war, an especially alarming outlook in a nuclear era in which the two major powers are already amply prepared to "overkill" their enemies. "Perpetual war for perpetual peace" has become the American formula in relation to world affairs.
Drastic changes in the domestic realm can also be attributed to the impact of our entry into the second World War. The old rural society that had dominated humanity for millennia was already disintegrating rapidly as the result of urbanization and technological advances, but the latter failed to supply adequate new institutions and agencies to control and direct an urban civilization. This situation faced the American public before 1941 but the momentous transformation was given intensified rapidity and scope as a result of the extensive dislocations produced by years of warfare and recovery. These gave rise to increasing economic problems, temporarily fended off by a military-industrial-political complex that provided no permanent solution. The social problems of an urban age were enlarged and intensified, crime increased and took on new forms that became ever more difficult to combat, juvenile disorganization became rampant, racial problems increased beyond precedent, and the difficulties of dealing with this unprecedented and complicated mass of domestic issues were both parried and intensified by giving primary but evasive consideration to foreign affairs in our national policy and operations. Hence, a discussion of the lessons of Pearl Harbor for today reveals a situation which is more than a matter of idle curiosity for military antiquarians.
Moreover, as will be pointed out during our treatment of the Pearl Harbor problem, we had by 1941 entered into a system of diplomatic secrecy and international intrigue and deception which had already committed this country to world war several days before the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor, and without the slightest knowledge of this on the part of the American public. The implications of such a contingency in a nuclear age are as obvious as they are astounding and ominous.

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Despite the crucial importance of the Pearl Harbor story for American citizens, it is certainly true that, although the twenty-seventh anniversary of the surprise Japanese attack has now arrived, only a small fraction of the American people are any better acquainted with the realities of the responsibility for the attack than they were when President Roosevelt delivered his "Day of Infamy" oration on December 8, 1941. The legends and rhetoric of that day still dominate the American mind.
Interestingly enough, the American people narrowly missed having an opportunity to learn the essential truths about Pearl Harbor in a sensational and fully publicized manner less than three years after the event. As a result of research by his staff, and possibly some "leaks" from Intelligence officers of 1941, Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican candidate for the presidency, had learned during the campaign of 1944 that President Roosevelt had been reading the intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages in the Purple and other codes and was aware of the threat of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor at any time after November 26, 1941, but had failed to warn the commanders there, General Walter C. Short and Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, in time to avert the attack or to meet it effectively. Dewey considered presenting these vital facts in a major campaign speech.
Roosevelt learned of this through the Democratic grapevine planted at Republican headquarters and, in understandable alarm, pressured Mr. Dewey through General George C. Marshall to abandon his plan, on the ground that it would endanger the war effort by revealing that we had broken Japanese codes. Marshall twice sent Colonel Carter W. Clarke to urge Dewey not to refer to Pearl Harbor during the campaign. To cover up for Roosevelt, Marshall has contended that he operated on his own initiative in sending Clarke to importune Dewey. As Clarke knew by this time, the basis of his plea was spurious, namely, that such a speech by Dewey would first reveal to the Japanese that we had broken their Purple diplomatic code. Actually, the Japanese had learned of this from the Germans by the end of April, 1941, over three years before the 1944 campaign. Dewey did not know this at the time and, as a supposedly patriotic duty, he suppressed the speech and the publicity which might have won the election for him.
In a column written for the King Features Syndicate and widely published on the eve of the 1964 election, the famed journalist, John Chamberlain, described Dewey's lugu

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brious retrospective observations on his deception by Roosevelt and Marshall in 1944:

Nixon's 1960 agony recalls that of Thomas Dewey in 1944, when the Republicans knew practically all the details about the surprise at Pearl Harbor yet were loath to put the issue into the campaign lest they reveal to the Japanese that the United States had broken a critical code.
This columnist vividly recalls riding in a car from Elmira to Geneva, New York, in August of 1945 with Dewey and listening to his rueful account of the decision to say nothing about Pearl Harbor. The worst of it, from Dewey's standpoint, is that he had a suspicion that the Japanese had changed their codes long before 1944, which would have made campaign revelations about Pearl Harbor harmless to the U. S. from a military standpoint.
When I talked to Tom Dewey in 1945, he thought he might have been cheated out of a winning issue in 1944.

Chamberlain made similar revelations in an article in Life while the Congressional Pearl Harbor investigation was still in progress, yet Mr. Dewey was never called to testify. John T. Flynn gave me much more detail about Pearl Harbor and the Dewey campaign by personal correspondence and conversation in the autumn and early winter of 1944. Flynn had been active at Republican headquarters during the campaign.
My suggestion to Mr. Dewey in 1966 that he publicize the facts of the 1944 situation in connection with the twenty-fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor proved fruitless. This is entirely understandable. In 1966, Mr. Dewey was not a candidate for the presidency. He was the responsible head of a great legal firm, and publicity so damaging to Roosevelt's public reputation might have alienated important clients not only among Democrats but also Republicans who were interventionist-minded relative to World War II. It might, however, also have done more to give the American public some idea of the realities of Pearl Harbor than the combined writings of revisionist historians in a whole generation since 1944.
An intriguing and not fully resolved point stems from the fact that the Japanese learned from the Germans at the end of April, 1941, that the United States had broken their Purple code in which they sent top secret diplomatic messages. Why, then, did they continue to use the code? Some
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authorities believe that, despite the reliability of their informants, the top level Japanese officials could not bring themselves to believe that their code had actually been cracked, and that this vanity was abetted by the officials who had been responsible and wished to cover up the leak. Other authorities assert that the Japanese went ahead with the Purple code because they did not care if we did read it, since reading it would make it all the more clear to the American officials that Japanese peace efforts were sincere and that the Japanese would go to war if the peace negotiations should fail. This explanation, which I find more convincing, is also confirmed by Tojo's repeated deadlines set for the end of negotiations during November, 1941.
During the nearly quarter of a century since 1944, and despite a series of official investigations, the defenders of Roosevelt among historians, journalists and politicians have been able to keep the vital information about the responsibility for war with Japan and the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor from the American people. In this article the attempt will be made to set forth as much of this withheld information as can be put down within the space available.

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II. ROOSEVELT'S POLICIES PRIOR TO PEARL HARBOR

Since this article is to be devoted mainly to explaining why and how Pearl Harbor was surprised on December 7 1941, we can provide only a very brief summary of Roosevelt's basic foreign policies and diplomatic actions which bear directly upon this problem.
He was chiefly concerned with the planning and operation of his New Deal domestic policy down to 1937, even to 1939, but he did not forget armament and possible war, even diverting NRA funds to finance naval expansion, chiefly directed against Japan. In early January, 1933, even before he had been inaugurated, and against the urgings of Raymond Moley and Rexford G. Tugwell, he had accepted as the basis of his policy toward Japan the bellicose altitude of Henry L Stimson which would have led the United States into war with Japan in 1932 or 1933 had Stimson not been checked by President Hoover's firm stand for peace, a situation explained to me in detail by former President Hoover.
Whenever his domestic policy struck reverses and hard sledding Roosevelt turned to foreign policy with aggressive implications. The first such trend appeared following the

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rebuff to his main political measures in Congress in 1937, as well as the sharp economic recession that began in the Summer of 1937. It produced the inciting quarantine doctrine of his Chicago Bridge Speech of October 5, 1937. With the outbreak of war in Europe in September, 1939, his aggressive foreign policy continued unceasingly until the attack on Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt's attempt to purge a no longer docile Congress in the election of 1938 proved an ignominious failure, and the New Deal appeared to be in a permanent slump. It obviously had not solved the depression. Nor had the increasing expenditures for armament succeeded in providing full prosperity.
When war broke out in Europe in early September, 1939, this gave Roosevelt an ominous impulse and continuous inspiration. The war had hardly begun when, on September 11th, Roosevelt wrote Churchill, then only First Lord of the Admiralty, suggesting that they work together through a secret system of communication: "What I want you and the Prime Minister to know is that I shall at all times welcome it, if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about. You can always send sealed letters through your pouch or my pouch." Churchill is said to have responded enthusiastically, including the statement: "I am half American and the natural person to work with you. It is evident that we see eye to eye. Were I to become Prime Minister of Britain we could control the world." A method of secret communication was agreed upon in which Roosevelt would sign himself "Potus" (President of the United States), and Churchill would sign as "Former Naval Person". About 2000 messages were exchanged in this way prior to Pearl Harbor, and Churchill is our authority for the statement that the really important negotiations and agreements between Britain and the United States from 1939 to Pearl Harbor were handled in this way, all quite unknown to the American public.
It has since become obvious that while Roosevelt was assuring this country of his peaceful aims he was also actually doing all possible in cooperation with Churchill to get us into war as soon as practicable. In addition to other sources, I have this information personally from Tyler Kent, the code clerk in the American embassy in London, who read all of this material from September, 1939, to the time of his arrest in May, 1941. Two telegrams that have been recovered from this secret correspondence, indicate the tenor and objectives of their collaboration. Roosevelt told Churchill that the United States was firmly isolationist and could not be induced to enter the war in

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behalf of Poland. Churchill responded: "Every chain has its weakest spot and the weak link in the Axis chain is Japan. Goad Japan into attacking the U. S. and you will have the U. S. in the war." While this proved to be the strategy followed by Roosevelt, it is unlikely that the policy originated with Churchill.
As Professor William L. Neumann has made clear in his America Encounters Japan (pp. 235-230) this plan to enter a war with Japan, even to provoke Japan to war, was opposed by the overwhelming mass of the American people in the late 1930's. Even the annual conventions of the American Legion in 1937 and 1938 demanded "absolute neutrality". The Veterans of Foreign Wars started a campaign to secure 25 million signatures for a petition to "Keep America out of War". Even the Ludlow Resolution requiring a national referendum on the declaration of war only failed of passage because of the tremendous pressure exerted by Roosevelt through influential public figures.
Despite the strong American isolationist sentiment, Roosevelt never really gave up hope of getting the United States into the war after October, 1937, first and directly in Europe until at least the end of July, 1941. During the spring and summer of 1941 he did everything possible to provoke Germany and Italy to produce some "act of war" in Europe or on the Atlantic that he could use to get the United States into the European conflict, especially through our illegal convoying of munitions and supplies to Britain and Russia, but neither Germany nor Italy would rise to the bait. He had not, however, neglected the possibility of war with Japan. The extensive and quasi-secret increases in the American navy after 1933 obviously pointed the finger at Japan. As far back as the winter of 1937-1938 he had sent Captain Royal E. Ingersoll to Europe to discuss with the English the possibilities of collaboration in the event of war with Japan.
In January, 1941, Roosevelt and Hull rejected the amazingly generous Japanese effort to settle Japanese-American relations by peaceful methods presented by a commission with full Japanese authorization. The rebuff of this really sensational overture from Japan seriously undermined the hope of the latter in arriving at a peaceful settlement with the United States, but the effort was continued for over ten months. Japan offered to retire from the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis in return for a guaranty of peace with the United States.

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Although Roosevelt had campaigned in 1940 on the basis of promising to keep the United States out of war, he quickly reversed his position. In January, 1941, he sent Harry Hopkins to London to confer with Churchill. Hopkins informed the latter that:

The President is determined that we shall win the war together. Make no mistake about it.
He has sent me here to tell you that at all costs and by all means he will carry you through, no matter what happens to him--there is nothing that we will not do so far as he has human power.

Arrangements were also quickly made for joint-staff conferences with the British to arrange a plan for military collaboration: ABC-1. These were held in Washington from January through March, 1941. In April, another conference was held in Singapore, and this time the Dutch were included to provide for a triangular arrangement: ADB. Combined, they came to be known as the ABCD agreement. The Singapore ADB provided that, if the Japanese moved southward beyond an arbitrary line--100' East and 10' North--or even threatened to attack British or Dutch possessions in the Southwest Pacific, the United States would join them in war against the Japanese even though the Japanese did not attack American possessions, forces or flag.
On the basis of this ABCD agreement, the American military services drew up a general war plan known as Rainbow 5, also usually called WPL 46 when used to describe the Navy basic war plan. WPPac46, the U. S. Pacific fleet coordinating plan, governed Admiral Kimmel's operations. These were promulgated in April, 1941, and orally approved by Roosevelt in May and June. Admiral Harold R. Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, informed his leading commanders that it was no longer a question of whether the United States would be involved in war but only one of when and where. This ABCD agreement and the resulting war plans greatly extended the range of possible provocations to war and provided the first important impulse that led some American military leaders, especially after July, 1941, to consider the likelihood that war might break out in the southwest Pacific rather than by an attack on Pearl Harbor. It thus fatally blurred the basic assumption in our Pacific naval strategy which had long been based on the probability that the Japanese would first attack the Pacific fleet to protect their flank before making extensive military movements in the Far East.
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The ABCD agreement also exposed Roosevelt to the possibility of serious political embarrassment. He had frequently promised that we would not enter any war unless attacked, but the ABCD agreement and the associated war plans were based on the pledge to make war if the situation so demanded without an attack on the United States.
At first, this did not worry Roosevelt too much, for he fully expected that Hitler would provide provocative action on the Atlantic in response to illegal American procedure in convoying war materials to Britain and later to Russia. When this did not eventuate and it appeared that Japan would be the actual opponent, it became essential for Roosevelt to do all possible to assure that Japan would provide the indispensable attack that was needed to unite the American people behind him in war. To bring this about it appeared necessary to prevent the Hawaiian commanders from taking any defensive action which would deter the Japanese from attacking Pearl Harbor which, of necessity, had to be a surprise attack.
From March to November, 1941, Roosevelt encouraged Secretary of State Hull to stall the obviously ardent desire of the Japanese, based on self-interest, to arrive at a reasonable and peaceful settlement of Japanese-American relations. By the latter part of July, Roosevelt had about given up hope of getting an act of war from Germany or Italy, and decided to increase pressure on Japan which would make war virtually certain. On July 25th-26th he froze all Japanese assets in the United States and soon placed an embargo on trade with Japan, in which the British and Dutch followed suit, thus facing Japan with economic strangulation unless she could get supplies from the southwest Pacific area, presumably by force.
Washington authorities, especially Admirals Stark and Richmond Kelley Turner, chief of Naval War Plans, recognized that this would force Japan to move rapidly into this forbidden region to secure vital materials which had been placed under an embargo by the ABCD countries. General George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, and Stark sent notices to American commanders in leading outposts that they should take this situation and outlook into serious consideration.
This was a second factor which led many of the top military brass in Washington to shift some of their attention from the traditional Pacific strategy based on a probable

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Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, even in the face of the Bomb Plot intercepts after September, 1941, which clearly pointed to Pearl Harbor as the first Japanese target. War might start in the Far East. It also helps to account for the fact that the lower or operating units in Army Intelligence and the Signal Corps and in Navy Intelligence and Communications at Washington, who were less fully informed on the partly secret top strategic commitments of ABCD and Rainbow 5 and were devoted to studying the current facts, remained insistent that due attention should be given to the threat to Pearl Harbor and that the Hawaiian commanders should be fully warned of the Japanese menace.
On August 9-12, 1941, Roosevelt met with Churchill at Argentia, off the coast of Newfoundland, and arranged the details of entering the second World War through the backdoor of a war with Japan. Churchill wished immediate war but Roosevelt insisted on having at least three months to "baby" the Japanese along so as to have more time to get ready for war, to allow Russia to take more heat off Britain, and to extend the possibility that Germany or Italy would still provide an act of war on the Atlantic, now that Russia was at war with Germany. These aggressive moves were disguised to the American public by issuing a high-sounding but morally deceptive Atlantic Charter, actually only a press release, the terms of which had been violated before the ink was dry on the document; indeed, by actions before the meeting at Argentia.
The official adoption of the "back door" policy and strategy at Argentia produced a powerful impulse to the top military brass to shift their primary concern to Japan and the Far East. Stark had previously been assuring Kimmel that Germany was our main enemy and that Roosevelt did not wish to get into a two-front war, involving both Germany and Japan. It was now apparent that, if necessary, Roosevelt intended to provoke Japan in the Far East and that the United States would enter the war in this manner.
Immediately on his return from Newfoundland, Roosevelt, with the approval of Churchill, called in the Japanese ambassador to the United States, Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, and administered to him an unprovoked and gratuitous tongue-lashing that even Stimson regarded as an ultimatum. This was done to undermine the Japanese peace party that was still in office, and to strengthen the war party. This aim was fully accomplished when Roosevelt and Hull unceremoniously brushed off the impressive effort

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of Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoye of Japan to reach a final peaceful adjustment with the United States, including meeting Roosevelt at any reasonable designated spot and accepting in advance the four principles" that Hull had announced in April, 1941, as the required basis of a peaceful settlement of Far Eastern problems with Japan.
Konoye was replaced as premier by General Hideki Tojo on October 16, 1941. Even the Tojo government offered terms of settlement in November which protected all legitimate American interests in the Far East, but Roosevelt and Hull rejected these, threw over the temporary modus vivendi that General Marshall and Admiral Stark wished in order to complete adequate plans for a Pacific war, and sent to Japan on November 26 an ultimatum which Hull frankly announced took our relations with Japan out of the realm of diplomacy and placed them in the hands of the military: Roosevelt and Secretaries Stimson and Knox. It was recognized by the Washington authorities, who were reading the Japanese diplomatic messages in the Purple code, that this would mean war when the Japanese replied to Hull. Steps were taken to insure that the Hawaiian commanders, General Walter C. Short and Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, would not be forewarned of any impending Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor.
Since we shall be mentioning the problem of warning Short and Kimmel, it may be well here to clear up some elementary details. The overall protection of the Hawaiian District, including Pearl Harbor, was entrusted to General Short as commander-in-chief of the Hawaiian District. Cooperating with him was Admiral Claude C. Bloch, commander of the Fourteenth Naval District. His function was to protect the Pearl Harbor naval base. The Naval Communications Intelligence staff, headed by Commander Joseph J. Rochefort, was nominally under the control of Admiral Bloch. Admiral Kimmel was commander-in-chief of the Pacific fleet and the supreme naval authority at Pearl Harbor. His duties were primarily strategic and related to preparing naval hardware and personnel for controlling the mid-Pacific and, if necessary, moving the fleet both to protect Pearl Harbor and to wage war in accordance with orders from Washington based on WPL 46. Important communications from General Marshall, such as warnings of an attack, were sent directly to General Short. Similarly, such warnings from Admiral Stark were sent directly to Admiral Kimmel, who had his own Fleet Intelligence service. Communications from Washington relative to the

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protection of the Hawaiian naval base at Pearl Harbor were normally sent to Admiral Bloch.
It has been maintained by some critics that Roosevelt was one of the most determined war-mongers of all history. This is a needless overstatement. It is nearer to the truth to state that in his foreign policy Roosevelt was one of the more notable opportunists in the historical record. Churchill may have been an opportunist on domestic policies, but he was consistent in being a partisan of the war.
As Assistant Secretary of Navy under Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt was an ardent interventionist in regard to the first World War, and later was a strong supporter of the League of Nations. In 1932, he repudiated the League to get the support of Hearst, which was indispensable if he were to win the Democratic nomination. In his campaign of 1936, he described our folly in entering the first World War and questioned Wilson's wisdom in leading us into it. After the 1936 election, when at Buenos Aires, he condemned nations that maintained prosperity through an armament economy, but by early 1939 he had adopted precisely this program to bolster the New Deal and assure himself a third term.
From this time until Pearl Harbor Roosevelt followed a combined policy of announcing peaceful intentions while planning for war. He informed the American public that he was determined to keep the peace. He told Churchill that he would bring the United States into the war as soon as possible without going so rapidly as to upset their whole plan. His diplomacy all during 1941 was provocative of war, involving this country both in Europe and the Far East, while he was assuring the American public that everything he did was "short of war" and designed to keep us out of war. This brief review provides the essential background against which we must view the developments leading to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

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III. WASHINGTON SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN SURPRISED WHEN THE JAPANESE ATTACKED PEARL HARBOR
1. The Probable Place of a Japanese Attack in the Event of War with the United States


No item in the revisionist presentation of the causes and merits of the second World War is better established than the fact that no top military or civilian authority in Wash

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ington on December 7, 1941, should have been surprised at either the place or time of the Japanese attack on the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. The only element of surprise, if any, should have been over the damage that the Japanese planes delivered to the fleet.
After the Japanese had abandoned dependence on their Red diplomatic code, which American cryptanalysts had earlier broken, American experts in the Army Signal Corps, directed by Colonel William F. Friedman, had broken the top Japanese Purple diplomatic code by mid-August, 1940, and for a year and a half before Pearl Harbor Washington had been intercepting and reading the secret Japanese diplomatic messages to their officials all over the world. Less difficult diplomatic codes, such as J-19 and PA-K2, were also easily read. Among other things, this breakthrough had enabled the Washington authorities to know that the Japanese peace offers were sincere and not mere window dressing for sinister later designs of an aggressive nature. The Japanese messages also revealed equally clearly that if even extreme Japanese efforts to reach a peaceful settlement with the United States failed, the Japanese would go to war for self-preservation and self-respect. We may first consider the extensive evidence that, if Japan did attack the United States, it would be where the American fleet was then located, namely, at Pearl Harbor.
For years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, naval maneuvers had been held off the island of Oahu in Hawaii to test the feasibility of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The results were far from reassuring to the United States, and were equally a definite warning of the danger and practicability of a Japanese task force attack there. As early as 1932, Admiral Harry E. Yarnell, one of our earliest air-minded naval officers, made the first carrier-based task force test and he was able to execute a surprise attack when operating only sixty miles off Pearl Harbor. These maneuvers were continued, and in 1938 a successful air attack was launched from the carrier Saratoga one hundred miles off Pearl Harbor. The Japanese task force in December, 1941, operated from over 200 miles away. In April, 1941, General Frederick L. Martin and Admiral Patrick N. L. Bellinger, commanders of the Army and Navy air forces respectively at Pearl Harbor, described in detail the nature of a possible Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor which was uncannily identical with Yamamoto's plan for the actual Japanese attack a few months later. This was forwarded to the Army and Navy head

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quarters in Washington but no positive response or protective operation took place.
Long before Admiral Kimmel assumed command at Pearl Harbor in January, 1941, it had become basic in Pacific naval strategy to accept the fact that if the Japanese ever started a war with the United States they would first strike our Pacific fleet, especially if based at Pearl Harbor, to protect their flank before they could safely move large naval forces south or north from Japan. This had been constantly emphasized to Washington from the time of the assertions of General Hugh Drum in 1935 and of General George V. Strong in 1940, to the observations in 1941 of Commander Arthur N. McCollum, head of the Far Eastern Section of Naval Intelligence, the man who had probably the best informed conceptions of the naval and diplomatic situation in the Far East, with the possible exception of Colonel Otis K. Sadtler of the Army Signal Corps and Colonel Rufus S. Bratton, Chief of the Far Eastern Section of Military Intelligence.
Viewed most generally, then, it had long been assumed that the Japanese would not go to war with the United States without first protecting their flank by trying to destroy the American Pacific fleet, wherever it was stationed. It was also clear that the American fleet would be both more inciting and more vulnerable to a Japanese attack if stationed at Pearl Harbor, as compared to its relative safety before the spring of 1940, when it had been based on the Pacific coast of the United States, mainly at San Diego. Admiral James O. Richardson, Kimmel's able predecessor as commander of the Pacific fleet, bitterly protested the fleet's permanent retention at Pearl Harbor, after maneuvers in the spring of 1940, and labelled Pearl Harbor "a damned mouse trap" for the American navy.
Indeed, it is certain that Richardson's untimely removal as head of the fleet was brought about by his determined resistance to what he considered the folly of keeping the fleet at Pearl Harbor. Admiral Frank E. Beatty, a well informed authority, has told me that it may also have been due in part to the animosity of Harry Hopkins, who sat in on Richardson's conferences with Roosevelt. Richardson was annoyed by Hopkins' interjection of his opinions into the debate and understandably commented unflatteringly on Hopkins' lack of qualifications as an authority on naval strategy. Added to this generalized conception of our Pacific naval

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strategy centering around Pearl Harbor was a precise statement from our Ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph C. Grew, in January, 1941, that he had received a friendly warning from the Peruvian Minister in Tokyo, which the latter had obtained from several sources, one Japanese, to the effect that, if Japan could not reach peaceful relations with the United States, it would start war by a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. After the successful Japanese attack on December 7, 1941, the Washington authorities, who were desperately trying to cover up their bad guessing or actual guilt, tried to represent this warning as worthless hearsay, but it was not so regarded by Ambassador Grew and some top Washington officials in January, 1941, notably Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox.
It was not necessary, however, to rely on generalized strategic considerations, however sound. From September, 1941, to December 7th Washington authorities intercepted a considerable number of Japanese messages between Tokyo and Honolulu that specifically and most obviously indicated that, in the event of war between Japan and the United States, the first Japanese move would actually be a surprise attack on the Pacific fleet--that Pearl Harbor would be the target. These messages came to be known as the "Bomb Plot" messages and consisted of requests from the Japanese government in Tokyo to the Japanese consul-general in Honolulu, Nagoa Kita, for detailed and specific information as to the nature, number and types of vessels in the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, their location and movements, and other relevant information connected with the American military establishment located there, together with Kita's replies to these requests. These requests from Tokyo to Kita became more insistent, frequent and detailed as we approach December 7, 1941.
The first of these was sent in the J-19 Japanese code to Kita on September 24, 1941, and was decoded, translated and read on October 9th at Washington. This requested very detailed information on the composition, location, and operations of the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. From this time onward, Washington should have had no doubt that the Japanese were planning a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, if negotiations failed. The Bomb Plot messages clearly pinpointed Pearl Harbor as the target of any Japanese surprise attack on the United States.
When relations became more tense after the fall of the Konoye Cabinet in October, 1941, Tokyo ordered that these espionage reports from Kita should be sent at more frequent

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intervals. On November 15th, Kita was ordered to send his reports twice each week. On November 18th and 20th, orders were given to inform Tokyo in regard to all our warships and others anchored in areas adjacent to Pearl Harbor. On November 29th, Kita was ordered to make his reports, even though there had been no movements of the warships at Pearl Harbor.
No such detailed or comprehensive reports, containing as they did grids and coordinates, were demanded of any Japanese officials and spies at any other American outpost or naval base anywhere in the world, not even those on the Pacific coast. Those who have sought to minimize the significance of these Kita Bomb Plot messages have pointed out that Japanese spies were frequently detected making inquiries at leading American naval bases but these were routine and trivial matters and not in any way to be compared or rated with the Kita messages. All these Bomb Plot messages were available to the appropriate top Washington officials in the Army and Navy and to Roosevelt and Hull, and they thoroughly established the probability that if the Japanese made any surprise attack on the United States it would be at Pearl Harbor.
The most crucial Kita report available in Washington before Pearl Harbor was sent to Tokyo by Kita on December 3rd. He informed the Japanese government that he had set up an elaborate system of window code signals at Lanikai Beach which were easily visible to boats off the coast. From this spot he would signal passing Japanese fishing craft and submarines as to the nature and movements of the Pacific fleet. These boats and submarines could then pass this vital information back to the Japanese task force as it was nearing Pearl Harbor for the attack.
This sensational and revealing message was intercepted at the army monitoring station at Fort Hunt, Virginia, on the 3rd, was decoded by Naval Communications in Washington before noon on the 6th, and was translated and ready for reading and distribution before 2:30 P.M. on that day. This finally confirmed the pin-pointing of Pearl Harbor as the place of the Japanese attack. Due to the fact that the Kita message implied that the signals would end on the night of the 6th, this December 3rd intercept also clearly indicated that the Japanese task force under Admiral Nagumo was moving on toward Pearl Harbor and intended to organize off Oahu on the night of the 6th, and make ready for the attack on Pearl Harbor the next morning. Hence, this message not only made it clear that Pearl Harbor

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would be the place of the Japanese attack but also revealed the time of this attack, unless something happened to slow down or divert Nagumo's expected arrival on the 6th as anticipated.
How far Roosevelt, Hull, and the top military brass in Washington were informed of the nature, contents and implications of this vital and revealing Kita message that was available on the 6th has, naturally, been the subject of much controversy. It was actually far more revealing than the fourteen-part reply to Hull and the Time of Delivery message as to the time, place and certainty of an immediate Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. If it could be proved that its contents had been known to the top officials in Washington by early evening of the 6th, then their failure to warn Kimmel and Short would appear to be far more culpable than that connected with the replies to Hull that were not available until the late evening of the 6th and the morning of the 7th, and even then did not make the time and place of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor anything more than trained and informed guesswork. Hence, there would be every effort to indicate that no information about this Kita message was available until after the attack.
Certain of the important facts about the Kita message are established beyond any reasonable doubt. Its interception on December 3rd has been described. It was decoded some time between the 3rd and 6th and was given to the translating section of Naval Communications for translating. This was done by a Mrs. Dorothy Edgers, a competent expert on the Japanese language, between 8:00 A. M. and 2:30 P. M. on the 6th. Her immediate superior was Yeoman Bryant, and the chief of the section was Commander Kramer. Both of these men knew during the time that Mrs. Edgers was working on the translation that she regarded it as a very important document and that she gave it careful attention. She was supposed to leave at noon, but was so much interested in the document that she worked until after 2:00 P.M. to complete and revise her translation. She handed it over to Yeoman Bryant to discuss with Commander Kramer with respect to its distribution to top-level civil and military officials entitled to receive such material. While there is controversy over whether Kramer read the Edgers' translater carefully, there is little doubt that Bryant did so. The main dispute is over whether Kramer distributed the message to at least a few key officials in the Army and Navy on the afternoon of the 6th.

26


The accepted legend is that when Kramer looked over the Edgers' translation after she left the office he found that it was so imperfect that it was unsuitable for immediate distribution. The excitement that followed with the arrival of the Plot Message and the Japanese reply to Hull, together with Kramer's responsibility for distributing the reply to Hull during the evening of the 6th, made him decide to delay reworking the Edgers' translation until Monday, the 8th, when it was too late to be of any value in warning Kimmel and Short.
The circumstantial evidence tends to support the probability that Kramer read the Edgers' translation well enough to recognize its great and immediate significance and showed the message to some of the leading officers in the Navy, and possibly in the Army, and was ordered by these persons, who recognized its importance, to suppress it for the time being. Mrs. Edgers was a competent translator and she remembered the essential parts and the full implications of the message well enough so she could describe the contents on the witness-stand some three and a half years later without ever refreshing her memory by seeing the document during that long interval. If she could remember the message, it is likely that Kramer could have quickly grasped its significance.
He was familiar with the Bomb Plot messages from the time of the first one decoded on October 9th, the importance of which he was the first to recognize. Since the reply to Hull was in English, Kramer did not have to be busy translatmg this on the afternoon of the 6th and should have had plenty of time to study the Edgers' translation and call it to the attention of his responsible superiors. Kramer was the most severely intimidated of all the witnesses in the post-Pearl Harbor investigations--to the extent of bringing on a nervous breakdown. Hence, he was not likely to come clean in his testimony on the Kita message if he did suppress it. He has declined to answer personal questions on the matter since his retirement. Although Yeoman Bryant was present in the room during the investigation he was not called to testify.
Hence, we are likely to remain as much in the dark about documenting the distribution of this final and most sensational of the Bomb Plot messages as we are about Captain Kirk's frustrations in regard to the first one on October 9th. The best discussion of the controversy to reach print is that by Commander Charles C. Hiles which was published in the Pearl Harbor supplement to the Chicago Tribune on

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December 7, 1966, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Why these Bomb Plot messages were not sent to Hawaii by the Washington authorities, so they could be used by Kimmel and Short and enable them to be prepared for the Japanese attack has never been adequately explained. In naval headquarters at Washington, they were suppressed chiefly by Admiral Richmond Kelley Turner, whose ignorance of the details of the cryptanalytic set-up and operations at Pearl Harbor was only exceeded by his arrogant self-confidence, and Admiral Stark backed him up instead of keeping his promise to Admiral Kimmel to have him fully and speedily informed on all such matters. At the army headquarters the responsibility was mainly that of General Marshall and General Sherman Miles, chief of Military Intelligence. Until December 3rd, most of these messages were intercepted by the Army Signal Corps station MS5 at Fort Shafter, General Short's headquarters near Honolulu, and were transmitted to Washington for decoding, translation and reading. They were also usually intercepted at several other monitoring stations in the United States.
When the first one was decoded, translated and read on October 9th, Commander Alwyn D. Kramer, who was in charge of the translation work for the Far East section of Naval Communications, noted that this was a very significant message that needed further study. It must have received such study for Captain Alan G. Kirk, the able, forthright and experienced Director of the Office of Naval Information at the time, insisted that the October 9th message must be sent to Admiral Kimmel. He was blocked in this proposal by Admiral Turner, who was supported in this by Admiral Stark. Frustrated and disgusted, Kirk left his post and sought the sea duty he needed to become an admiral, and later rendered very distinguished service in naval operations in Europe. 'I'he details of Kirk's leaving for sea duty have been furnished to me in person by Admiral Beatty, at that time chief aide to Secretary Knox.
It is most unfortunate that Admiral Kirk was not thoroughly interviewed after the war concerning the refusal of Stark and Turner to permit him to transmit this first Bomb Plot message to Kimmel. I had arranged to have this done in 1962 when Kirk was residing in New York Clty. Being on the opposite side of the continent at this time, I could not do it personally, but had arranged that a trained interviewer and an expert on Pearl Harbor would carry it out. He

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delayed briefly to make more complete preparation, and in the meantime Kirk was appointed American ambassador to Formosa (Taiwan). Another student of the situation, without my approval, took the chance of writing Admiral Kirk in Formosa about the incident. It was hardly to be expected that Kirk could give any detailed answer under these circumstances. He might well have been expected to ignore the letter but he gave a courteous reply, making no categorical denial and thus by indirection implying that he may have been prevented from transmitting the information to Kimmel. He soon retired due to ill-health, was then in no condition to accept the request for an interview, and died soon after his retirement. This ended the possibility of clearing up the October problem in any final and definitive manner. That the situation in the Office of Naval Intelligence was confused in 1941 is evident from the fact that by the end of October there had been four chiefs of this organization: Captains Anderson, James, Kirk and Wilkinson.
It is certain that Turner was directly responsible for frustrating Kirk, but there is no proof that this was the result of any conspiracy to keep Kimmel in the dark. Turner was a very able but conceited officer, sure of himself. His mind was mainly on the Atlantic, and so far as the Pacific was concerned he still believed that the Japanese would attack Siberia. He was unpardonably ignorant about Pearl Harbor intercepting facilities at the time, actually believing that it had a Purple machine and was reading the Japanese diplomatic messages on the spot. The main responsibility for Kirk's frustration was, however, that of Stark, who had promised Kimmel that he would transmit to him all significant information about any possible Japanese menace to Pearl Harbor, and Kirk had been fully informed of this. Why Stark deferred to Turner in this episode has never been cleared up. Admiral Beatty informed me that Turner often dominated Stark in the matter of naval decisions. Stark refused to clarify matters in a long interview with Percy Greaves in mid-December, 1962. It has been alleged on good authority that an attempt was made to falsify the Naval Directory for 1941 to indicate that Kirk had left his post as Director of ONI before October 9, 1941.
Kirk was succeeded by an able but far less experienced and more pliant person, Captain Theodore S. Wilkinson, who may have feared to repeat Kirk's insistence with Turner. This has come to be known as "the October Revolution" in the Office of Nava1 Intelligence. In any event, both the Army and Navy Departments had these

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crucial Bomb Plot messages at hand and if they neglected them, then it was no less than a criminal neglect and it was an important factor in leading to the destruction of the Pearl Harbor fleet. The place--and through the Kita message of December 3rd even the probable time--of the Japanese surprise attack no longer needed to be a mystery. Not only the Japanese inquiries as to the fleet, facilities and supplies at Pearl Harbor but also the general strategic logic of all the circumstances connected with the launching of a Japanese war against the United States at any time, and especially in 1941, made it all but certain that the first drastic move would be against Pearl Harbor. Japan did not need to be attacked to start a war, as Roosevelt did. It needed to destroy the American Pacific fleet, and it would be difficult to do this after war had started elsewhere. Admiral Kimmel would then deploy and scatter his forces as they moved to Wake, Midway and the Far East and they would never again be bunched up as they were at Pearl Harbor in peacetime.
It should also be emphasized that although the treatment of the Bomb Plot messages in the preceding pages has stressed the role of the Navy in receiving and handling them, the Army also obtained them, and alert officers therein were impressed as Captain Kirk had been by the threat to Pearl Harbor which they revealed. Colonel Rufus S. Bratton, chief of the Far Eastern section of Military Intelligence, delivered the original Bomb Plot message, decoded on October 9th, to Secretary of War Stimson, General Marshall and General Leonard T. Gerow, chief of the War Plans division of the Army. These messages were discussed by officers in Military Intelligence and the Signal Corps and most of them recognized the desirability of sending them to General Short at Fort Shafter, but they were no more able to get past Marshall and do so than Kirk, Wilkinson, Noyes and McCollum could get by Turner and Stark. Just as Turner was the chief navy obstacle to getting the Bomb Plot messages through to Kimmel, so Marshall constituted the main blockage in passing them on to Short, although he could delegate the action to General Miles, chief of Military Intelligence. Marshall was also the person mainly responsible for the slow transmission of the Bomb Plot messages from MS5 at Fort Shafter to Washington, compelling them to be sent by the China Clipper, every two weeks, or by ordinary boat mail, when they could have been sent at once by cablegram or RCA radiogram. In other words, General Short was as much victimized as Admiral Kimmel in being deprived of these vitally important Bomb Plot messages.

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2. The Time of the Japanese Surprise Attack


Washington also possessed extensive and diversified advance knowledge of the time when the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor; by the morning of December 7th almost to the minute when the attack would be launched. The Kita message, which had been prepared for distribution by 2:30 P. M. on the 6th, also indicated even more directly that the attack would in all probability take place on the morning of the 7th.
On November 5th, Tokyo informed the Japanese embassy at Washington that negotiations must be satisfactorily concluded by November 25th. Unknown to Washington was the fact that the latter was also the date that the Japanese task force was getting ready to leave the Kurile Islands for Pearl Harbor if negotiations were broken off, but with orders to return if negotiations were resumed. On November 14th, Tokyo informed the Japanese consul at Hong Kong that Japan would declare war on the United States and Great Britain, if the negotiations with the United States failed. On November 11, 15 and 16, Tokyo repeated to the Japanese ambassador in Washington that the deadline for completing negotiations with the United States was November 25th. On November 22nd this deadline was extended to the 29th, but the Japanese embassy in Washington was then emphatically informed that Tokyo meant business this time and there would be no further extension of the deadline. After that "things are automatically going to happen." On November 27th and 28th, Tokyo informed the Japanese embassy in Washington that Hull's ultimatum of November 26th was entirely unsatisfactory and Japan would not negotiate any further on that basis. Hull himself had said on the 27th that he knew his ultimatum meant war and that henceforth, affairs between the United States and Japan were in the hands of Stimson and Knox, the Secretaries of War and the Navy, both of course under the control of President Roosevelt. On November 30th, Tokyo informed Germany that negotiations with the United States had ended.
Yet, on November 27, 28, 30 and December 1st there was a succession of messages from Tokyo to the Japanese embassy in Washington warning them not to reveal that negotiations were over, but to indicate they were being stretched out. This move was both a last ditch attempt at a peaceful settlement and, if that failed, an effort to cover up the actual nature of "the things that are automatically going to happen" after negotiations had ended, which was

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really on the 26th. These "things" were the departure of the Japanese task force from the Kuriles to Pearl Harbor. There had been no effort whatever to conceal the extensive movement of large Japanese convoys and task forces to the southwest Pacific, and, hence, these were clearly not the things which were "automatically going to happen."
The policy of sending extensive Japanese convoys and task forces southward helped to distract responsible attention in Washington from a possible attack on Pearl Harbor, even if it should not have done so, and thus worked well for the Japanese program. This was one reason why many top officials in Washington seemed to neglect the traditional Pacific strategy in regard to Pearl Harbor and the Bomb Plot messages and after early November concentrated most of their attention right down to December 7th on the probability of an attack in the Far East, either on the Philippines, along the coast of southeast Asia, or on the British possessions and the Dutch East Indies. A little thought should have been sufficient to convince the Washington authorities that Japan would not be likely to make its first major onslaught in the Far East. Admiral Thomas C. Hart's Asiatic fleet was so small that its destruction would not protect the Japanese flank from a major and immediate American naval attack.
The most important factor in this distraction from Pearl Harbor was the basic strategic plan for a possible Pacific war with Japan, Rainbow 5 (WPL 46), which had been drawn up by our military services on the basis of the Washington joint staff conferences ending with that at Singapore in April 1941, and confirmed orally by Roosevelt in May and June. This plan was based on the assumption that, if war came with Japan, it might start in the Far East as a result of American commitments to come to the aid of the British and Dutch, even if there were no attack on American ships or territory. This naturally helped to divert the attention of top military brass in Washington from the traditional Pacific strategy related to an attack on the Pacific fleet, wherever located, especially during the week before Pearl Harbor.
Washington had all the numerous intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages indicating by November 27, 1941, that war was in all probability only a matter of days away, but Kimmel and Short knew nothing whatever about any of this. They did not even know that Hull had sent an ultimatum to Japan on November 26th or that the Japanese had warned that negotiations were to be ruptured on the 29th if no

32

settlement had been arranged. They obviously knew nothing about the details of the Japanese-American diplomatic negotiations from August to November 26th; Short was in the dark after July.
By November 27th, war with Japan seemed almost certain, and it was expected in Washington official circles that it would probably come coincident with the Japanese reply to Hull's ultimatum. Since Japan usually made its surprise attacks on a weekend, when opposing forces were most likely to be relaxed and off-guard, some Washington authorities, including Roosevelt, thought that the attack might come on November 30th, but that was too soon for Japanese plans, which were centered on the task force's departure from the Kuriles and its movement toward Pearl Harbor. When the Japanese did not attack on the 30th, there was special apprehension in Washington that it might come on December 7th, but no plans were made or steps taken to warn Kimmel and Short of this possibility.
On November 19th, the Japanese announced in their J-19 diplomatic code, which we could and did read, the setting up of a so-called Winds System, which Japanese diplomatic officials and consulates could intercept and learn of Tokyo's intentions in the event of breaking off diplomatic relations and going to war with the United States. The Winds signals were as follows: "East Wind Rain" for the war on the United States; "West Wind Clear" for war on Great Britain; and "North Wind Cloudy" for war on Russia. This Winds system, as we shall see, was executed on December 4th.
Evidence of the approach of war became ever more apparent after November 30th. On December 1st and 2nd it was learned that Tokyo had ordered its main embassies, with the exception of that at Washington, to destroy their main code machines, including Purple, and burn their documents. This was a measure that usually precedes immediate war and is rarely, if ever, otherwise if ordered on any such scale as in December, 1941. The Washington Purple machine was to be retained until December 7th so that Tokyo could keep in touch with the Japanese embassy and be able to send Ambassador Nomura the reply to Hull, which would be the last "peaceful" communication, even though it would also mean, in all probability, the actual onset of war.
On the morning of December 4th a Japanese message was intercepted at the important naval monitoring station at

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Cheltenham, Maryland. This did not need to be decoded for it was written in plain Japanese language and was transmitted in the Japanese Morse code. This was done in order to enable Japanese officials, who were without decoding equipment after the codes-destruction order, to be able to understand this critical message. This intercept was the all-important execution of the Winds system set up by Japan on November 19th. It is known es the "Winds Execute" message and the information therein revealed that war would be made on the United States and Britain, but not on Russia.
Later on, when the frenzied effort was made to cover up the responsibility for the failure of Washington to inform Kimmel and Short, there was a desperate attempt made to deny that any Winds Execute message had ever been received, and most--perhaps all--copies of it were destroyed. The last copy ever seen was identified by Commander Laurance F. Safford when Commander Kramer was assembling documents for the Roberts Commission a week after the Pearl Harbor attack. But honest and courageous experts, notably Safford, chief of the Security Division of Naval Communications, who had received the intercept from Kramer after translation and handed it over for distribution, stuck by the facts and demolished all efforts to repudiate the authenticity of Winds Execute. Safford was able to list some fourteen persons, including Admiral Thomas C. Hart, commander of the Asiatic fleet, who said that they had seen the Winds Execute message or had discussed it with a responsible official who had seen it. The Naval Court of Inquiry, which met from July to October 1944, established beyond any doubt that the Winds Execute message was received on December 4th. Colonel Otis K. Sadtler, acting chief of the Army Signal Corps, not only testified that he had seen the Winds Execute message but said that he regarded it as the most important intercept he had ever handled. On it he based a forthright warning to Marshall's subordinates, presumably with Marshall's approval. The investigations by the Army Pearl Harbor Board and the Clarke Inquiries indicated that the Army authorities knew that the Navy had intercepted the Winds Execute message on December 4th.
Some of the apparent excitement and confusion which seemed to prevail in Washington military circles on December 4th, when Winds Execute was received, may have been due to the fact that this was also the day that the Chicago Tribune published the implications of Rainbow

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5, thus revealing Roosevelt's deception of the American people as to his war plans and his promise not to go to war unless attacked. At least we know that Marshall was far more concerned about this vital leak than he was about the reception of Winds Execute. Colonel John R. Deane was still working on this problem when he saw Marshall in his office at 10:00 on the morning of the 7th.
Winds Execute was not only the first explicit assurance that Japan was going to make war, but it also made it clear that the war would be declared against the United States. All that remained to be revealed was the moment of the Japanese attack, and it was expected that this would be when the Japanese handed in their reply to Hull' s ultimatum of the 26th, which turned out to be the case.
It was not necessary to wait long. The final and decisive Kita Bomb Plot message, sent to Tokyo on December 3rd, was intercepted at Fort Hunt, Virginia, on the same day. By December 6th it was decoded, translated and available for distribution at 2:30 P.M. in the communications section of the Navy Department in Washington. This revealed that the Japanese task force was nearing Pearl Harbor and was expected to arrive off Hawaii by the night of the 6th.
On the heels of processing the Kita message came the so-called Pilot Message from Tokyo, which announced that Japan was sending to the Japanese embassy in Washington its ominous and anxiously awaited reply to Hull's ultimatum. The Pilot Message was decoded, translated and ready for distribution before mid-afternoon on the 6th and enabled the Washington authorities to know that the Japanese reply to Hull was arriving, that negotiations were over, and that war was now at hand. The whole fourteen-part message told little more than this, aside from a summary of the negotiations. There was no doubt that Japan would attack the United States in a matter of hours. Short and Kimmel should have been warned at once. This would have provided their last fair and decent opportunity to take action to avert, evade or repel the Japanese attack. Of course, they should and could have been warned weeks earlier, and certainly by November 27th.
Some thirteen parts of a total of fourteen in the complete reply to Hull came in during the afternoon of the 6th, were decoded from the Purple code, and were ready for distribution by that evening. Since the reply to Hull was in English it did not need to be translated. A copy was delivered to Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins at the White House about nine

35

o'clock that night. After reading it, Roosevelt acknowledged that it meant war but he took no steps to order any warning sent to Pearl Harbor. As we shall point out later on, Roosevelt knew by the forenoon of the 6th, if not on the 5th, that the United States was already at war with Japan due to our commitments to the British and Dutch under ABCD and Rainbow 5.
The thirteen-part message was delivered on the evening of the 6th to the available Army officers entitled to Magic and to Hull under the supervision of Colonel Rufus S. Bratton, chief of the Far East section of Military Intelligence of the Army, and to the appropriate Navy officers, except for Stark, who was at a theater, by Commander Alwyn D Kramer of the Far East section of Naval Communications. A copy for Marshall was left by Bratton with Colonel Walter Bedell Smith, who was Marshall's secretary and the man short of Roosevelt himself, most likely to know where Marshall was to be found. It was Smith's duty to deliver such messages to Marshall.
The final or fourteenth part, also in English, arrived during the night of the 6th and was decoded by early morning on the 7th. It confirmed the Pilot Message's implication that negotiations between Japan and the United States were over, hardly news to Washington. Following this fourteenth part of the reply to Hull was another and far more important short message from Tokyo, the crucial so-called Time of Delivery message. It ordered the Japanese ambassador, Admiral Nomura, and his associate, Kurusu, to deliver the full fourteen-part Japanese reply to Secretary Hull in person at 1:00 P. M., Washington time, about 7:30 A. M. Pearl Harbor time.
The fourteenth part was intercepted, decoded, and ready for distribution by 7:30 A.M. and the Time of Delivery message by 9:00 A. M., if not earlier. One authoritative report indicates that both were ready for distribution before 7 00 A. M. They had been received before 5:00 A. M. This does not make too much difference because Admiral Stark did not get to his office before 9:00 and General Marshall was either on a horseback ride or hiding out in some place. When these late intercepts were shown to Admiral Stark; chief of Naval Operations, about 9:00 by Admiral Leigh Noyes, chief of Naval Communications, Captain Wilkinson chief of Naval Intelligence, and Commander McCollum chief of the Far East section of Naval Intelligence, they pointed out to Stark that 1:00 P.M. in Washington was about 7:30 in Pearl Harbor and that this could very well mean

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that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor at 1:00 P.M. Washington time. Stark had four hours remaining in which to warn Kimmel, whom he could have reached in ten minutes or less by his fast naval transmitter, but he ignored the appeal of Admiral Noyes, Captain Wilkinson and Commander McCollum that he send a separate warning to Kimmel, and did nothing for the time being beyond phoning to Roosevelt, who certainly did not order him to warn Kimmel.
Marshall's conduct on the morning of the 7th was even more mysterious than that of Stark. According to the accepted legend, supported by sworn testimony of himself and prominent army associates, he abruptly left his office in the old Munitions Building on Saturday afternoon right after he learned from the Pilot Message that the Japanese reply to Hull was about to start coming into Washington, which was exactly the moment Marshall should have settled down in his office, warned Short of the prospect of immediate war, and spent the night with him discussing the best manner of dealing with the imminent attack. Of course, if he had given Short an honest and adequate warning on November 27th, there would have been no attack to discuss on the night of the 6th.
Where Marshall spent the rest of the afternoon and the night of the 6th has never been determined in any final fashion. When examined in the Joint Congressional Committee Investigation of 1945-1946, although known for his excellent memory, Marshall contended that he could not remember where he spent the night of December 6th, probably the most significant, critical and exciting night of his professional life, at least down to that time. Later on, after his wife had gallantly refreshed his memory, Marshall stated that he spent it at home with Mrs. Marshall, who was recovering from an accident at the time. During the Joint Congressional Committee investigation Senator Homer Ferguson reported to his colleague, Senator Owen Brewster, and to his research aide, Percy L. Greaves, that a few days after Marshall's attack of amnesia on the witness stand, he overheard Marshall tell Senator Alben W. Barkley, chairman of the JCC: "I could not tell you where I was Saturday night (the 6th). It would have got the chief (Roosevelt) into trouble."
Continuing the official legend, the next morning Marshall rose leisurely, had a late breakfast with his wife, and then took a long horseback ride when, for all he is alleged to have known, the Japanese could have already attacked the

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United States. While washing up after his return from the relaxing ride, he was summoned to his office by Colonel Bratton, who had been greatly alarmed by the clear implications of the Time of Delivery message relative to an attack on Pearl Harbor. Arriving at his office about 11:25, so the story goes Marshall allegedly read for the first time the fourteen-part reply to Hull and the Time of Delivery message, and decided to send a warning to Short, which he did at 11:50. Despite more rapid means of communication that were available, it was sent by Western Union to San Francisco and from there to Hawaii by RCA, not marked urgent, and was not actually put on the wires until 12:17. It did not reach Short until after the Japanese planes had returned to their carriers, over 200 miles from Pearl Harbor. This delay in delivery did not, however, make too much difference, since the message was sent far too late, even if telephoned, to have given Short enough time to have taken effective steps to repel the Japanese attack and it did not even suggest to Short that there was any reason to expect that a Japanese attack might take place immediately. Kimmel and Short thus remained entirely unwarned even after leading experts in both Army and Navy Intelligence had concluded by around 9:00 A. M. that the fourteen-parter and the Time of Delivery messages meant that the Japanese would probably attack Pearl Harbor at about 1:00 P. M., Washington time.
Another much different version of Marshall's activities from mid-afternoon on the 6th to noon on the 7th appears to be far closer to the truth than the traditional legend and it is supported by persons of unimpeachable integrity. This verslon also accepts the fact of the complete mystery of Marshall's disappearance from the mid-afternoon of the 6th to the morning of the 7th and our lack of precise knowledge as to where he was during all this time, when he should have been constantly in touch with Short at Fort Shafter. But it does eliminate the horseback ride and Marshall's incredibly late arrival at his office on the morning of the 7th. Colonel John R. Deane, then an aide of Colonel Walter Bedell Smith, who was Marshall's secretary at the time, has asserted that he saw Marshall at his office at about ten o'clock on the morning of the 7th. Commander McCollum has twice stated once under oath that Marshall came to Stark's office with a military aide about 9:00 that morning. Marshall and Stark, along with others in Stark's office, notably Admiral Noyes, discussed the fourteen-part and Time of Delivery messages, and

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formulated the message that was to be sent to Short by Marshall. Admiral Stark asked, later that morning, that the message sent to Short should also be handed on to Kimmel. Marshall delayed sending this message for nearly two hours after he left Stark's office, thus making it too late to enable Short to go on an alert that might frighten off the Japanese attack, and did not hand over his message to be sent to Short until 11:50. He further assured its late delivery by refusing to use the quick methods provided by his scrambler telephone connection with Short or the more powerful Navy and F. B. I. transmitters which were offered to him. It was sent by Western Union at 12:17 from Washington to San Francisco and from there to Short at Fort Shafter by R. C. A., not even marked urgent, with the results noted above.
Both versions of Marshall's conduct on the morning of the 7th agree upon the content of the "warning" message Marshall finally sent to Short and make it clear why it has been dubbed the "too-little-and-too-late" message. This is the message:

Japanese are presenting at one p.m. Eastern Standard Time what amounts to an ultimatum also they are under orders to destroy their Code machine immediately. Just what significance the hour set may have we do not know but be on the alert accordingly. Inform naval authorities of this communication.
Marshall


There was nothing in the message to indicate any immediate emergency for Pearl Harbor or that there was any knowledge or conviction at Washington that the Japanese might be attacking Pearl Harbor within about an hour. Marshall deliberately deceived Short in telling that the significance of the Time of Delivery message was unknown. Even Admiral Samuel E. Morison admits this. Actually, when Marshall read over the fourteen-part reply to Hull and the Time of Delivery message, his associates in his office state that he exclaimed, "This means immediate war!" There was no such interpretation, even by way of implication, in what he sent to Short, and the same message was to be transmitted to Kimmel. That Marshall was capable of sending a clear and incisive warning when he wished to do so is shown by the message he sent to General
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Herron, the commander of the Hawaiian District, on June 17, 1940, In what was little more than a practice alert to impress the Japanese Marshall ordered Herron to: "Immediately alert complete defensive organization to deal with possible trans-Pacific raid."
The defenders of Roosevelt and Marshall have contended that Marshall knew nothing of the fourteen-parter or the Time of Delivery messages until he read these in his office after 11:25 on Sunday morning. To accept this requires the utmost credulity, even naivete. If he did not know about them, then this proves carelessness and callous indifference to his official duties quite sufficient to justify his dismissal from office as Army chief-of-staff. He needed to be well informed about these documents just as much if he were to practice clever deception as though he were doing his duty in getting the facts and cooperating with Short in meeting the Japanese attack. Roosevelt would not have allowed him to get out of touch with Army Intelligence or the Signal Corps. There is no reasonable doubt that Marshall, informed of the Pilot Message, had arranged for receiving these messages, had read them, and was fully informed by the time he reached his office or Stark's on Sunday morning whatever time that was. This is the only reasonable explanation of why he sought an early conference with Stark. Those who have sought to indicate otherwise are better known for their proclivity to cover up the facts in this situation than for their zest for revealing the truth. The only reasonable motive for Marshall's disappearance would have been to make himself inaccessible to those who might plead with him to send a warning to Short and Kimmel.
Another important qualification bearing on the validity of the traditional account of Marshall's conduct on the morning of December 7th has been pointed out by Commander Hiles. He made a very careful estimate of the time which would have been required for Marshall to have done all the things he is stated to have accomplished in the twenty-five minutes between 11:25 and 11:50 in his office on the morning of December 7th, and conservatively concluded that it would have required at least two hours.
There is no space here to go into the complicated question of where Marshall was from mid-afternoon of the 6th until 11:25 on the morning of the 7th, when he is represented as reaching his office in the Old Munitions Building to examine for the first time the messages that had come in from Japan during this interval. I sought to do this as well as possible in the Pearl Harbor Supplement published by the Chicago

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Tribune on December 7, 1966. It is obvious that one must choose between the traditional legend and the statements of Admiral McCollum, made during the post-Pearl Harbor investigations, and before a luncheon at the Army and Navy Club in Washington on May 3, 1961, as reported in the notes of Admiral John F. Shafroth that were twice checked and confirmed with minor revisions by Admiral McCollum. They are also supported by the statement of Colonel (now General) Deane that he saw Marshall at his office about 10:00 A. M. on the morning of the 7th, and by a direct report to me by Professor Charles C. Tansill who was present at the meeting on May 3rd.
It obviously makes a great deal of difference, factually, whether Marshall was off on a horseback ride during the morning of December 7th and did not reach his office until 11:25, where he first saw the reply to Hull and the Time of Delivery message, or whether he came to Stark's office shortly after 9:00 on the morning of the 7th, discussed the reply to Hull and the Time of Delivery message with Stark, McCollum, Noyes and Wilkinson, formulated there the warning to be sent by him to Short before 10:00 A.M., but delayed sending it until 11:50 that morning. Personally, I prefer to accept the statements of Admiral McCollum as being far better supported by documentation and circumstantial evidence and motivated only by a courageous desire to establish the truth. Most of the documentation supporting the traditional story has been destroyed or kept a close secret. On December 17th General Sherman Miles, chief of Military Intelligence, prepared an honest account of what went on in Marshall's office on the morning of December 7th and showed it to Marshall. It made the latter furious and he banished Miles to the post of military observer in Brazil and allowed him to stay in the service on condition of making no further revelations. Later on, Marshall summoned the officers who were acquainted with the facts to a room, locked the door, walked around the room, shook hands with each of those present, and told them that the facts relating to the events of December 6th and 7th and associated developments must remain a secret with them "to the grave". One of those present decided not to have this situation on his conscience until he reached the grave and revealed the facts to Professor Tansill and myself. Whatever Marshall did on the morning of December 7th, it was all too late for any effective warning of Pearl Harbor. It is probable that even revisionist historians have erred in putting exclusive emphasis on the Time of Delivery

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message as the sole or best basis for deciding that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor on the morning of the 7th. Intelligence experts like Bratton and McCollum did this only by clever guessing and logical inference. But the Kita message, which was ready in all essential parts for distribution by 2:30 P.M. on the afternoon of the 6th, left nothing to guesswork. Kita's complex system of signals to be passed back to the approaching Japanese task force was to end on the night of the 6th, clearly implying that the task force was expected to be arriving at Hawaii by the night of the 6th, organizing off Oahu and put in readiness for the attack the next morning.
Such was the situation in Washington. There was an impressive accumulation of evidence by the morning of December 7th which made it certain that war with Japan was coming in a matter of a few hours, with every probability that the attack would be made on Pearl Harbor. Even as early as December first, it was probable that war was about to start somewhere, and by December 4th it was certain that Japan would attack the United States. Surely, by then, it was mandatory to warn Short and Kimmel in clear and definite fashion. If they had been so informed on the 4th they would have taken steps to go on an effective alert that would have led the Japanese task force to turn back. It was not until December 5th that Tokyo sent its vital radio message directing Admiral Chiuchi Nagumo (who commanded the Japanese task force) to "climb Mount Niitaka", which meant that he was to proceed to Pearl Harbor with no further delay or interruption unless negotiations were resumed.
Of course, Short and Kimmel should have been told of the negotiations with Japan in November, 1941, and warned when Tojo began to set deadlines for the end of these negotiations, notably after he set November 29th as the date when they must be settled unless "things were automatically going to happen." But neither Kimmel nor Short received any warning whatever of an impending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor until the Japanese bombing planes appeared over the fleet and the military establishment about 7:50 on the morning of December 7th.

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IV. KEEPING SHORT AND KIMMEL IN IGNORANCE OF A SURPRISE JAPANESE ATTACK

We may now turn to the account of the incredible extent to which General Short and Admiral Kimmel were kept in

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ignorance of any Japanese threat to Pearl Harbor down to the moment of the attack. Both these men had special personal reasons to believe that Washington would keep them informed of any developments that directly endangered Pearl Harbor.
Short was a personal friend of Marshall, and like Marshall one of the few important generals who was not a West Point graduate, and he had been promoted and placed in charge of the Army establishment in Hawaii by Marshall. He had every reason to believe that Marshall would keep him thoroughly informed of any information available in Washington that was of vital significance for Pearl Harbor. Probably, he should have begun to have some doubts about this before December, 1941, in the light of the manner in which Washington ignored his demands for material and equipment to complete the defensive installations that were required, and the almost complete failure to send planes that he needed for reconnaissance and repelling Japanese bombing attacks. Short received no information about intercepts of the Japanese Purple diplomatic code after the economic measures taken against Japan at the end of July, 1941.
Kimmel had even more personal reasons to believe that he would not be double-crossed or blacked out by Washington. He had been an aide to Roosevelt when the latter was Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Wilson and had maintained pleasant relations with him after that time. He was an especially close friend of Stark, who was then Chief of Naval Operations, the supreme authority over naval affairs. Soon after Kimmel succeeded Admiral Richardson as commander of the Pacific fleet, he wrote Stark in February, 1941, that he would expect to be sent all relevant information collected by Naval Communications and the Office of Naval Intelligence. In March, Stark promised that this would be done, and that Captain Kirk, the able and alert Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, fully understood this to be one of his most important duties. There can be no doubt that Kirk intended to keep Kimmel informed and that his being blocked in this by Turner and Stark when the first Bomb Plot intercept was decoded in early October was a main reason why he resigned as head of the Office of Naval Intelligence and sought sea duty. In June, Kimmel went to Washington, had a long talk with Stark, and the latter assured him that he would be furnished with full information about all developments of interest to Pearl Harbor and by the most rapid methods which were also secure.

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There is good reason to believe that Stark meant to do this, but his hands were tied in many ways. He was a genial and modest person, and had the bad luck to be closely associated with Admiral Turner, chief of Naval War Plans, who, while a mentally superior officer, was also an arrogant, conceited, overbearing and opinionated bully. He tended to override Stark, almost to the extent of assuming to be in charge of the Navy. Admiral Beatty, who, as aide to Secretary Knox, attended many top naval conferences, told me that, more often than not, when Knox asked a question of Stark, Turner would do the answering. He regarded his own opinions as more reliable than the facts, of which he was often careless. He even believed that Pearl Harbor had a Purple machine and could decode Japanese diplomatic messages on the spot. Until mid-November, 1941, he labored under the obsession that Japan would move into Siberia and attack Russia rather than make war in the southwest Pacific. There is no doubt that Turner did more than anybody else in the Navy to prevent the Bomb Plot messages from getting to Kimmel and to frustrate the efforts of Commander McCollum to warn Kimmel decisively in the days immediately before the Pearl Harbor attack. How far he was directly influenced by Roosevelt in this is not revealed in the documents.
Stark kept up a friendly correspondence with Kimmel down to December, 1941 and from this Kimmel learned indirectly most of what little he knew about the negotiations with Japan, but Stark stressed the fact that the only actual threat of war in the Pacific existed in the Far East and never at any time even implied any direct menace to Pearl Harbor. While he sometimes mentioned our negotiations with Japan, he would never go into detail or indicate the sources of the information about our diplomatic dealings since this information was derived from our Magic operations which Stark has always maintained he was not allowed to divulge. In June, 1961, Stark told two college professors, Paul Burtness and Warren Ober, that he had to swear a "horrendous oath" which superseded all other oaths, never to divulge the existence or contents of Magic operations.
Kimmel had never heard of the Purple machine or of our breaking the Japanese Purple code. Pearl Harbor had been denied a Purple machine in the summer of 1941, when the one which was originally designed to go to Pearl Harbor was sent as a "spare" to London, which already had two Purple machines. But Kimmel had been given clearly to understand that he would immediately obtain all information

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of any significance in safeguarding his operations at Pearl Harbor and believed he was getting it. Actually, Kimmel never received any of the intercepts from the diplomatic messages in the Purple code after the meeting of Roosevelt and Churchill at Argentia early in August, 1941, and no details about Japanese-American negotiations at any time.
On the whole, one may assume that Stark personally wished to keep Kimmel informed so far as he could without violating his orders from Roosevelt about Magic and other secret restraints. When accused of improper action, Stark's invariable defense was that he always acted in accordance with a "higher authority", who could only have been Roosevelt. He was often confused himself, partly by Turner and partly because he became one of those who seemed to be both beguiled by the movement of Japanese forces down the southeastern coast of Asia and distracted by the strategic implications of the naval war plan WPL 46, derived from ABCD and Rainbow 5, which envisaged war in the southwest Pacific. He actually may have come to believe that the first Japanese attack would surely take place in the Far East. Of course by December 4th, Stark was hogtied by Roosevelt's order that all warnings to Pearl Harbor must be cleared through Marshall, and on the night of the 6th and the morning of the 7th Roosevelt may have seen to it that Stark was reminded of this order by telephone.
The truth of the matter is that Short and Kimmel never received any of the intercepted Japanese messages in the Purple code that would have told them of the diplomatic negotiations with Japan during the autumn of 1941. Without these the mention of such items as the "ending of diplomatic negotiations" could not make any real sense to them or cause any serious alarm.
Kimmel and Short were not even sent the Bomb Plot messages that were obtained between September 24th and December 7th, although they were sent in the J-l9 and PA-K2 codes which were less secret than Purple and could have been read at Pearl Harbor at any time by Commander (now Captain) Joseph J. Rochefort, Admiral Bloch's talented and experienced cryptanalyst and Communications Intelligence officer, if he had been assigned this duty. These Bomb Plot messages, as we have seen, pinpointed Pearl Harbor as the first target of any Japanese Surprise attack. If these had been read by Rochefort they would have been even more of a warning of a direct Japanese threat to Pearl Harbor than the Purple diplomatic messages some of which actually encouraged top naval

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authorities in Washington to believe that if there was any war with Japan it would probably start in the Far East.
Most of these Bomb Plot messages were picked up by the Army Signal Corps station MS5, located at Fort Shafter, General Short's army headquarters near Honolulu. The station was actually controlled and operated by Colonel Carroll A. Powell operating under the Army Signal Corps in Washington. Kimmel did not even know that Station MS5 existed. Short knew it was stationed at Fort Shafter but he did not know what it was actually doing. He had been informed that it was operated by the Army Signal Corps at Washington and, hence, assumed that if anything of significance to Hawaii was picked up by MS5 the information would be sent back to him from Washington, which never actually occurred.
Station MS5 intercepted the Japanese messages to and from Tokyo and Honolulu as raw and undecoded material, and, at Marshall's order, sent them on by mail to Washington, making use of the China Clipper from Honolulu to San Francisco which made the trip once every two weeks. When the Clipper missed a trip they were sent by boat mail which further slowed down their arrival in Washington. These Bomb Plot messages were also usually intercepted by the Navy monitoring station S at Bainbridge Island on Puget Sound, and by the Army Signal Corps Stations MS2 at the Presidio in San Francisco, and MS7 at Fort Hunt, Virginia. Duplicates of these intercepts were thrown away, depending on the time of their arrival in Washington. Those retained were decoded, translated, read and filed away. Their nature and crucially important contents were never revealed to General Short or Admiral Kimmel.
Colonel Powell had no personnel capable of decoding and translating these Bomb Plot messages, and they would not have dared to do so without authorization if they had been able to do so. But, as we have noted, Admiral Bloch had in Commander Rochefort a trained and veteran cryptanalyst--one of the very best in the Navy--and a master of the Japanese language who could have decoded and translated these J-19 messages with great ease if he had been assigned to do this as one of his duties. But he was kept very busy at research work on Japanese naval codes, direction-finding, and traffic analysis. It was customary for these specialists in cryptanalysts and related operations to stick to their own assignments. Therefore, Rochefort, who did know that MS5 existed, would not have considered investigating its operations and would not have been welcomed if he had done so.

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If he could have received these J-19 and PA-K2 messages that carried the Bomb Plot material, decoded and translated them, and turned them over to Kimmel and Short, there can be no reasonable doubt that these commanders would have taken defensive actions long before November 25th that would have called a halt to Yamamoto's plan to send a task force to attack Pearl Harbor.
Commander Rochefort has told me that if he could also have had the diplomatic messages sent in the Purple code he would have been even more impressed with the significance of the Bomb Plot messages and, in that event, Pearl Harbor would most surely have gone on an alert in ample time to have led to the cancellation of Yamamoto's attack program. Even some of the Purple material that he needed for this was also actually being intercepted at MS5 and transmitted to Washington, but Rochefort could not have decoded and translated this in the autumn of 1941 because Pearl Harbor had been denied a Purple machine for the benefit of the British. Hence, it is both paradoxical and calamitous that the very material which would have frustrated the attack on Pearl Harbor was intercepted right at Hawaii but could not be used there, by either the design or the stupidity of Washington, mainly that of the Army officials, specifically, General Marshall himself.
As to the precise attitude and opinion of the military authorities at Pearl Harbor concerning the probability that the Japanese would start a war with the United States in 1941, I have discussed this matter several times with Captain Rochefort, twice with Admiral Kimmel, and once with General Short. Admiral Kimmel assured me once more in June, 1966, that he and Short were in agreement on this. Lacking any specific warning information whatever from Wasnington or any other reliable source, they had to make up their own minds from general considerations. It seems perfectly clear that all the responsible personnel at Pearl Harbor rather completely discounted the probability of war with Japan. They arrived at this conclusion because they did not believe that Japan would be unwise enough to start a war that it could not ultimately win. The resources of the United States were so great that we would ultimately wear down Japan, even if we did not win a quick and brilliant victory. They were proved to be right about this, but not about Japan's willingness to risk defeat if they started a war.

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V. THE SO-CALLED WARNINGS TO SHORT AND KIMMEL

Now that we have seen that Short and Kimmel were denied the extensive body of valid and relevant information which would have enabled them to learn of the probability of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in ample time to have taken proper action to have averted or repelled it, we may consider the so-called "warnings" that were sent to them. These have been presented by the defenders of Roosevelt, Stimson, Marshall and Stark as clear and precise warnings that Pearl Harbor was definitely threatened by an imminent Japanese air attack, and it has been asserted that if Short and Kimmel had taken proper cognizance of the information they would have been prepared for the Japanese attack that came on the morning of December 7th. Actually, these so-called warnings to Short and Kimmel on November 27th and 28th were nothing of the sort. Commander Hiles has stated the reality clearly: "A genuine, forthright, and honestly inspired war warning can be expressed most lucidly, concisely, intelligently and forcibly in one sentence--the shorter the better. The warnings to Short and Kimmel were lacking in all these virtues. They were probably the most profuse collection of misleading verbiage ever to grace two military messages that purported to warn two important field commanders of a war already known in Washington to be a fait accomcli." They were a great contrast with the warning that Marshall had sent to General Herron in Hawaii in June, 1940.
On November 27th, General Short received from Washington the following message which has been represented as a warning of approaching war, with the direct implication that he was being informed of a probable attack by Japan "at any moment":

Negotiations with Japan appear to be terminated to all practical purposes with only the barest possibilities that the Japanese Government might come back and offer to continue. Japanese future action unpredictable but hostile action possible at any moment. If hostilities cannot, repeat cannot be avoided the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act. This Policy should not, repeat not, be construed as restricting you to a court of action that might jeopardize your defense. Prior to hostile Japanese action you are directed to undertake such reconnaissance and other measures as you deem necessary but these measures should be carried out so
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as not to alarm civil population or disclose intent. Report measures taken. Should hostilities occur you wil1 carry out the tasks assigned in Rainbow five so far as they pertain to Japan. Limit dissemination of this highly secret information to minimum essential officers.


The message just cited did not even imply any threat of a Japanese attack at Hawaii. It stated that negotiations with Japan, of which Short had no specific knowledge, had come to an end, with little prospect that the Japanese would renew them. Hostile action, which could have meant either distant war or local sabotage, might start at any time, but it was essential that Japan must commit the first overt act. Prior to any hostile act, Short was to take all protective measures deemed necessary, but they must not alarm the civil population. If hostilities did start, Short was to operate in accord with War Plan Rainbow 5, so far as it applied to Japan.
The message to Short bore Marshall's signature although he was away from Washington that day watching maneuvers in North Carolina. Its inception was conceived by Secretary Of War Stimson, possibly at Roosevelt's suggestion, and it was written by Stimson and General Leonard T. Gerow, chief of Army War Plans, with some aid from Colonel Charles W. Bundy of the Army General Staff. They consulted Roosevelt, Hull and Knox, Admirals Stark, Turner, and Ingersoll, and General William Bryden, Deputy Army Chief_of_Staff. Commander Hiles has appropriately observed that it was both strange and suspicious that such a large group and range of top level signatories had to be assembled if the purpose was actually to formulate a clear and precise warning of imminent war, which could have been prepared by any bright second lieutenant or ensign in ten minutes. To prepare a war warning that was not a war warning required, however, the pooling of much skill in obfuscation and deception. From the statements of Stimson and Gerow, it appears certain that the message was originally conceived and formulated to guide General MacArthur in the Philippines, to whom substantially the same message was sent. It was also sent to the Caribbean Defense Command in the Panama Canal zone and to the Fourth Army headquarters at the Presidio in San Francisco.
Short logically replied to the November 27th message as follows: "Department alerted against sabotage." His reply was read by Stimson, Marshall and Gerow. Since Short
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received no reply from Washington he correctly assumed that these men were satisfied with his report.
Three other messages were sent from Washington to Fort Shafter on the 27th and 28th, amplifying the directions as to measures to be taken by Short against local sabotage. One was sent by General Sherman Miles, chief of Army Intelligence in Washington, to Colonel Kendall J. Fielder, chief of Army Intelligence in Hawaii; one by Adjutant General Adams to Short, and one by General Henry H. Arnold, chief of the Army Air Corps in Washington, to General Frederick L. Martin, chief of the Hawaiian Air Force. All of these indicated to Short that he had been correct in instituting an alert against local sabotage.
These messages merely added more detailed directions as to how Short should apply his alert against local sabotage. They stressed the need to assure security against the danger of hostilities, by which was plainly implied local subversive activities in Hawaii, to avoid publicity and not excite the public at Honolulu, and to maintain strict legality in all actions. To the Army authorities in Hawaii, it appeared obvious that the main fear in Washington, as expressed in the messages to Short and his subordinates, was that subversive activities, such as rioting in Honolulu, might produce some overt act by Americans that Japan could regard as justifying a declaration of war. The United States could then be accused of having precipitated war without any attack. It was Roosevelt who, personally, directed that the stipulation that Japan must be permitted to commit the first overt act of war should be included in the message to Short of November 27th and in that of Stark to Kimmel on November 29th. This was the basic formula of Roosevelt as the situation approached hostilities, and was immortalized by the statement of Stimson in his Diary after the meeting of the War Cabinet on November 25th: "The question was how we should maneuver them [he Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves."
On November 29th and December 4th, Short and Martin sent detailed reports to Marshall and Arnold, as to the manner in which they had carried out the directions on instituting and operating the alert against local sabotage. Once more, there was no reply from Washington, and Short again felt assured that Washington was satisfied with what they were doing in Hawaii. Marshall admitted, when being examined by Senator Homer Ferguson during the Joint Congressional Committee Investigation in 1945-46, that

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Short was entirely correct when he assumed that, since there were no replies to his reports on the operations he had instituted to check local sabotage, what he had done was fully satisfactory to Washington.
In assessing the nature and significance of these bogus "warning" messages to Short, one may well start with pointing out that they were not in any way even labelled as a "war warning". Nothing indicated any thought of war at Hawaii. It is obvious that the vague reference to Japanese hostility in the message to Short had been inserted for the benefit of MacArthur who was located at the Philippines in the Far East, the area where the authorities in Washington were becoming ever more convinced that, if any Japanese attack occurred, it would take place. This overlooked the fact that an attack on the Philippines and the destruction of Hart's small fleet would not serve the main purpose of the first Japanese attack, which was to destroy the Pacific fleet and protect the Japanese flank against their further campaigns in the Far East.
The emphasis in all four messages to Short was placed primarily on watching and suppressing local subversive activities and on handling such operations with care and with studied legality. Subversive activities were obviously what were meant by "hostilities", so far as Hawaii was concerned, although they doubtless envisaged possible military activities in the case of MacArthur. This throttling of subversive activities was to be effective but executed with restraint and caution. Neither any subversive activities nor Short's restraint of them should be allowed to get out of hand and make it possible for Japan to regard some extreme incident as an overt and plausible "act of war", which, according to Roosevelt's policy, must be left for the Japanese to provide.
All this restraining action must be so executed as not to alarm the civilian population or create excitement or demonstrations which might lead the Japanese consul general and spies in Honolulu to interpret them as a genuine Pearl Harbor alert against a possible Japanese attack and report this to Tokyo. The latter could send such information on to Admiral Nagumo in command of the task force enroute to Pearl Harbor, which on the 27th was still not too far from its point of departure in the Kurile Islands. Nagumo was jittery enough about the venture as it was without any suspicion that Hawaii was already getting ready for an attack. It was this unusual combination of insistent directives and qualifying restrictions in the Washington messages to

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Short which led the Army Pearl Harbor Board, when investigating the responsibility for the surprise attack, somewhat cynically to designate the Marshall message of the 27th to Short as the "do-and-don't message".
But more important than the above comments on the so-called warning messages to Short on the 27th and 28th is this crucial observation: If the men who wrote or approved these messages to Short really suspected any probability of an immediate Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and then ordered Short to go on an alert against local sabotage, they would have had to be nothing short of military idiots or political traitors, which would scarcely be true of Stimson, Generals Marshall, Gerow, Bryden, Miles, Arnold and Adams, and Colonel Bundy, or of Admirals Stark and Turner.
Concentration on local sabotage and civilian responses constituted a complete reversal of the attitudes and operations which would have been required to prepare for a possible enemy attack by warships and airplane bombers. Local sabotage turned attention inward and groundwise rather than outward and upward from which an air attack by Japan would take place--local sabotage in Honolulu from the air was very unlikely. An attack by Japan, and there were no other possible assailants, would come from the outside and the air.
Exclusive devotion to suppressing local sabotage also demanded operations which would be militarily suicidal, such as bunching the planes in a circle, wing to wing, where they could be more easily guarded and protected, but would be helpless in the event of a surprise air attack, as proved to be the case when the Japanese struck on the early morning of December 7th. Experienced military officers like Marshall, Gerow, Bryden, Miles, Arnold, Adams, and Bundy were very well aware of this.
Suppressing local sabotage without alarming civilians also encouraged giving very restricted attention to checking and preparing anti-aircraft protection. Concentrating on local civilian activities also naturally shifted emphasis away from detecting any possible approaching enemy task forces. Further, the special and repealed directions to avoid arousing civilian curiosity or excitement precluded any serious military operations, even increased reconnaissance, that would have been involved in getting ready for an attack by aircraft. It would have been impossible even to carry out an alert involving artillery operations without causing great

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excitement in Honolulu. Some of the heavy coast artillery was located right in the center of the city, and live ammunition had to be taken from magazines and placed by the guns. Fort de Russey was situated close to Waikai Beach and the most important hotel in the city.
Hence, it can safely be maintained that, if Washington had desired to tell Short indirectly and obliquely, but very clearly and obviously that the top military "brass" at Washington apparently did not expect in any immediate period a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they could hardly have done better than the messages sent to Short on November 27th and 28th. They were a masterly achievement in the way of producing a "war warning" that did not warn against war, at least at Hawaii. The Washington brass knew that these were no actual war warnings, but some of the authors or advisers, notably Admiral Turner, acted, even before the attack, as though they thought they were. When Short was caught off guard by the surprise attack, the men who fashioned and sent these fake warning messages tried to pass them off as genuine and adequate warnings, and so have their defenders among publicists, historians, and journalists over the last quarter of a century.
The question naturally arises as to whether Roosevelt, Stimson, Marshall, Bryden, Gerow, Miles, Adams, Bundy, Arnold, Stark, Turner, and Ingersoll, in reality meaning Roosevelt, Stimson, and Marshall, deliberately intended the fake "warnings" to deceive Short end give him additional assurance that there was no probability of an attack on Pearl Harbor in order to insure that he would take no action which might frighten Admiral Nagumo and lead him to turn back with the task force that Yamamoto was sending to Pearl Harbor. Many of the more critical students of the Pearl Harbor episode have contended that the warnings to Short were actually intended to be misleading, and good arguments can be produced to support this interpretation, notably in the case of Stimson.
At this time (November 26-27), it appears that Roosevelt and most of the top military brass in Washington may have been pretty well convinced that, if Japan struck at all, it would probably do so at the outset in the southwest Pacific. Apparently, it was not before the afternoon or evening of December 3rd, at the earliest, that Roosevelt became finally convinced in his own mind or actually learned that the Japanese were planning to strike at Pearl Harbor on or about the 7th, confided this to Marshall and Arnold on the 4th, and immediately bottled up all possible warnings to

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Short and Kimmel by making it necessary to clear them through Marshall, who would certainly not forward any such warnings in violation of Roosevelt's wishes and orders. Even on the 4th, as will be shown later on, while Roosevelt may have been convinced that the Japanese were on their way to attack Pearl Harbor, he was still waiting anxiously for an attack on one of the "three small vessels" that he had ordered sent out from the Philippines to draw Japanese fire, thus being able to start war after an attack and yet in time to save Pearl Harbor.
It was not until after the attack and the bad planners and bad guessers had been exposed that the attempt got underway to make Short and Kimmel the scapegoats for the surprise attack and try to interpret the fake warnings to them on the 27th and 28th as definitive and adequate warnings of an approaching Japanese attack. This malicious mendacity reached its most contemptible and despicable depths in some of the post-Pearl Harbor investigations, beginning with the kangaroo court of the Roberts Commission, thus creating what has been well designated as the"American Dreyfus Case".
We now come to the alleged "warning" sent to Kimmel by Stark on the 27th. It has already been pointed out that Kimmel had casual but friendly relations with Roosevelt for a quarter of a century before he assumed command at Pearl Harbor, and was a close personal friend of Stark. Hence, he was justified in expecting a fair deal from Washington. He was told by Stark that he would promptly receive all the relevant information concerning any threats to Pearl Harbor and he had every reason to expect that he would get them. He did not. He did not receive any of the diplomatic intercepts in Purple after the Argentia meeting at Newfoundland in early August, 1941. He did not even get the Bomb Plot messages in J-19 and PA-K2 that were intercepted by MS5 from September 24th onward right at Fort Shafter. The fact that, before the Argentia meeting, Kimmel did obtain some of the contents of a few of the Japanese diplomatic messages from the Purple code, although there had been no mention of Purple or Magic in them, actually deceived him. This made him believe that he was getting all that came in after that time, whereas he received none.
Stark wrote Kimmel frequently and in a friendly manner but the main theme of his letters before September was that Germany was our main enemy, that Roosevelt wished to get into the war directly in Europe, and that the administration did not desire to be drawn into waging a two-front

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conflict by having a war with Japan on its hands. When Stark did begin later on to write Kimmel about a possible war with Japan, he stressed the fact that it would probably begin thousands of miles away in the Philippines, the southwest Pacific, or in the English possessions and the Dutch East Indies, and even here was as likely to be one of Japan against Britain and Holland as directly against the United States. Of course, Stark was fully aware that any Japanese attack on British or Dutch territory would immediately bring the United States into war against Japan, as arranged in ABCD and Rainbow 5. Never once did Stark hint of any early Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and it is very possible that he did not expect one until December 4th, when Roosevelt by his order to Marshall bottled up any Navy warnings to Pearl Harbor and Stark was so informed.
The actions of the Washington authorities which related to Kimmel's and Bloch's operations at Pearl Harbor supplemented Stark's letters in giving Kimmel a definite impression that no attack on Pearl Harbor was expected by Washington. When Kimmel took over the command of the Pacific fleet in February, 1941, the Japanese Navy was, in Kimmel's own words, superior to our Pacific fleet "in every category of fighting ships". Nevertheless, in April and May, 1941, Kimmel was ordered to send about a fourth of his fighting force to the Atlantic to engage in what was described to him by Washington as the "first echelon of the battle of the Atlantic"--surely an unwise act if Washington was expecting to get involved in a prior war with Japan.
This early impression was reinforced by the failure of Washington to send Short and Bloch the additional planes they needed and requested if they were to maintain effective reconnaissance around the Hawaiian area and repel any Japanese air attack. Knox had indicated the need of more planes for Pearl Harbor in January, 1941, and Bloch had requested one hundred additional patrol planes, but not one had been sent before December 7th, 1941. Only six usable B-17 flying fortresses had been sent to Short before Pearl Harbor, although he had been officially allocated one hundred and eighty. Planes of all types were being shipped to Europe, especially to Britain and Russia, and B-17's were being ferried to the Philippines and the Far East to bolster the defense there.
Furthermore, it is essential once more to recall Kimmel's assignment and role as commander of the Pacific fleet. While he was in supreme command of all naval vessels stationed at Hawaii, the actual naval defense of Pearl

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Harbor was vested in Admiral Bloch, commander of the Hawaiian Coastal Frontier--the Fourteenth Naval District. To be sure, Bloch consulted with Kimmel and took orders from him when necessary, but Bloch and Short were responsible for protecting Pearl Harbor, and even here the main responsibility was that of Short and the Army. Kimmel's function was to train personnel, provide and improve equipment, recondition ships, and, when so directed, to send them westward to Wake and Midway, and even to the Far East to raid the Japanese islands if war broke out between the United States and Japan. By assignment, duties, and activities, his role was offensive and oriented toward the mid-Pacific and the Far East, in accordance with the naval phases of Rainbow 5, based on the ABCD agreement.
We are now in a position to examine the so-called war-warning to Kimmel that he received from Stark on November 27th. To get a better idea of what was on the mind of Stark and his associates in Washington at this moment, we may note that Kimmel had received a dispatch from Stark on the 24th which included the following statement: "Chances of favorable outcome of negotiations with Japan very doubtful. This situation coupled with statements of Japanese Government and movements of their Naval and Military forces indicate that in our opinion that a surprise aggressive movement in any direction including an attack on the Philippines or Guam is a possibility." On the next day, Stark wrote a letter to Kimmel. Although Kimmel did not receive it until December 3rd, it reveals the trend of Stark's thinking on the 25th. He stated that a Japanese attack on the Philippines would be the most embarrassing thing that could happen to the United States and that some Washington authorities thought that this might occur. Stark went on to say that he, personally, was inclined to "look for an advance into Thailand, Indo-China, Burma Road area as the most likely." Stark concluded by stating that: "Of what the United States may do, I'll be damned if I know. I wish I did. The only thing that I do know is that we may do almost anything." This well illustrates Stark's frequent personal confusion and uncertainty.
One may observe that the "almost anything" did not include an attack on Pearl Harbor, despite Stark's knowledge of the Bomb Plot messages from the time of the decoding and translation of the first one on October 9th. By the 24th and 25th of November, his thinking appeared to be almost entirely dominated by the thought that the Japanese would first attack in the Far East, indeed in the furthest East.

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Kimmel, of course, knew nothing about the negotiations with the Japanese or the details of the Japanese movements which had led Stark to these conclusions. He did not even know that Hull had sent an ultimatum to Japan on November 26th, which Washington expected would lead to war with the United States in a few days--when the Japanese sent their reply to Hull. On November 27th, Kimmel received from Stark the following so-called "war warning" message, which has been represented by Roosevelt's defenders as sufficient to alert Kimmel as to the possibility of an imminent Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, although this was not even mentioned by implication:

This despatch is to be considered a war warning. Negotiations with Japan looking toward stabilization of conditions in the Pacific have ceased and an aggressive move by Japan is expected in the next few days. The number and equipment of Japanese troops and the organization of naval task forces indicate an amphibious expedition against either the Philippines, Thai, or Kra peninsula, or possibly Borneo. Execute an appropriate defensive deployment preparatory to carrying out the tasks assigned in WPL 46. Inform District and Army authorities. A similar warning is being sent by War Department. SPENAVO inform British.Continental Districts Guam Samoa directed take appropriate measures against sabotage.

Not only the content of Stark's "war warning" message but also the method used in transmitting it further emphasized to Kimmel that Stark and Washington were concentrating on the threat of Japanese movements in the Far East. Just as the message sent to Short on the 27th was drafted with MacArthur primarily in the mind of Washington authorities, so Stark's message to Kimmel clearly indicated that Washington framed it primarily for Admiral Hart, Commander of the Asiatic fleet in the Far East. This Navy "war warning" message was addressed as follows:
For Action: Cincaf (Hart), Cincpac (Kimmel).
For Info: Cinclant (King, USN, Ghormley, London)
Spenavo tCreighton, Singapore) . . .

It would, of course, be quibbling to contend that Kimmel did not know that the message was designed for him as well as for Hart. But it is also a fact that, as shown by the prior listing of the lower ranked Hart, that it was the latter whom the drafters had primarily in mind. Admiral Ingersoll
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actually testified that the warning of the 27th was intended primarily for Hart. It is equally true that Kimmel noted this order of address and naturally interpreted it as deliberately intended to emphasize that Washington believed that the real danger from Japan lay in the Far East. With never one mention of a threat to Hawaii, Stark's message diverted attention to the Far East. Nevertheless, Kimmel faithfully carried out the directions in this message of the 27th, as well as in the supplementary messages from Stark, just as though he had been the sole addressee in the "war warning" message. Stark testified on the witness stand that Kimmel had done all that was required of him in the message of the 27th.
Stark's statement started off with the assertion that "This dispatch is to be considered as a war warning." This carried a much weaker and more generalized connotation than, "This is a war warning." It went on to state that negotiations with Japan, of which Kimmel knew no details, had ceased and aggressive action by Japan might be expected within the next few days. All known Japanese equipment and activities indicated an "amphibious expedition against the Philippines, Thai or Kra Peninsula, or possibly Borneo." Kimmel was ordered to "execute an appropriate defensive deployment preparatory to carrying out the tasks assigned in WPL 46" if war broke out.
Two later supplementary messages were sent to Kimmel by Stark on the 27th. One dealt with sending infantry divisions to defend adjacent bases in the Pacific. The other ordered, if Kimmel thought it feasible, sending Army patrol and pursuit planes to Wake and Midway on carriers then at Pearl Harbor. There was no suggestion of an extensive offensive deployment by the Pacific fleet to the Marshalls to restrain Japanese movement.~ toward the Malay barrier. Commander Hiles has suggested that if the Stimson message to Short on the 27th was a "do-don't message", those of Stark to Kimmel on the 27th constituted "do nothing" messages, so far as preparing Hawaii for an attack on Pearl Harbor. On November 29th, Stark sent Kimmel another message directing him to take no action under WPL 46 until "Japan has committed an overt act", thus matching the similar order sent to Short on the 27th.
Kimmel carried out these orders promptly. On November 28th, Admiral William F. Halsey was sent to Wake with the carrier Enterprise, three heavy cruisers and nine destroyers. On December 5th, Admiral John H. Newton was sent to Midway with the carrier Lexington, three heavy cruisers

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and five destroyers; and also on the 5th, Admiral Wilson Brown was sent to Johnson Island on a practice operation with some cruisers and destroyers, there being no remaining carrier for him. The carrier Saratoga had been sent to the Pacific coast for reconditioning and equipment with radar and was just starting to return to Pearl Harbor. It was fortunate that the carriers and heavy cruisers had been sent out of Pearl Harbor before the 7th; otherwise, the naval disaster from the surprise attack would have been far more serious. The battleships which were destroyed or injured were of very secondary importance in the type of naval warfare which ensued.
Of course, if Kimmel had been actually warned of imminent danger on the 27th, as he could and should have been, the battleships, carriers, and heavy cruisers at Pearl Harbor would all have been deployed and directed in such fashion as possibly to have detected, intercepted and surprised the Japanese task force under Nagumo and inflicted serious injury upon it, even though it was outnumbered by the Japanese in carrier and planes: that is, provided that the Japanese consul general and spies in Honolulu had not become alarmed by this desertion of Pearl Harbor, informed Tokyo, and the latter had not recalled Nagumo, which is probably what would have happened. Even if Nagumo had proceeded to Pearl Harbor, there is little probability that he would have sent his bombers to attack an empty naval base.
Kimmel ordered the planes that were taken on the carriers by Halsey and Newton to conduct reconnaissance sweeps to detect any possible enemy movements or threats. This was done promptly and on an extensive scale--about two million square miles of ocean area.
There was no valid reason why Kimmel should have regarded these messages that he received from Stark on the 27th and 29th as, in any sense, a warning that Japan might strike at Pearl Harbor within any immediate period. The first message received on the 27th was obliquely labelled a "war warning" but it meant nothing at all in this respect, when considered in connection with the remaining portion of the message and those that followed. Indeed, their tota1 implications were quite to the contrary. "War warning" as used by Stark was only a formal label and a vague, convenient and routine semantic "catch-all", as Kimmel has well described it. Since Kimmel had been denied any knowledge of Magic operations, was not sent a Purple machine, and was ignorant of diplomatic negotiations with Japan after

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the Argentia meeting in August, the statement that negotiations with Japan had ceased could not have meant anything specific or alarming to him.
He not only had no knowledge of the details of the negotiations revealed in the intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages that were kept from him after August but he was not informed of even such fundamental items as Hull's having sent an ultimatum to Japan on November 26th. The only possible war mentioned was one that might start in the southwest Pacific, East Indies, or Philippines, some thousands of miles away, as the result of a possible Japanese amphibious expedition and attack, and no assurance was expressed by Stark that even this expedition would inevitably mean an attack on the United States unless it was made on the Philippines. All the orders or suggestions for action contained in the messages received by Kimmel on the 27th and 29th clearly indicated that Kimmel was to get ready for possible war in the Far East, and if feasible to send ships to Wake and Midway with planes and reinforcements. Only in the event of war in the Far East was he to make forays against the Marshalls, and try to draw Japanese strength away from the Malay barrier.
Just as the order to go on alert against local sabotage and concentrate attention on civilians in Honolulu and environs made Short believe that Washington had no suspicions of any imminent attack on Hawaii, so the measures Kimmel was directed to take, as laid down in the messages of the 27th and 29th, gave him the inevitable impression that Washington had no suspicion of any immediate Japanese action against Pearl Harbor. The Naval Court of Inquiry, which met from July to October, 1944, asserted that the so-called war warning message sent by Stark to Kimmel on November 27th "directed attention away from Pearl Harbor rather than toward it."
The orders given to Kimmel also involved the further depletion of the already inadequate defensive personnel and equipment at Pearl Harbor--sending more sailors and soldiers to the mid-Pacific, along with robbing Pearl Harbor of pursuit and patrol planes, which were in almost fantastically short supply there, and sending all the carriers away. In the same way that ordering Short to go on alert against local sabotage convinced him that there was no fear in Washington of any attack on Hawaii, so the orders to Kimmel further to deplete his Pearl Harbor supplies, equipment and personnel were tantamount to telling him that Pearl Harbor was not in any danger of attack, so far

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as Washington was aware, on November 26th and 27th. He received no direct warnings of any probable attack there after that time
One item that has been especially seized upon by defenders of Roosevelt to demonstrate that Kimmel was adequately informed of the threat of a Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor is that he did receive the information that on December 1st and 2nd that Japan had ordered the destructions of its codes and code machines.
This contention will not hold up under the most elementary analysis. In the first place, Kimmel is expected to have reacted to this information as though he had been informed of everything that the Washington authorities knew by December 4th: the whole complex of Magic, the breaking of the Purple code in August, 1940, our reading of all Japanese diplomatic messages from that time to December, 1941, all the negotiations that had taken place since August, 1941, the deadlines set by Tojo in November, 1941, his statement of "the things that are automatically going to happen" if negotiations had not been settled by November 29th, Hull's ultimatum of November 26th, which Washington was convinced the Japanese would reply to by a declaration of war, and the whole Winds set-up and its execution on December 4th. None of these vital facts, which gave the codes destruction orders their real significance and implications, were known to Kimmel. On the other hand, in Washington, the codes destruction orders were a dead giveaway as to imminent war when taken in the context of all the other vast array of intercepts and intelligence that was available there.
Despite all this, even at Washington the codes destruction orders were not taken as an infallible sign that Japan was going to make war, especially war on the United States. Even Commander Safford did not consider that the codes destruction orders meant certain war until Winds Execute was intercepted on December 4th. The latter did make it clear that Japan was going to make war and would start it against the United States and Great Britain, but not against Russia. This is precisely why Winds Execute was so vitally important in incriminating the Washington authorities and why it was frantically suppressed and so emphatically declared non-existent by those who sought to conceal their guilt after December 7th.
While Kimmel was informed of the Winds code and Commander Rochefort had experts monitoring on it, neither Kimme nor Rochefort was told that Winds Execute had been

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61 intercepted by Washington on December 4th. Rochefort's staff was unable to intercept it at Pearl Harbor because they were monitoring the voice circuit from Japan. Winds Execute actually came over the Japanese Morse code and Safford was lucky enough to pick it up at Cheltenham, Maryland, as indicated earlier.
Further, there is actual evidence that the codes destruction messages did not inevitably mean war in December, 1941. This news came to Washington on December 1st and 2nd. Nagumo was not ordered to climb Mount Niitaka until the 5th. If the United States had offered to resume negotiations on the 2nd, 3rd or 4th, his task force could have been called back and most probably would have been. It was so arranged in his orders. It is very possible that an American offer to resume negotiations as late as early on December 6th might have led to calling off the attack on Pearl Harbor, but Roosevelt, Hull and Stimson were determined that negotiations would not be resumed after Hull sent his ultimatum on November 26th. Its terms assured that they would not be.
Moreover, the routine destruction of codes was a not unusual occurrence, and had often taken place without an ensuing war. It can be only a casual or formal process. Kimmel had known that the Japanese consulate in Honolulu had frequently burned its papers, which might have been codes, for all that he knew. It is true that, when taken in their full context, as known by Washington, the Japanese code destruction orders of December 1st and 2nd were extreme and sweeping and very probably were a conclusive sign of war, but Kimmel knew nothing of this context. Along with this was the fact that all the information and so-called war warnings that Kimmel and Short received on November 27th, 28th and 29th distracted attention away from Hawaii and emphasized the Far East. Further, any appropriate action by Kimmel, if based on a full recognition of the meaning of the codes destruction order, would have required a complete alert which would have been wholly at variance with the orders to Short not to alarm the civilian population at Hawaii, and these orders to guard against local sabotage were not lifted prior to the Pearl Harbor attack, not even on the West Coast by General Arnold until December 6th at Sacramento. Stark's message to Kimmel on the 29th had also ordered Kimmel not to take any sweeping offensive action under WPL 46 until after Japan had commited an overt act of war. Hence, one can safely conclude that Kimmel's having

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received the news of the Japanese code destruction orders of December 1st and 2nd was no more of a war warning that the Japanese might strike Pearl Harbor from the air almost immediately than were the messages received by him and Short on the 27th, 28th, and 29th.
In short, the "warnings" received by Kimmel on the 27th and 29th hardly went much further as to details or the imminence of war than Admiral Stark's release to his Admirals after the Singapore Conference of April, 1941, and the formulation of Rainbow 5, to the effect that the question of the United States entering the war was no longer one of whether but of when and where.
Short and Kimmel have been vigorously criticized on the ground that, in the light of the traditional strategic assumptions about naval warfare in the Pacific, they did not, on their own knowledge and initiative, recognize the probability that, in the event of war, the Japanese would first attempt a surprise attack on the American Pacific fleet, wherever it was stationed, even though top authorities in Washington seemed to overlook this. As a matter of fact, they never lost sight of this possibility at any time; indeed, they seemed far more aware of it than Stimson, Marshall, or Stark. Knox had stressed this possibility in January, 1941.
From the time Kimmel assumed command at Pearl Harbor in February, 1941, both he and Short had frequently mentioned and discussed the possibility of a surprise Japanese attack there, and recognized the action and supplies needed to detect and turn back such an attack. They had vainly requested the equipment required effectively to carry out such a protective policy, especially the planes necessary to carry out adequate and continued reconnaissance and to destroy or cripple any Japanese task force approaching Pearl Harbor, but they had received virtually nothing down to the Pearl Harbor attack. As noted earlier, on April 9, 1941, General Frederick L. Martin and Admiral Patrick N. L. Bellinger, commanders of the Army and Navy air forces in Hawaii, handed in a report about the feasibility and danger of a Japanese surprise air attack on Pearl Harbor that was virtually identical to the plan Yamamoto actually carried out under Admiral Nagumo's command. It was carefully studied by Short and Kimmel and was forwarded to Marshall in Washington on April 14th but without any response directing appropriate defensive operations at Pearl Harbor or supplying adequate equipment. Early in 1941, Admiral Bloch had asked for one hundred

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additional patrol planes that would be needed for effective reconnaissance, and Short had requested 130 B-17 bombers needed for both reconnaissance and attacking an approaching Japanese task force. These planes were promised but never delivered. None of the hundred was ever sent to Admiral Bloch for naval reconnaissance at Pearl Harbor, and a scant twelve B-17 bombers were sent to Short, only six of which were suitable for use after they arrived. Planes needed by Short and Kimmel at Pearl Harbor had been diverted to the Atlantic and Europe to aid Britain and Russia, along with one-fourth of Kimmel's naval force, sent there in April and May, 1941. Other planes were belatedly sent to the Philippines and to China.
Throughout 1941, Short and Kimmel were actually far more alert and apprehensive to the danger of a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in the event of war with Japan than was Washington, even though they had been denied the Bomb Plot messages. They were simply refused the equipment required to meet and allay their apprehensions in this matter. Nevertheless, despite the blackout of Pearl Harbor, the patrol planes at Pearl Harbor carried out limited reconnaissance and the planes on the task forces sent out under Admirals Halsey and Newton did conduct extensive reconnaissance in the days just before Pearl Harbor in the effort to detect any evidence of a Japanese task force moving against Pearl Harbor, covering no less than two million square miles of the surface of the Pacific.
In conclusion, it is abundantly clear that Short and Kimmel were not adequately informed, or literally even warned at all, about the prospect of an imminent Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. What were later dishonestly described as warnings by defenders of Roosevelt actually confirmed and intensified their impression that Pearl Harbor was not in any immediate danger of a surprise attack. This almost criminal failure to warn Short and Kimmel was fully realized in Washington in late November and early December, 1941, by such outstanding operating experts as Colonel Otis K. Sadtler, acting chief of the Army Signal Corps, Colonel Rufus S. Bratton, chief of the Far East Section of Naval Intelligence, and Commander Arthur N. McCollum, chief of the Far East Section of Naval Intelligence.
These men sought to have Short and Kimmel directly and adequately warned, only to have their efforts ignored or frustrated. McCollum believed that Kimmel should have a better warning on the 27th of November. He was probably

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the best informed person in Washington at the time on the situation in the Pacific, and he prepared a general survey and evaluation of the state of affairs in the Pacific area, Suggesting what should be done, and showed this to Turner, NOyes, and Wilkinson, but it got no further. It would have been invaluable to Kimmel, and if sent to Pearl Harbor would doubtless have led to preparations that would have frustrated Yamamoto's plan to carry through the task-force attack. McCollum then prepared a precise warning to Kimmel on December 1st and another on the 4th, but neither was sent. They were killed by Stark and Turner, which in this case meant Turner, who stubbornly contended that the "warnings" sent on November 27th provided all necessary information to put the Hawaiian commanders on the alert. When McCollum, along with Admiral Noyes and Captain Wilkinson, suggested to Stark on the morning of the 7th that he warn Kimmel at once, both were ignored.
No honest and competent Intelligence, Signal Corps, or Naval Communications officer who was in Washington in November and December, 1941, has ever contended, at least not prior to being intimidated during the post-Pearl Harbor investigations, that Short and Kimmel were clearly and adequately warned of any probable impending attack on Pearl Harbor, despite the increasing abundance of material available in Washington from early October onward to justify and validate such a warning and make it mandatory.
There is no substantial evidence whatever that either Short and Kimmel failed in their duties in any way whatever at Pearl Harbor or were in any manner responsible for not anticipating and repelling the arrival of the Japanese task force that made the attack on the morning of December 7, 1941. They did not have divine wisdom or insight, but it is very doubtful if two men better fitted or more competent for the posts they were occupying in 1941, or officers more diligent in executing their duties, could have been found in the United States. They were clearly more competent, energetic and alert with respect to all matters connected with their assigned duties at Pearl Harbor than their superior officers, General Marshall and Admiral Stark, were in Washington.
The allegation of Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal, backed up by Admiral Ernest J. King, after the Hewitt Inquiry, that Kimmel failed to demonstrate the superior judgment necessary for exercising command commensurate with his rank and assigned duties, and the order that Forresta1 then issued that Kimmel should never again hold

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any position in the United States Navy which required the exercise of such superior judgment, was one of the most unfair, malicious, and mendacious statements ever made by prominent American public figures in their official capacity. It flew directly in the face of the conclusions of the Naval Court of Inquiry. The criticisms of General Short in the post-Pearl Harbor investigations were equally biased and unfounded and were completely refuted.
Since substantially the same "warning" message that was sent to General Short on the 27th was also sent to General MacArthur in the Philippines at the same time, it is instructive to point out significant differences in the message sent to the latter. These variations all stem primarily from the fact that there was little to hide from MacArthur and Hart. Both Washington and Manila knew that war with Japan was coming soon and that the Philippines were almost certain to be attacked soon after it started. Hence, MacArthur and Hart were left free to take all measures they deemed essential to get ready for the blow. The only exception was that Japan must be allowed to fire the first shot. MacArthur and Hart expected that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor before they struck the Philippines because they needed to destroy the Pacific fleet and protect their flank before they could safely carry on extensive campaigns in the Far East and the southwest Pacific.
There was nothing in the message to MacArthur relative to refraining from alarming the civilian population; nothing forbidding the disclosure of intent; and nothing restricting the dissemination of the "highly secret information to minimum essential officers". Manila was to operate under a "Revised Rainbow 5", which had been brought out to MacArthur personally by General Brereton. There was no reference to any "Revised Rainbow 5" in the message to Short or any indication that he knew of any such revision. Finally, MacArthur was directed to inform Hart of the contents of the November 27th message, while no suggestion was made to Short that he notify Kimmel. As Commander Hiles characterizes the situation:


The conclusion seems obvious and incontestable. The Far East Commands at Manila were given a free hand with no special admonitions or restrictions whereas the Hawaiian Commands were handcuffed and hogtied. It required some finagling to do the trick and fit it nicely into a pattern of intrigue and deceit in such fashion as to appear plausible for
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the record. To devise and express in words a war warning that is not a war warning calls for some nice mental gymnastics, but it was done and it worked, even though it involved the cooperation of a considerable number of the highest functionaries of the government and no end of conferences, memoranda, and the like.


It is interesting and illuminating to know that while MacArthur and Hart were favored in the above manner by Washington, they did not really need such special concern. They were far more fortunate in having a Purple machine at Manila and were also assisted by a special arrangement unique in all pre-Pearl Harbor communications connected with Japanese-American relations and any probable Japanese attack on American forces or territory.
When MacArthur felt the need of being well informed as to the diplomatic situation between the United States and Japan, he requested that he be sent one of the best experts from the Army Signal Corps in Washington, and specified Colonel Spencer Akin as the man he desired. Colonel Akin had access to Magic and was fully aware that neither Manila nor Fort Shafter had been fully informed of the increasingly tense situation in Japanese-American relations. He was especially concerned over the failure to send the Bomb Plot messages to Hawaii. Hence, Akin arranged with Colonel Otis K. Sadtler, acting head of the Signal Corps in Washington, that Sadtler would send him such information as would be required to keep MacArthur fully informed of the increasingly alarming developments. Akin was shrewd and foresighted enough to insist on being promoted to Brigadier General before he would consent to accepting MacArthur's request to come to Manila. Sadtler worked just as honestly and patriotically but lived and died a colonel.
Sadtler sent Akin all the information he thought necessary to keep MacArthur fully informed as to the likely time and place of any Japanese attack, whereas Short did not receive any Purple, J-19 or PA-K2 messages after the end of July. A specially important item in the information sent over this secret Sadtler-Akin pipeline were the Bomb Plot messages being intercepted at MS5 at Fort Shafter and other monitoring stations in the United States and forwarded to Washington to be decoded, translated, read, filed away and kept from Short.
Hence, MacArthur had been adequately informed of the imminence of war with Japan before he received the Marshall
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message of the 27th. He did not need it, but he was able to read far more into it than could Short, who had been kept completely in the dark about the ominous developments during November, 1941. MacArthur was ready for the attack and had cleared his beaches in anticipation of the approaching Japanese assault that he expected to take place immediately after an attack on Pearl Harbor.
One of the main myths circulated by the "blackout" and "blurout" historians is that MacArthur was actually surprised by the Japanese, even six hours after he had learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and that his airplanes had remained huddled helplessly on the ground and were destroyed by the Japanese bombers as Short's had been that morning at Hawaii. They had actually been in the air on reconnaissance during the morning of the 7th, and had just returned to refuel when the Japanese attack came, quite unexpectedly at the moment. It had been doubted that the Japanese bombers could fly from Formosa to Manila and return, and weather conditions were also such that it seemed unlikely that they would even make the attempt on the 7th.
MacArthur and Akin knew that Short was being deprived of this alarming information that they received from Sadtler in Washington, but had to sit quietly by and await a Japanese attack. They did not dare pass on this crucial information to Short because any resulting precautionary action on the part of Short might reveal the existence of the Sadtler Akin pipeline and lead to its suppression, which would have been a serious loss for Manila.
Commander Laurance F. Safford, chief of the Security Section of Naval Communications in Washington, thought at the time that all such disturbing information was being sent from Washington to Admiral Bloch at Pearl Harbor. Hence, he made no attempt to set up a secret Safford-Rochefort pipeline which would have given Commander Rochefort, chief of Naval Communications Intelligence at Pearl Harbor, essentially the same information that Sadtler was sending Akin. Rochefort has told me several times that if this had been done, Pearl Harbor would have gone on alert long before Nagumo approached Pearl Harbor, in all probability before he left the Kurile Islands.
Rochefort has criticized Safford for even failing to give him some clear hints of the dangerous developments in Japanese-American relations after November 26th, or even earlier, since they were close friends and in constant com

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munication. Even a few allusions about the actual situation would have led Rochefort to intensify precautionary monitoring action. He could not decode Purple, for Pearl Harbor had no Purple machine, but he could have decoded and read messages sent in J-19 and PA-K2, many of which, notably the Bomb Plot messages, indicated a serious threat to Pearl Harbor.
Safford asserts that he supplied Rochefort with the changing keys for these codes but did not feel that it was necessary to suggest that Rochefort use them for intercepting and reading the Japanese diplomatic messages because he thought that Kimmel and Bloch were getting all the relevant information from their superior officers in Washington. He remained misled about this for nearly two years after the Pearl Harbor attack, when he first discovered that Bloch and Kimmel had not been sent the relevant information on Japanese-American relations at any time before the attack. Until then, he had believed that Kimmel had actually been seriously derelict in not heeding his warnings and executing his duties. Safford made this discovery when he was examining the Navy files and found that the incriminating documents relative to Pearl Harbor had been removed. Fortunately, he found where they had been hidden before they could be destroyed and restored them to the files. Later on, this enabled the Army Intelligence officers to discover that most of the incriminating documents had been removed from the Army files and not replaced.

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VI. THE BLACKOUT OF HAWAII ON THE EVE OF PEARL HARBOR

We may now deal with the problem of why, how and by whom Short and Kimmel were, during the more than a week before the Pearl Harbor attack, deprived of the large and varied mass of information that had been accumulated in Washington and demonstrated, surely by October, 1941, that war with Japan was now definitely in the making, that by November 27, 1941 it might start at any time, but most likely when Japan submitted its reply to Hull's ultimatum of November 26th, that by December 1st and 2nd it was at hand, that by December 4th Japan would declare war against the United States and Great Britain, that by the early afternoon of the 6th war could come at any moment, and that by the morning of the 7th the Japanese would in all probability attack Pearl Harbor about 1:00 P. M. Washington time, or 7:30 A M. Pearl

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Harbor time. This leaves out of consideration the Kita message, which had been processed by 2:30 on the afternoon of the 6th and definitely indicated that the Japanese would arrive off Hawaii by the evening of the 6th and be prepared to attack Pearl Harbor on the morning of the 7th.
The blacking out of Short and Kimmel relative to the Japanese threat at Pearl Harbor is a highly complicated situation involving many facts, issues and changes of policy and operations, especially during the year 1941. The only consistent item and unvarying policy in all the tortuous maze of developments from October 5th, 1937, to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was the determination of Roosevelt from the autumn of 1939 to put the United States into the war, but his conception of the enemy to be fought at the onset of war changed markedly throughout this period. At the outset, it was Japan, as revealed by his suggestion at the first Cabinet meeting, the largely secret strengthening of the American navy, the Chicago Bridge speech of October 5, 1937, and Captain Ingersoll's mission to Britain in the winter of 1937-1938. After the outbreak of war in Europe in September, 1939, it became Germany, where Churchill was exerting his main pressure for collaboration. It was not until this seemed almost impossible to accomplish by mid-summer of 1941, because Hitler provided no casus belli, that Roosevelt finally decided that he would have to enter war through the back door of Japan.
No other prominent American official except Stimson was clearly determined to support war with Japan at this time. Stimson first became publicly very influential in this policy only by the summer of 1941 when Roosevelt decided that Japan would probably have to become the main initial target of his bellicosity. After this date Stimson, already appointed Secretary of War in June, 1940, logically became the most undeviating member of Roosevelt's entourage so far as upholding the war motif with Japan was involved.
There are a number of relevant questions which have to be raised, some of which have not been entirely resolved even today and may never be wholly cleared up. The first one is how and why many of the top military officials in both the Army and Navy at least appeared to ignore at the most crucial period, November and December, 1941, the basic Japanese strategy of a Pacific war--an initial attack on the American Pacific fleet--which had been demonstrated to be sound and practical and had been given

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special relevance after the Pacific fleet had been based at Pearl Harbor in the spring of 1940? How could they have disregarded the numerous Bomb Plot messages and the Martin-Bellinger Report, both of which clearly pinpointed Pear1 Harbor as the inevitable target of any Japanese air attack if war came?
How could this top military personnel appear to be unaware of the special threat to Pearl Harbor when all the operating groups in the lower echelons, who were devoted to matters of Magic and intelligence, were discovering and emphasizing this danger and were persistently seeking to get this evidence presented to their superiors and have Short and Kimmel properly warned while there was still an abundance of time in which to alert Hawaii and avert an attack there? Why did the most concerted effort to blackout Hawaii begin when Roosevelt's shift of policy to direct bellicosity toward Japan obviously increased the danger of an attack there? Short was blacked out as to negotiations with Japan after the latter part of July and Kimmel after the Argentia meeting in August.
How were the top military echelons able to keep the impressive evidence of danger to Hawaii suppressed? Were they ordered by Roosevelt to suppress this material and withhold it from Hawaii? If so, how many were so ordered, and who were those who suppressed the evidence without any order to do so? Why, when the threat to Hawaii became more clear and evident, did most of the top military echelons turn their attention to the Far East and apparently neglect Hawaii?
Who in the upper civil and military echelons in Washington wanted the United States to go to war, and if they did, was it to be war against Germany or Japan? Neither Marshall nor Stark really wanted any kind of war at the moment, with either Germany or Japan, because they believed that this country needed to get better prepared to wage a world war; they were especially opposed to war with Japan in 1941. Hull was apparently satisfied to continue feeding his banalities and platitudes to Nomura and assuring the probability that no peaceful settlement could be made with Japan. He hated both the Germans and the Japanese and, as an old Tennessee feudist, was hardly opposed to a little killing on principle, but he was surely not a leading protagonist of open hostilities although he knew that they would almost surely result from his operations as Secretary of State.

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Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, as one of the leading warmongers of the time, was eager to get us into any available war, although he preferred one with Germany, but he wished to have Hawaii well prepared for war and seems to have played no decisive role in precipitating war with Japan or blacking out Hawaii. By the latter part of November, when the Japanese began to send extensive forces southward and it seemed possible that the Japanese would make their first attack in the southwest Pacific, on the islands or mainland, Knox was especially vigorous in maintaining that the United States must stick by the arrangements in ABCD and Rainbow 5 and resist the Japanese by force even though there was no attack on American territory and forces.
When I was teaching at the University of Colorado in 1949, one of my mature students was a nephew of Knox. Learning of my interest in Pearl Harbor, he brought up the subject of Knox in relation to this question. He said that the Knox family had always believed that the Secretary's death was hastened by his sense of shame and humiliation over what he had discovered to be the deliberate failure of Washington to warn Short and Kimmel about the coming surprise attack, and the subsequent attempt to make Short and Kimmel the scapegoats for the quasi-criminal neglect by the guilty parties.
Since Knox died on April 28, 1944, he did not live to learn the revelations brought forth in most of the post-Pearl Harbor investigations, but the Naval Intelligence and Communications experts of 1941 knew and resented the failure to warn Short and Kimmel, and Knox may have called them in for questioning. Indeed, all he would have needed to do was to talk to his friend, the distinguished Admiral William H. Standley, about the "kangaroo court" conducted by Justice Owen Roberts, where this disgraceful smearing of Short and Kimmel, especially the latter, got off to a running start. A similar impression was given to me by Admiral Ben Morreell, who was closely associated with Knox and travelled thousands of miles with him between Pearl Harbor and Knox's death. He assured me that Knox was "clean as a hound's tooth" with respect to any complicity in blacking out Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, and became increasingly suspicious of Roosevelt's role in this matter.
Only Stimson, who had been brought into the Cabinet in June, 1940, clearly stood with Roosevelt in strongly favoring

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war with both Germany and Japan. He had been one of the leaders in the interventionist group in the East from 1937 onward who had urged our entering the European war; but he had also been the outstanding Japanophobe among the top civilian figures in the United States for a decade. How were Roosevelt and Stimson able to steer the country into war in the face of the great strength of non-interventionist sentiment in the country at large?
The year 1941 brought all these confused policies and personal attitudes to a head, partly due to new international developments and partly as a result of the unexpected responses of leading personalities involved, notably Hitler. Although keeping Japan as a martial ace-in-the-hole, Roosevelt started out the year with his interventionist policy mainly centered on Germany, an attitude which was supplemented by strong pressure from Churchill. Hitler was to be provoked into starting war by challenging American unneutral action in convoying supplies to Britain and Russia on the Atlantic, but Hitler refused to rise to the bait as he had earlier declined to do in the case of the Destroyer Deal of 1940 with Britain and the lavish shipment of arms to Britain. By the end of June, 1941, the prospect of provoking Hitler had greatly dimmed and it seemed likely that the most effective way in which to get into the war was to incite Japan to take some action which would inevitably mean war. At this moment, Roosevelt, most appropriately, brought Secretary Stimson into direct action to implement the Japanese policy that he had "sold" to Roosevelt with great ease on January 9, 1933.
Although there is no doubt that after September, 1939, Roosevelt definitely preferred to get into the war directly in Europe, he had always kept Japan as an ace in his sleeve ever since his meeting with Stimson in January, 1933, and the first meeting of his Cabinet in March, 1933, as we have been told by then Postmaster-General James A. Farley. He had secretly built up the American navy, and our only likely naval enemy was Japan. His Quarantine Speech in Chicago in October, 1937, straight Stimson doctrine, emphasized Japan more than Germany. In the winter of 1937-1938, he sent Captain Royall E. Ingersoll to Europe to consider possible American operations with the British in the event that they became involved in a war with Japan. Roosevelt early adopted measures aiding the Chinese in their war with Japan, and there is much evidence that the financial and diplomatic policies of the United States played a very considerable role in bringing about the renewal of war between Japan and China in July, 1937.

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The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 only provided a temporary interlude which distracted Roosevelt from his underlying aggressive program relative to Japan. The Roosevelt-Stimson policies and actions with reference to Japan after June, 1941, that led to the outbreak of war on December 7, 1941, were summarized early in this article and need not be repeated here.
Much has been written on the possible communist influence on Roosevelt's decision to make war on Japan, but even revisionist historians have concentrated mainly on that exerted by Chiang kai-Shek and Owen Lattimore through pro-communist officials among Roosevelt's associates at the White House, such as Lauchlin Currie and Alger Hiss, in leading Hull to kick over the modus vivendi and send his ultimatum to Japan on November 26, 1941. It was a far more complicated and far-reaching operation than this, but to deal with it adequately would require much more space than is available here. Moreover, it does not require extensive treatment here, for Roosevelt, Stimson, and Hull did not need any encouragement and support from the Communists in their determination to pressure Japan into war with the United States.
Most basic, perhaps, was the fact that Litvinov sold his doctrine of "collective security" to the Popular Front politicians in Europe, and this was adopted by the American Liberals as the dominant consideration in their pro-war propaganda in the United States. This matter has been treated in detail by Professor James J. Martin in his American Liberalism and World Politics, 1931-1941. The liberal propaganda was most potent in supporting American intervention in the European War until Hitler failed to provide the expected provocation to war on the Atlantic.
In Asia, the predominant motive of the Communists in supporting war against Japan was provided by the fact that Japan was the main bulwark against Communism in the Far East. But Russia left this propagandist operation chiefly in the hands of the Communists of Asia, mainly those in China, since Russia had to move cautiously to avert vigorous Japanese defensive movements against Siberia. The Chinese Communists pressured Chiang kai-Shek to act aggressively against Japan, and they were encouraged by the pro-communist figures in Roosevelt's entourage in Washington. After England became involved in war in Europe, and especially after Hitler attacked Russia, the latter stepped up its pressure on the Chinese Communists to involve the United States in war with Japan.

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But it was not until the Russian spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, informed Stalin in mid-October 1941 that Japan would move southward and not molest Siberia, that Russia began in earnest to influence American action against Japan. Prior to Hitler's attack on Russia on June 22, 1941, the most publicized Soviet attitude in the United States had been anti-interventionist. American Communists sought to line up with the America First organization until they became embarrassing to the latter and its leaders repudiated any communist support, which evaporated after Hitler's attack. But Russia had never abandoned its previous cautious support of pressure against Japan in the Far East.
The Lauchlin Currie-Owen Lattimore episode was only a dramatic item in this broader campaign of the Communists against Japan in the Far East. Lauchlin Currie, an assistant-President in the White House circle, was a strong pro-communist sympathizer, perhaps a member of the party. Owen Lattimore, who was similarly pro-Communist, but not personally a Communist, occupied the somewhat curious position of American adviser to Chiang kai-Shek in China. When Roosevelt, Hull, and even Stimson, at the insistence of Marshall and Stark, were considering a modus vivendi with Japan to gain time in order better to prepare for a Pacific war, Lattimore sent a strongly worded cablegram to Currie protesting against any such temporary truce with Japan. The cablegram was vigorously supported by Currie and it has been regarded by many historians as constituting the final item which induced Hull to kick over the modus vivendi and send his ultimatum to Japan.
There were other far more basic, communist influences on items with regard to Hull's ultimatum to Japan which have been overlooked even by many revisionist historians. The most interesting of these is the extent to which the terms of Hull's ultimatum reflected the views of Harry Dexter White, the pro-communist brains of the Treasury Department, Felix Frankfurter having once observed that secretary Morgenthau did "not have a brain in his head".
On November 18, 1941, Morgenthau sent to Hull a memorandum drafted by White setting forth proposed terms that should by presented to Japan by Hull. They were so drastic that it was obvious that Japan would never accept them. Nevertheless, Maxwell Hamilton, the chief of the Far Eastern division of the State Department, read the Morgenthau-White memorandum and said that he found it the "most constructive one which I have yet seen". He

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revised it slightly and filed it with Hull, who had this Hamilton revision before him when he drafted his ultimatum of November 26th to Japan. Actually, no less than eight of the ten points in Hull's ultimatum to Japan embodied the drastic proposals of the Morgenthau-White memorandum.
Despite all this volume of evidence of communist pressure in the Far East for war between the United States and Japan, I remain unconvinced that it exerted any decisive influence upon Roosevelt, who, after all, determined American policy toward Japan. Roosevelt had made up his mind with regard to war with Japan on the basis of his own attitudes and wishes, aided and abetted by Stimson, and he did not need any persuasion or support from Communists, however much he may have welcomed their aggressive propaganda. If he had desired to preserve the modus vivendi he would have had no hesitation in repudiating Hull's action. Hence, it remains my conviction that the contention that Soviet Russia exerted any preponderant influence in pushing the United States into war with Japan must be discarded. This also applies to the belief that Churchill, who was then working hand-in-glove with the Russians, exerted decisive influence on Roosevelt in his pressuring the Japanese into war. Roosevelt was in no way dependent on Churchill's support; the reverse was the ease. The responsibility for the final action in pressing Japan into war was that of Roosevelt, and this must be judged solely on the basis of its wisdom with respect to the national interest of the United States at this time. The apologists for Roosevelt, from Thomas A. Bailey to T. R. Fehrenbach, have contended that our national interest required our entry into the war and justified Roosevelt's "lying" the country into the conflict to promote our public welfare.
For at least fifteen years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, most revisionist historians still believed that by December 4th or 5th, at the latest, virtually all the top officials in Washington, civilian and military, were convinced that, in the event of war, the Japanese would first attack Pearl Harbor. They based this conclusion chiefly on the whole broad historical background and the traditional naval strategy in the Pacific: the assumption that Japan would never start a war without making her first move an attempt to destroy the American Pacific fleet, wherever it was stationed. This was necessary to protect the Japanese flank before they could safely move into the southwest Pacific and the East Indies or go north to attack Siberia, unless they could be assured of American neutrality, and

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nothing in Roosevelt's foreign policy gave the Japanese any reason to expect American neutrality. By mid-summer of 1941 it seemed evident that Roosevelt and Stimson were determined to wreck Japan by either economic pressure, military operations, or both.
These revisionist historians were also familiar with the series of Bomb Plot messages which clearly pinpointed Pearl Harbor as the target of any Japanese surprise attack on the United States. They were also well acquainted with the fact that our Navy had been holding maneuvers for years off Hawaii, long before the Pacific fleet was retained there in the spring of 1940, to discover the nature and prospects of a surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Unfortunately, the prospect of success for Japan seemed very good indeed, and hence it was taken for granted for years that any evidence of imminent hostilities between the United States and Japan would bring with it prompt action on the part of Washington to keep Pearl Harbor on the alert for a prospective Japanese attack, and ready to anticipate and repel one when it came. When this Japanese action did not take place before December, 1941, it was logically assumed that the top officials in Washington, acquainted with all the evidence that war was at hand, must have been personally prevented from warning Short and Kimmel, and only one man could give such an order and have it obeyed. That person was Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hence, he must have ordered all these top officials not to warn Short and Kimmel until it was too late for them to detect and repel the attack.
We now know that this interpretation needs some qualification, even though, as presented by Admiral Robert A. Theobald and other informed experts, it seemed to be soundly based upon both the factual historical background and sound logical inference. In the first place, any such general order by Roosevelt might have been very difficult to sustain. There were just too many important officials to be restrained by such an order without a considerable possibility that there would be a leak or disobedience somewhere. This is one point on which the views of Admira1 Samuel E. Morison, in his article in the Saturday Evening Post, of October 28, 1961, are in my opinion worthy of consideration, although the reasons he gives for it are in part erroneous. It would obviously have been rather risky for Roosevelt. Some of these numerous officials who had to be warned to keep silent might reveal Roosevelt's order to black out Pearl Harbor, and this

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would have been disastrous to both Roosevelt's political career and military plans.
It is only fair, however, to present Commander Hiles' defense of Admiral Theobald's contention that Roosevelt could have ordered that Short, Bloch and Kimmel were not to be warned of the threat to Pearl Harbor without any great personal risk of exposure. The so-called chain-of-command procedure would have made this possible without too much risk. Roosevelt did not have to reach all of his important subordinates personally. The Joint Board of Command was the highest military authority in the land, except for the President. It was made up exclusively of the armed forces, with Marshall and Stark at its head. Even the Secretaries of War and the Navy were not members and had no voice in the deliberations of the Joint Board, although as a matter of routine its reports to the President were submitted through the Secretaries and the latter could add such comments as they wished to make for what value they might have from the military point of view. No person except Roosevelt had any jurisdiction over the Joint Board. Consequently, it is not at all difficult to discern how Roosevelt could control the situation with no great difficulty or risk; from the Joint Board on down it was solely a matter of the chain-of-command. Certainly, there might be some minor leaks and some disobedience, as in the "contact Rochefort" message in connection with Winds Execute, the "October (1941) revolution" in the Office of Naval Intelligence, and in the Sadtler-Akin "pipeline" arrangement, not to mention the efforts of Sadtler, Bratton and McCollum to get past the Marshall barrier. Roosevelt was well covered up because he would almost never place any orders in writing--they were nearly invariably verbal.
At any rate, Roosevelt appears to have kept Hawaii in the dark about the threat to Pearl Harbor without any blackout orders of which we have any definite evidence save those to Marshall, Arnold and Stark, and then not until December 4th.
Finally, and most important, it appears that Roosevelt may not have needed to order many of his leading subordinates against warning Short and Kimmel. These top officials seem to have become unduly absorbed by the fact that all the known Japanese military movements, and these were on a grand scale and rather conspicuously displayed, indicated that Japanese task forces were moving down into the southwest Pacific and the East Indies, and

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there were no known Japanese fleet movements that appeared to threaten Pearl Harbor. Some writers believe that this virtual parading of Japanese power moving southward was in part deliberately designed to distract attention from Pearl Harbor. This is doubtful. The extensive movement southward was a basic part of the campaign connected with the attack on Pearl Harbor, and had to be timed accordingly.
To this, and a very important consideration, was added the concentration of the top brass naval authorities on the strategic implications of the ABCD agreement and the Pacific War Plans, Rainbow 5 (WPL 46), drawn up in April, 1941, and approved verbally by Roosevelt in May and June, which envisaged the launching of the first Japanese attacks in the Far East. The extensive Japanese task force movements southward in November, 1941 appeared to confirm this assumption. The top naval officers, Stark and Turner, had warned that the economic strangulation of Japan in late July would certainly mean that Japan would have to move southward to get, by force if necessary, the indispensable vital supplies that were denied to her by the July embargo imposed by the United States, Britain and Holland. Both the navy and the army leaders were fully aware that Rainbow 5 (WPL 46) provided that the United States would make war on Japan if the latter went too far in this quest, even if there was no Japanese attack on American forces or territory.
Very significant evidence of this concentration on the Far East, especially by the Navy, on the eve of Pearl Harbor is provided by Admiral Beatty, the aide of Secretary Knox in 1941. He recalls that, at the last meeting of the top officers of the Navy with Knox on the afternoon of December 6th, Knox inquired as to whether the Japanese were about to attack the United States. Turner, who, as usual, spoke for Stark, answered rather dogmatically in the negative, and went on to say that he believed Japan would first strike the British in the Far East. Beatty asserts that there was no dissenting voice from any of the navy officers present, from Stark down. Perhaps more conclusive as evidence of the shift of interest and concern from Pearl Harbor to the Far East is provided by the agenda and discussions of Roosevelt's "War Cabinet", made up of Roosevelt, Stimson, Knox, Marshall and Stark, on November 28th, and of the final conference of Stimson, Knox and Hull on the forenoon of December 7th. In both cases the main subject and problems discussed were the movements of Japanese forces to the southwest Pacific, the obligations of the United States under ABCD and

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Rainbow 5 to check these by war, if necessary, and the question as to whether the country would unite to support a war which had not been started by an attack on American territory or forces.
It is desirable to point out, however, that the newer Revisionism on Pearl Harbor, which is based on the assumption that most of the top civilian and military authorities in Washington expected that the Japanese would almost surely begin their aggressive action in the Far East, also needs qualification, just as does the older view that Roosevelt specifically ordered them all not to send any warnings to Pearl Harbor.
This newer interpretation, stressing the Far Eastern fixation of most top Washington officials from early November to the Pearl Harbor attack, does not account for the failure to supply Short, Bloch, and Kimmel with the planes and other equipment which they had requested early in 1941 to enable them to carry out the necessary reconnaissance to detect and repel any Japanese attack; the failure in the summer of 1941 to provide Pearl Harbor with a Purple machine or even to assign Commander Rochefort and his large and capable cryptanalytical group the task of intercepting, decoding, and reading the other Japanese diplomatic messages in J-19 and PA-K2; the blacking out of Short after the economic strangulation of Japan in July and of Kimmel after Argentia with respect to the nature of American negotiations with Japan; or the reasons why Stark and Turner, as well as the responsible army officials, refused to permit the Bomb Plot messages to be sent to Pearl Harbor in October 1941, and later on.
Their concentration on the Far East may account for the attitude and operations of the top echelons in the Army and Navy after the extensive ship movements of the Japanese into this area in November, 1941, but it fails to provide an adequate explanation of the obvious efforts to keep Short and Kimmel from getting the essential information available in Washington long before that time or of sending them bogus "warnings" on November 27th.
Pending a better explanation, which has never been provided by Roosevelt's defenders, it must be assumed that this long continued and unbroken effort to keep Short and Kimmel in the dark as to the tense diplomatic situation between the United States and Japan was keyed to Roosevelt's persistent recognition that he must have an attack by Japan, once it became rather clear that Hitler would not

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rise to the provocative bait provided by American convoying on the Atlantic. The situation surely calls for something more fundamental than the trivial and impersonal "noise", which is offered by Roberta Wohlstetter in her defense of Roosevelt and his bellicose collaborators in Washington.
As late as December 1st, it is very possible that Roosevelt himself feared lest Japanese aggressive action might start in the southwest Pacific and the East Indies and not provide any prior and direct attack on the United States. On that date, he sent a note to Admiral Hart at Manila ordering three "small vessels" to be fitted out at Manila, each manned by Filipino sailors, commanded by an American naval officer, flying the American flag, and carrying a machine gun and a visible cannon. They were to be sent out to specified positions where they could be fired upon by the Japanese task forces that were moving southward. This would give him the attack on American ships that he vitally needed to get the United States into the war by the back door of Japan, unite the country behind him, and also save the Pearl Harbor fleet if the Japanese attacked this bait in the Far East before Nagumo reached Pearl Harbor.
The Democratic platform of 1940 had declared that the United States would not enter the war unless attacked. The anti-interventionist sentiment in the United States was so overwhelming in 1940 that, during the campaign of that year, Roosevelt thought it necessary repeatedly and vigorously to assure the American public that he would avoid war, culminating in his famous speech in Boston on October 30, 1940, in which he told American mothers and fathers, "again and again and again" that their sons would not be sent into any foreign war.
But on the heels of his victory in the election of 1940, Roosevelt, as noted earlier, started military conferences with the British which, in April 1941, ended at Singapore with the ADB agreement, to include the Dutch. It was all implemented by ABCD and Rainbow 5, which specified that if the Japanese went beyond a certain arbitrary line in the Southwest Pacific-100'E and 10.N--and even threatened the British and Dutch possessions there, the United States would enter the war against Japan even if American territory, forces and flag were not attacked by the Japanese. Roosevelt actually desired, above all, to avoid having to enter the war in this manner. If this happened, he would have to reveal that he had deceived the American public in his campaign promises and would not have anything like a united country behind him.

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This was obviously what induced Roosevelt to order the three "small vessels" to move out from Manila into the path of the Japanese task forces as they sailed southward. Aside from a futile trip by the dispatch ship, Isabel, which was not even repainted, only one of the small vessels" had left Manila harbor before the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor, and this ship, the little schooner Lanikai, was not able to proceed beyond Manila harbor into the path of the Japanese task forces before the attack on Pearl Harbor. This so-called Cockleshell ship stratagem of the three "small vessels", first noted among revisionist writers by Dr. Frederic R. Sanborn in his Design for War (1951) has been vividly described by Admiral Kemp Tolley, commander of the Lanikai, the second ship that was ready to leave as "bait" for the Japanese, in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings of September, 1962, and October 1963.
Commander Hiles, a close and well-informed student of the Pearl Harbor episode, believes that, although Roosevelt was in all probability convinced before December 1st that the Japanese planned to attack Pearl Harbor, he devised the three "small vessels" scheme to get a prior attack which would start the war in a politically satisfactory manner without sacrificing the Pearl Harbor fleet. This is undoubtedly true, but if this was his motive Roosevelt thought up the plan some days too late. The Japanese hit Pearl Harbor before even one of the three "small vessels" could get fired on. The order to equip and dispatch them should at the latest have been sent coincidental with Hull's ultimatum on November 26th. Indeed, it should have been sent by November 5th, when it was evident that the Japanese proposals for settling American-Japanese relations peacefully which were to be offered in November were the final Japanese gesture that could preserve peace, and Roosevelt knew that the situation built up by Stimson, Hull and himself precluded the possibility of accepting any Japanese proposals short of a virtual surrender. The memory of the sinking of the Panay on December 12, 1937, and the bellicose excitement caused by the accidental attack on one small American vessel should have inspired an order identical with that he sent to Admiral Hart on December 1, 1941. Roosevelt should not have needed the report on the Japanese hostility to the gunboats passing Formosa on November 29th and 30th to inspire the note to Hart.
Secretary Henry Morgenthau tells of a conversation with Roosevelt as late as the morning of December 3rd in which the latter seemed frustrated, despairing of any Japanese attack, and feared that he and Churchill might have to plan

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and strike the first blow, an emergency which Roosevelt desperately wished to avoid for political reasons, as Stimson has revealed in his Diary and was stipulated in the messages to Short on November 27th and to Kimmel on November 29th.
On December 4th, everything seemed changed. Roosevelt appeared assured that the Japanese had decided to attack Pearl Harbor as their first stroke, and he now seemed convinced that all possible emphasis and effort in Washington must be placed on keeping Short and Kimmel from being warned of an impending attack, although he was still hoping for an attack on one of the three 'small vessels" before the Japanese could reach Pearl Harbor.
There is no definitive documentary evidence which has thus far been revealed and fully proves that Roosevelt had been explicitly informed by Decemer 4th that Japan would attack Pearl Harbor as the first act of war. There may be none until the voluminous secret correspondence between Roosevelt and Churchill, which began in September, 1939, is opened to reputable investigators. Even in this event, it is likely that so incriminating a document will have been removed from any American copy of the files, following the pattern of the removal of so much incriminating material from the American Army and Navy files dealing with Pearl Harbor.
There are three reputable reports from British intelligence in the Far East that, between November 30th and December 7th, London was informed that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor on December 7th. If these reports, or any one of them, are accurate, then there is little doubt that Churchill would have passed the information on to Roosevelt. General Bonner Fellers, who was in Army Intelligence in the Near East and located at Cairo, has given me personally and by letter the following relevant information. Here, quoting from his letter of March 6th, 1967:


About 10:00 A. M., Saturday, December 6, 1941, I walked into the Royal Air Force Headquarters in Cairo. The Air Marshal who was then in command of the RAF Middle East sat at his desk. Immediately, he opened with: "Bonner, you will be at war within 24 hours." He continued: "We . . . have a secret signal Japan will strike the U. S. in 24 hours." . . . I had been in Egypt for about fifteen months. During that time no word whatsoever had been sent
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to me from G-2 in Washington that Japanese-American relations were strained.


In the confession of the Russian spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, he stated that in October, 1941, he had informed Stalin that the Japanese intended to attack Pearl Harbor within sixty days. Stalin may well have passed this on to Roosevelt in return for Sumner Welles' helpful gesture in informing him of Hitler's plan to attack Russia. One of the last things that Stalin would have wished to have happen at this time in the Far East was the destruction of the American Pacific fleet. Most important of all is the fact that a very prominent American Army Intelligence officer in service in the Far East during 1941, whose name I am not yet free to mention, had gained knowledge of the Yamamoto plan to send a task force to attack Pearl Harbor and sent three separate messages to Washington revealing this information, and at least two of these reached the Army files well before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Moreover, as will be clear later on when we deal with the Merle-Smith message, it is entirely possible that Roosevelt could have read this on the evening of December 4th, Washington time, and known that the United States was already involved in war because the Dutch had implemented ABCD and Rainbow 5 (A-2) on December 3rd, Washington time. The message must have been available in Washington by the 5th. Perhaps even more instructive and revealing is the fact that some time before 5:30 P. M. on December 4th, Roosevelt had discussed the Far Eastern situation with Stark and had approved Stark's informing London and the Dutch that Roosevelt was in favor of warning Japan that if its forces crossed the magic line in the southwest Pacific this would be regarded as a hostile act and Japan would be attacked by the ABCD powers. Roosevelt was thus approving the ABCD (ABD) agreement more than 24 hours before Halifax approached Hull, and he should have been well prepared for the contents of the Merle-Smith message.
Another unimpeachable item of information which indicates that Roosevelt was in all probability informed by December 4th that the Japanese were planning to attack Pearl Harbor on December 7th has not previously been presented, but, fortunately, it has neither been destroyed nor suppressed. This is an entry in the History of the Sacramento Air Service Command for December 6, 1941. This History, declassified in 1948, had been casually lying around for some time but had not been carefully examined even by revisionist historians. A copy was noticed by a revisionist student who was working for his master's degree at Indiana
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University on the subject of logistic failures at Pearl Harbor. Having plenty of money, he had travelled about looking for sources. When visiting the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base at Dayton, Ohio, he found the History of the Sacramento Air Service Command available for inspection by interested parties admitted to the Base. Reading the entry for December 6, 1941, he was immediately impressed with its significance and sent it to Commander Hiles, who was assisting him in locating source-material for his study. Hiles has been the first revisionist expert to develop the full significance of this material.
General Henry H. Arnold was the chief of the Army Air Corps and one of Marshall's deputy chiefs-of-staff. Few men could have been more vitally needed at this critical time in Washington, the center of activities in getting ready for the war with Japan which had been regarded as imminent ever since Hull sent his ultimatum on November 26th. Its approach was amplified and confirmed by the codes destruction intercepts of December 1st and 2nd and by the Winds Execute intercept of December 4th, the latter revealing that when war came Japan would attack the United States and Britain, and not Russia. Against this background, it is obvious that Arnold could have been spared from Washington only if he were to carry out an assignment of the utmost confidential and strategic significance in the face of a Japanese attack at any moment. On December 5th, Marshall ordered Arnold to make a transcontinental trip to Hamilton Airfield in California.
Arnold's mission was ostensibly to expedite the departure of a small squadron of some twelve B-17 bombers from Hamilton Airfield to the Philippines via Hawaii, and to repeat orders concerning the continuation of reconnaissance while en route over Japanese mandated islands in the mid-Pacific. This assignment surely did not justify a long trip by an officer of Arnold's rank, experience and ability, even if there had been no crisis in Japanese-American relations and he had all the time in the world. It was something that could have been executed by any experienced captain, major or colonel in the Air Force at Washington. There was nothing complicated or unusual about it, since this was by no means the first time that a squadron of B-17 bombers had been sent to the Philippines via Hawaii and had photographed the Japanese islands. It does not seem reasonable, or even credible, that such a lofty and capable military figure as General Arnold would have been sent from Washington to carry out so relatively trifling a mission as Watching a few bombing planes depart from the Pacific

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Coast, especially when it was assumed that the first Japanese moves in the approaching hostilities would be made in the air and require Arnold's full attention at Washington Hence, we are compelled to look for the actual reason behind the Arnold mission.
It so happened that December 4th was the day on which the Chicago Tribune published the implications of Rainbow 5, which fully proved that Roosevelt had been planning war over many months, if necessary without any attack on American forces, while at the same time he was assuring the American people that all his actions were designed to keep the United States out of war. Naturally, this sensational exposure created great excitement in Washington, and Roosevelt ordered Marshall to try to locate the source of this embarrassing leak.
After the war, it was revealed that it was an emissary from General Arnold's office who facilitated the leak of Rainbow 5 to Senator Burton K. Wheeler, who, in turn, showed it to the Washington representative of the Tribune, all three of them patriotically motivated by the hope of forcing more adequate attention to the needs of the Army Air Corps if the United States was to become engaged in a farflung Pacific war. Some writers, working mainly on hindsight, have alleged that Marshall wished to get Arnold out of Washington for the moment as soon as possible, lest his relation to the "leak" be discovered. I personally doubt this explanation, although Marshall was feverishly active in searching for the sources of the leak, and Colonel Deane was working for him on this subject when he saw Marshall at his office in the Old Munitions Building about 10:00 on the morning of December 7th.
Whatever the basis of Arnold's mission, it had to be one of a secret, serious and responsible nature, commensurate with Arnold's rank, distinction and ability. The account of what Arnold actually did when he was on the coast provides the soundest explanation of his mission and it rests on facts that cannot be refuted. They are the following:
The same message that had been sent to General Short on November 27th, ordering action at Hawaii to prevent local sabotage had also been sent to the Army headquarters on the Pacific Coast at the Presidio in San Francisco. Accordingly, appropriate steps had been taken at the Mcclellan airfield and the planes had been bunched there to safeguard them against local sabotage. Presumably, they were also bunched at the Hamilton airfield, but neither Arnold nor the

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Sacramento History mentions this matter. As the entry in the History of the Sacramento Air Service Command for December 6th puts it: "It looked like all the planes on the Pacific coast were at McClellan field." General Arnold "brought word of the imminence of war, expressed stern disapproval of the planes being huddled together and ordered them dispersed." This was done at once and as rapidly as possible, despite heavy rain and special local difficulties at the moment. There were no revetments, so the planes had to be flown to other airfields.
This dispersal of the planes was an order that would not have been accepted or obeyed if given by a junior officer however capable and well informed. It superseded the Washington order of November 27th to the Hawaii air command in which Arnold had participated and had supplemented by later directions on how to assure full protection against local sabotage.
The action taken by Arnold can only be explained on the ground that Marshall and Arnold had learned through December 4th that the Japanese were planning to attack Pearl Harbor on December 7th. Fearing an attack on the Pacific coast, as well, they decided to order the dispersal of the planes that had been bunched there in accordance with the orders of November 27th and 28th. Marshall and Arnold did not dare to order the dispersal of Short's planes at Hawaii, although Hawaii is 2500 miles closer to Japan than California, and hence far more vulnerable to a Japanese air attack, but they decided to take a chance on alerting the Air Force on the Pacific coast. Both Marshall and Arnold were well known for their fear of an attack there.
In other words, Marshall and Arnold were greatly alarmed over the information that the Japanese would attack at Pearl Harbor on the 7th. While their hands were tied with respect to alerting Short and Martin at Hawaii, they did have momentary freedom of action on the Pacific coast and could surreptitiously alert McClellan airfield without creating any great excitement or publicity. In any event, by the next morning any possible adverse reaction to alerting the Air Command in California would be rendered redundant by the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor. It is instructive to note that nowhere in his testimony about his trip to California did Arnold mention actually visiting McClellan airfield, which indicates that he wished to leave this visit in obscurity for obvious reasons. Moreover, he made it a surprise visit, thus avoiding the normal honors and

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publicity attending a visit by the head of the Air Corps in Washington.
This would seem to be the only rational and valid explanation of Arnold's mission to California on the eve of Pearl Harbor; the expediting of planes to Hawaii and the Far East was only the excuse or coverup. Otherwise, we face the double paradox of the century for Roosevelt's defenders to explain: (1) pulling Arnold out of Washington during the two most critical days of the whole crisis for a perfunctory and routine operation, and (2) keeping Short's planes bunched in Hawaii, while dispersing the planes in California. The Arnold mission and action is surely one of the best proofs which we shall have that Roosevelt had advance knowledge that the Japanese planned to attack Pearl Harbor on December 7th until the time comes when we can produce absolute documentation of this fact.
One can well imagine Arnold's feelings as he sent off the B-17's to Hawaii, unwarned that they might in all probability be heading for destruction the next morning. Their guns were unfit for use and there was no ammunition for them, the latter having been dispensed with to provide more room for fuel. Having been sent to California ostensibly to dispatch these planes, not even Arnold dared to restrain them and cancel their flight. His emotions must have been even deeper when he thought of Short's huddled planes, which would also be destroyed on the ground by Japanese bombers the next morning, and of Kimmel's battleships that would actually provide sitting-ducks for the Japanese bombing and torpedo planes, but he did not dare to alert Short, Martin, Bloch and Kimmel as to their impending fate.
That Arnold gave the officers at the Sacramento Air Service Command the definite impression that war was right at hand is evident from the statement in the History that: "When word came on December 7th, 1941, that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor it did not cause any surprise!"
I shall only mention in passing a possibly significant slip of the tongue on the part of Roosevelt at an important meeting of Roosevelt, Hull, Stimson, Knox, Marshall and Stark at noon on November 25th, which has attracted the interest of some revisionist scholars. Roosevelt observed that the United States might be attacked "perhaps next Monday for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning." One revisionist critic has queried: "Why did he say 'Monday', which is Sunday in the United states?

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A dispatch from the Orient from anyone except our military or diplomatic services normally used the Far East date rather than ours. Somehow, I just cannot believe that Roosevelt would even have said Monday unless it slipped out inadvertently as a result of his having read some warning message from the Far East." I am not inclined to overplay this item, and will leave it merely with the suggestion that Roosevelt's defenders give a better explanation for his mentioning "Monday" rather than "Sunday". This is something that had long aroused my curiosity.
Many revisionist historians now regard the above material as adequate to demonstrate that Roosevelt must have received impressive and precise information by December 4th that Japan was planning to attack Pearl Harbor as the first act of war. Nevertheless, it is probably best to recognize the plausibility and relevance of this assumption but to depend more upon circumstantial evidence, based chiefly on the trend of events from the 4th to the 7th which has now been presented in detail. This is actually overwhelming, while the circumstantial evidence--and there is no other evidence-supporting the contention that even after December 4th Roosevelt still did not expect an attack on Pearl Harbor is extremely fragile and unconvincing, as we shall now indicate.
One argument for Roosevelt's ignorance of an impending attack is that, as a lover of ships and especially our naval ships, he would never have sacrificed our Pacific fleet to insure his needed attack. But he could have known or seen to it by December 5th that the carriers, the heavy cruisers, and most of the destroyers and pursuit planes had been sent out of Pearl Harbor, leaving mainly the battleships, which were chiefly of sentimental concern in the light of contemporary methods of naval warfare. This had been done as a result of Stark's order to Kimmel on November 27th. When Roosevelt was trying to "sell" his idea of a long patrol line, rather than a double line, to the Orient, he did not seem disturbed about the prospect of losing even a few cruisers. He wanted to see them "popping up here and there" to fool the Japanese. He may have loved ships but he loved politics and his own political ambitions far more.
Even less plausible is the contention that Roosevelt would not have sacrificed the lives of thousands of American sailors, soldiers and marines to obtain the attack. He was then playing for high and crucial political stakes in which a few dreadnaughts or a few thousand human lives were hardly a consideration to override policy, however regret

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table their loss. Roosevelt's program was primarily political rather than military or humanitarian. He surely knew that the war into which he was seeking to put the United States would cost millions of lives. Moreover, it is well established that Roosevelt did not anticipate as great destruction of ships and life as the Japanese bombers actually wrought As Secretary Knox observed after he visited Roosevelt in the White House immediately following the news of the attack: "He expected to get hit but did not expect to get hurt." There can be little doubt that the Cockleship plan of December 1st was designed to get the indispensable attack by a method which would precede the Pearl Harbor attack, avert the latter, and save the Pacific fleet and American lives.
It is maintained that Roosevelt could have had his Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor without its being a surprise and the forces of Short and Kimmel could have been alerted as to the prospective attack and repelled it with no serious losses. This fantastic suggestion runs counter to all the well-known facts. Walter Lord and Gordon W. Prange, the main writers on this subject, have shown with impressive evidence that Admiral Nagumo would have been ordered to turn back if there was any impressive evidence that Pearl Harbor had been fully alerted to the prospect of an attack, even after the order of December 5th to "climb Mount Niitaka." Of course, we do not need the testimony of Lord and Prange for these facts are fully supported by the available official documents. There could not have been any Japanese task-force attack on Pearl Harbor unless it was a surprise attack.
Finally, there is the fact that Roosevelt sent a message to the Japanese Emperor on the night of December 6th, after he knew that the negative reply to Hull was coming in, suggesting a peaceful settlement, but even Hull has admitted that this was only sent "for the record" after it was too late. Roosevelt had stressed this point of having a good formal record to Harry Hopkins when Lieutenant Schulz brought to him, on the evening of December 6th about 9:30, the detailed Japanese reply to Hull, which everybody in top Washington circles had assumed would be the moment when Japan would attack this country. Moreover, as will be indicated later, on the afternoon of the 6th Roosevelt had approved the implementation of Rainbow 5 by the Dutch and British, which meant that we were already at war with Japan, actually had been since December 3rd, Washington time when the Dutch invoked Rainbow 5 (A-2).

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There is an alternative cogent, logical and completely factual explanation of Roosevelt's decision on December 4th to concentrate on preventing any warnings from being sent to Short and Kimmel. This does not rest upon circumstantial evidence or any assumption that Roosevelt must have received precise information by that time that Japan was about to attack Pearl Harbor.
Through the three small vessels" stratagem he had done all that he could to secure his indispensable attack in the Far East. There was nothing left here except to wait and hope that one of the "small vessels" would be fired on. This left Pearl Harbor as the only other remotely probable place that would invite and be vulnerable to a surprise Japanese attack. Hence, nothing should be allowed to obstruct or divert this final crucial necessity. There is no doubt that he would have preferred a prior attack on one of the three small vessels" and thus save the Pearl Harbor battleships. He hoped for this until the morning of December 7th.
It is my firm personal opinion that this is the one unassailable and impregnable explanation of Roosevelt's action on December 4th for revisionist historians to accept prior to published documentary evidence that Roosevelt had been definitely and personally informed of an imminent Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This is sound and true, even though the circumstantial evidence of his having received such information is overwhelmingly more convincing than the Blackout and Blurout contention that he was surprised and shocked by the attack at Pearl Harbor, at least beyond the shock over the actual extent of the devastation produced by the attack. By December 4th he had brought the country to the brink of war. Its outbreak had to come through an attack on American forces if he was to have a united country behind the war effort. The Far East, via the three "small vessels", and Pearl Harbor were the only places that remained at which he could reasonably expect a surprise attack. The Philippines, as has been indicated, had been so well informed of Japanese intentions and operations through the Sadtler-Akin pipeline and their own intercepts that MacArthur could hardly have been surprised by hearing of immediate Japanese aggression. Moreover, Admiral Hart's Asiatic Fleet was so small that to destroy it would not have furnished much protection for the extensive movements that the Japanese had planned in the Pacific, once the war had started. Kimmel's powerful Pacific fleet would have remained intact.

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Now that it has been shown that apparently few top officials in Washington except Roosevelt, Marshall and Arnold--and possibly Stark after the 4th--expected that the Japanese would first attack at Pearl Harbor, and that Roosevelt may not have ordered all the top brass to refrain from warning Short and Kimmel, we may indicate how he did prevent any warning from being sent to Short and Kimmel between December 4th and 7th
Roosevelt first passed on his logical conclusions or specific information relative to the impending attack on Pearl Harbor to Generals Marshall and Arnold on the 4th of December. Marshall had very special reasons for being subservient and trustworthy to Roosevelt. The latter, influenced by Mrs. Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, had rescued Marshall from obscurity after his conspicuous failure in the armed command of the famous Eighth Regiment, and MacArthur had relegated him to the post of an instructor of the National Guard in Illinois. Roosevelt promoted Marshall to be full general over some thirty-four superior officers, and even made him Chief-of-Staff of the Army. There is no doubt that Marshall also greatly admired Roosevelt personally and, as the events of December 4-7 demonstrated, put his loyalty to the President above his loyalty to the military services and his country.
Nothing else could account for Marshall's strange behavior from December 4th to 7th, right down to his delayed sending of the "too-little-and-too-late" message to Short at 11:50 A. M. on the 7th, which we have already described. Neither Marshall nor Stark personally wished the United States to go to war with Japan in 1941 because they did not feel we were prepared to wage a large-scale Pacific war, to say nothing of a two-front war in Europe and the Pacific. They so reported on November 5th. They favored the modus vivendi of late November which Roosevelt and Hull kicked over, followed by Hull's sending an ultimatum to Japan on the 26th. There is no reasonable doubt that if Marshall had been left to his own convictions and impulses he Would have sent Short a real warning at least as early as November 27th, elaborated it repeatedly, and been in his Office on the afternoon and night of the 6th of December conferring with Short, if this had been needed. Obviously it would not have been needed to deal with any immediate attack on Pearl Harbor if Short had actually been warned on the 27th. Even the Army Pearl Harbor Board stated that a clear and definite warning to Short on November 27th, indicating the threat of an immediate Japanese movement

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against Pearl Harbor, would have led to action by Short which would have averted the attack.
As Admiral McCollum and others have revealed, Roosevelt quietly directed on December 4th that no warning communications could be sent to Pearl Harbor unless cleared by Marshall, which bottled up Army Intelligence and the Signal Corps. Marshall immediately informed Stark of this directive, thus preventing any leak to Pearl Harbor through the Navy. This precluded sending Short or Kimmel the Winds Execute message which was received on the 4th and was the most important and decisive intercept that had been received indicating immediate war with Japan, as well as all later evidence of an attack on Pearl Harbor.
Whether Roosevelt personally emphasized to Stark this arrangement to black out Pearl Harbor before the night of the 6th is uncertain. When the news of the arrival of the Japanese reply to Hull was brought to him about 9:30 on the evening of the 6th, Roosevelt called Stark on the telephone, found that he was out for the evening at the theater, and left word that Stark was to call him on his return, which Stark did.
The next morning, when Noyes, McCollum and Wilkinson showed Stark the "Time of Delivery" message, and indicated to him that this probably meant a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor about 7:30 A.M. Pearl Harbor time, Stark called Roosevelt, rather than Kimmel, and thereafter showed no interest in contacting Kimmel, even ignoring the pleas of Noyes, McCollum and Wilkinson for a separate warning message to Kimmel. After discussing with Marshall the desirable content of the message to be sent to Short--the "too-little-too-late" farce--Stark only suggested, as a sort of afterthought, that this also be handed on to Kimmel by Short.
We have already dealt with Marshall's strange behavior from December 4th to 7th and especially on the 6th and 7th. How much influence he had on the frustration and killing of Mccollum's clear message of precise warning to Kimmel on the 4th by Stark and Turner is not known. As reported in the officially accepted legend, on the afternoon of the 6th, as soon as he learned that the Japanese reply to Hull's ultimatum would be coming in, which the Pilot Message clearly indicated meant immediate war, Marshall abruptly left his office and hid out somewhere, which he could not for a time remember but later on reported to be his official

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quarters. On the morning of December 7th, the Washington-Times-Herald published an item stating that Marshall attended a banquet of alumni of the Virginia Military Institute on the evening of the 6th, but this has never been confirmed or denied. Marshall did not appear again officially until Sunday morning, whether some time around 9:00 at Stark's office, which seems most likely, or not until 11:25 at his own office. According to normal military procedure he should have been in his office all of Saturday afternoon and most of the night further informing Short and conferring about protecting Pearl Harbor.
If we accept the official legend of Marshall's activities on December 6th and 7th, Japan might have attacked the Pearl Harbor fleet on the afternoon or night of the 6th and Marshall would have known nothing about it until he came out of hiding late the next morning. When he did, he only sent Short at 11:50 the brief, vague, ambiguous and equivocal "too-little-and-too-late" message, which was in no sense any warning that war was about to start and, least of all, that the Japanese would probably attack Pearl Harbor in about an hour. It gave Short little or no information that he did not already have, except for the Time of Delivery message, and Marshall deceived Short in withholding the significance he had attached to this when reading it in his office. Finally, he refused to use three rapid means that he had available to send his already "too-late" message to Short, but let it be sent by Western Union to San Francisco, and R. C. A. from San Francisco to Fort Shafter--not even marked urgent--with the result that it did not reach Short until the Japanese planes had returned to their carriers after the attack. The delay in sending the message and Marshall's refusal to use a rapid method of transmitting it can only be explained as due to a desire to have it arrive too late for Short to take any action that might frighten off the Japanese attack. If we accept the more probable version, earlier described, that the message to be sent to Short had been agreed upon during Marshall's conference in Stark's office before 10:00 on the morning of the 7th, then the delay in sending it until 11:50 becomes all the more significant and unpardonable, to indulge in understatement.
Marshall saw to it that no warnings were sent to Pearl Harbor between the 4th and the 7th. The only alleged attempt to do so came on the night of the 6th, when Knox has asserted that he made a serious effort to send a clear and definite warning to Kimmel and to Admiral Hart, commander of the Asiatic fleet at Manila. This never arrived 94 at Pearl Harbor or Manila and Knox could not find any record of what happened to it in Washington. Only Marshall had the authority to kill it if Knox actually ordered such a message to be sent of which there is some doubt.
As conduct on the part of a trained soldier, assumedly dominated by the ideals and professional stereotypes of those high in his profession, and having the supreme military responsibility for the protection of his country, it would seem both fair and reasonable to contend that Marshall's conduct can be explained on only three grounds: mental defect, deliberately treasonable behavior, or carried out under orders from President Roosevelt. The last seems the only plausible and sensible interpretation. One thing is certain: however much Marshall was dominated and controlled by Roosevelt, his behavior during the brief period between December 4th and 7th perfectly performed the function of keeping Short and Kimmel in the dark about the danger of Japanese attack until the Japanese bombers appeared over the Pacific fleet. And this was all achieved with a minimum of risk and exertion on the part of Roosevelt. He only needed to give his blackout order directly to Marshall.
While we are on or near that subject, it is desirable to point out that altogether too much emphasis has been laid by both the defenders of Roosevelt and his "Day of Infamy" rhetoric and the revisionist critics on the alleged significance of possible "last minute" warnings late on the night of the 6th or the morning of the 7th, whether sent or unsent.
Unless the Japanese task force could have been frightened back more easily than is likely, even in the light of its jittery and timid commander, Admiral Nagumo, any warnings sent immediately after the first thirteen points of the Japanese reply to Hull's ultimatum had been received, decoded and delivered before midnight of the 6th might not have made any great difference with respect to Nagumo's carrying through the attack. The results could have been even more disastrous to the Pacific fleet than it turned out to be. As Admiral Nimitz and others have suggested, there might have been just time enough to get the ships out of port and on the ocean, in which case they might have been sunk in deep water and could not have been raised, salvaged and restored for action. There would have been plenty of Japanese planes available for a supplementary attack on the Army installations, machine shops, supplies and most important of all, the oil supplies, still above

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ground, which would have been far more of a disaster to the United States than the destruction of the battleship fleet.
There is little doubt that Short, Martin and Bellinger could have got many of their planes distributed, fueled and ready for battle and some in the air for reconnaissance, probably only to be shot down by the greatly superior air force on the six Japanese carriers. The unarmed B-17 bombers that came in on the morning of the 7th, some of them only to be immediately destroyed or damaged, might have been turned back. There is little doubt that greater damage could have been inflicted on the attacking Japanese bombers than took place in the actual attack, but it is doubtful if the devastation wrought by them would have been greatly lessened.
If a warning had been sent to Short and Kimmel when the Pilot Message had been decoded and read and the Kita message had been processed by mid-afternoon of the 6th, it might have been a quite different story. Defensive movements at Hawaii connected with an alert put in operation during the afternoon of the 6th might have caused the Japanese task force to abandon their bombing mission and turn back or to face an empty harbor. That would have made a great difference in the fate of the ships at Pearl Harbor. In this case, Kimmel could have put to sea with all his available ships, joined Halsey who was returning from Wake, linked up as soon as possible with Newton and Brown, and through a surprise attack perhaps have inflicted a serious surprise blow on at least a part of the returning Japanese task force whose location could have been rather precisely determined by Commander Rochefort at Pearl Harbor. Nagumo could have had no knowledge of the location of Kimmel's reorganized fleet. In any event, Nagumo's bombers would have found an empty harbor at Pearl Harbor and all of Kimmel's warships out of sight beyond the horizon.
When it comes to later warnings that could have been given, but were not, such as Knox's mysterious alleged message to Kimmel and Hart late on the night of the 6th, a warning to Kimmel by Stark shortly after 9:00 on the morning of the 7th, when Noyes, McCollum and Wilkinson explained to him the significance of the Time of Delivery message, and Marshall's "too-little-and-too-late" message at 11:50, or even a clear and forthright one by Marshall at least two hours earlier, there is only a gambling chance that the disaster to the Pacific fleet would have been greatly lessened. As pointed out above it would have been worse had the ships been sunk in the deep Pacific beyond hope of

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salvage and repair. The failure to get off these last minute warnings promptly, or not at all, may have great significance for the historian and the moralist but they are far less important strategically.
It is only fair, however, to present here an informed critique by Commander Hiles of my opinions on the probable results of a warning if sent by Stark to Kimmel even as late as 9:30 A. M. on the morning of the 7th, when Stark was made to realize that the Time of Delivery message implied the probability of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor at around 7:30 A.M. Pearl Harbor time. Actually, the bombers did not arrive until about 7:50. If, as McCollum maintains, Marshall was also in Stark's office between 9:00 and 10:00 on the morning of the 7th and they had there decided to send a real warning to Short, this could have been sent by 10:00 A.M. instead of 11:50. Hiles admits that even a clear warning sent at 11:50 by the most rapid method, would not have made possible an effective averting of the Japanese attack, although both Short and Kimmel would have had time to get some of their anti-aircraft armament in shape for action and Short might have got more of his planes off the ground by the time the Japanese bombers arrived, thus increasing the damage to the Japanese. But let us stick to the approximately four hours that Short and Kimmel would have had in which to take action if Stark and/or Marshall had sent clear warnings to them by around 9:30 on the morning of the 7th According to Hiles:


It would have required only four hours at the most for the Pacific fleet that remained at Pearl Harbor on the morning of the 7th to sortie from the harbor, and still less time for Short to have re-oriented his planes and anti-aircraft defense against the attack. Kimmel could have sortied and dispersed his entire force and perhaps rendezvoused with the three main task forces later on, but most likely he would have kept his ships dispersed until he learned the composition of the attacking force. After this, it is problematic as to just what he would have done. Admiral Kimmel has told me that he is not sure just what action he would have taken. Two American carriers against six for the Japanese might have been too great a risk to take, although the battle of Midway was won in June, 1942, against a much superior Japanese naval force and the four Japanese carriers were mainly destroyed by one American carrier, the Enterprise.
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Now let me set the stage for you, assuming a four-hour alert. It would have been 3:30 A.M. at Hawaii. It would have been dark and would remain so for several hours. There would have been no need to wait and recall the liberty section which was ashore. The ships could always function with the duty sections in an emergency. Long before daylight all the major units would have been clear of the harbor and well scattered beyond visual distance. A few of the smaller ships might have been visible by the time the Japs arrived but even this is not likely because a large part of the fleet was already away with Halsey, Newton and Brown, and four hours would have been adequate for the depleted fleet to have sortied and dispersed.
It is safe to say that the Japanese would have found both the horizon and the harbor empty. This also presupposes that Nagumo would not have been alerted by Japanese spies in Honolulu as to the sortie during these four hours and withheld the attack, even have got ready to turn back to Japan. Several scouting planes preceded the attack waves to report back to Nagumo as to the state of the fleet and it is unlikely that Nagumo would have ordered an attack on an empty harbor.
Let us assume, however, that the bombing planes did proceed to Pearl Harbor and found nothing there. The targets were gone and well scattered out over the broad Pacific. The Japanese planes had no spare fuel to go flying around completely blind, looking for targets they knew not where; as it was, some of them ran out of fuel before they got back to their carriers after the attack. With this unexpected denouement, Genda and Fuchida (the Japanese bombing commanders) would have had no other choice than to recall the planes or bomb the off-shore installations and the shops, machinery and oil, which is not very likely under the circumstances. And up to this point we have assumed perfect conditions for Fuchida and have ignored the fact that Short and Martin would also have had that same four-hour warning and that their planes would have been in the air and the anti-aircraft guns ready to greet the bombers.


It is well to have this authoritative and detailed portrayal of what might have happened at Pearl Harbor and Fort Shafter on the morning of December 7th if Stark and Marshall
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had sent warnings to Hawaii by or before 9:30-10:00 Washington time.
Of course, Commander Hiles is assuming that all would have worked out smoothly if the warning had been received about 3:30 A. M. on the morning of the 7th, but how a situation looks on paper may be quite different from how it will take shape in action. It would have been quite a shock to officers, crews and soldiers to have been rudely awakened at 3:30 A.M. with the news that Oahu was about to be shattered by a Japanese bomber attack when there had been no previous warning of any such move and nearly every one in the armed forces there had been convinced that Japan would not make war on the United States, a rich and powerful country that no small island empire could hope to overcome.
Events might have worked out as Commander Hiles has indicated. On the other hand, there might have been much confusion, with the ships not all out of sight when the Japanese bombers arrived. The channel leading out of Pearl Harbor was so shallow that the battleships had to move slowly, and in the haste and confusion one of them might have run aground and made it impossible for ships behind it to reach the open sea. But it is certainly true that, if a clear warning had reached Fort Shafter and Pearl Harbor between 3:00 and 4:00 on the morning of the 7th, the Army and Navy forces and equipment on Oahu would have suffered s smaller loss than occurred, unless Kimmel's battleships had been sunk in deep water as the Repulse and Prince of Wale: were shortly afterward in the southwest Pacific.
It is, of course, utterly abhorrent to have to conceive of Kimmel's being subjected, as a result of Washington neglect or treachery, to any such shock and crisis as being warned of a Japanese attack at 3:30 on the morning of the 7th, when he could and should have been effectively warned days, weeks or months before, and there would not have been any Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
The main reason for deploring overemphasis on the failure to send last minute warnings is that this obscures and confuses the real nature and the extent of the guilt for failing to warn Hawaii in plenty of time. There was every reason for sending a clear warning there on November 27th, and any delay after December 4th was nothing less than criminal neglect, if one wished to save the American forces at Pearl Harbor. If one limits main consideration of the

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warning period to the late night of the 6th and the morning of the 7th, the Blackout and Blurout writers can conjure up all sorts of confusing alibis about timing and the possible disastrous results of warnings sent at this late hour, but there is no such way to counter or explain the failure to warn the Hawaiian commanders at any time during the previous nine days, or even as far back as when the first Bomb Plot message was decoded and read on October 9th. Nor was there any excuse for having failed to provide Pearl Harbor and Fort Shafter with a Purple Machine to intercept, decode and read the Japanese diplomatic messages right there, thus learning of the danger on the spot.
It is also futile and misleading to exaggerate the minor acts of incompetence or mis-judgment at Pearl Harbor between very early morning on the 7th and the attack at 7:50, so much stressed by Roberta Wohlstetter at the beginning of her book on Pearl Harbor. Such were the failure properly to interpret the discovery of a Japanese scouting submarine right off Pearl Harbor on the early morning of the 7th, the apparent indifference shown by Lieutenant Kermit Tyler of the Army Air Corps to the report from the Army radar station about some strange approaching planes, which might have been thought to be those of Admiral Halsey who was returning with his task force from Wake or the approaching B-17's, and the official closing down of this radar station at 7:00 on the morning of the 7th, as had been ordered, but was not actually closed. These have some curious interest as minor deficiencies and mistakes of judgment, greatly bolstered by the impact of hindsight, but they had little to do with the approach, diverting or repulse of the Japanese bombing planes, which were already well on their way from their carriers to attack Pearl Harbor.
Incidentally, technically speaking and as a matter of curious interest, despite the repeated orders of Roosevelt and his associates that Japan must be allowed to fire the first shot, this was actually fired when the commander of the American destroyer Ward fired upon and sank a Japanese submarine off Pearl Harbor about an hour before the first wave of Japanese bombers arrived there.
Defenders of Roosevelt and Washington have sought to equate these trifling and exaggerated errors, due to surprise, confusion and haste at Pearl Harbor on the morning of the attack, with the failure of Washington to pass on the Bomb Plot messages to Short and Kimmel, the refusal to give them the Purple diplomatic messages, the denial of a Purple

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machine to Pearl Harbor, and the killing of the efforts of McCollum, Noyes, Sadtler, Bratton and others after November 26th to warn Short and Kimmel about the approaching danger of a Japanese attack. These were the main deliberate delinquencies of Washington which made possible the successful Japanese attack--to say nothing of the fact that most of the top Washington officialdom, civil and military, involved in such matters, appear to have permitted the movement of Japanese task forces down the southwest Pacific and the strategic assumptions of Rainbow 5 (WPL 46) to drive the whole traditional Pacific naval strategy relative to the threat to Pearl Harbor from their minds.
The time to have started warning Pearl Harbor was with the decoding, translating, reading and evaluation of the first Bomb Plot message on October 9, 1941, obviously by November 5th when it announced that Japan had set a deadline for negotiations, and certainly by November 26th when Hull rejected the Japanese diplomatic plans, kicked over the modus vivendi, and sent his ultimatum to Japan. Literal warnings even if sent by the time the codes destruction intercepts were at hand on December 1st and 2nd, and when Winds Execute was received on the 4th, would most certainly have averted the Pearl Harbor attack. And, surely, a Purple machine should have been sent to Pearl Harbor by July, 1941, where the competent operating force, headed by Commander Rochefort, could have intercepted and read the revealing diplomatic messages from Tokyo. If they had been ordered to do so, they could have read the Bomb Plot messages in the J-19 and PA-K2 codes without a Purple machine.
The overwhelming responsibility for the war and the attack was, of course, Roosevelt's deliberate refusal to settle the relations between the United States and Japan in a peaceful manner by honest diplomatic negotiations, to achieve which Japan made unusually impressive gestures and offered very reasonable terms that protected all legitimate vital American interests in the Far East. As I pointed out in an article in the Progressive, December 6, 1941, we were surely more thoroughly and logically involved in continuing our profitable and peaceful relations with Japan in 1941 than with supporting Chiang's tottering and corrupt regime, even though Roosevelt's maternal grandfather may have made no money out of trade with Japan. Japan had no military designs against the United States except for self-protection in the event of war. Japan made two genuine but vain offers to withdraw from the Rome-

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Berlin-Tokyo Axis in return for peaceful relations with the United States; these were unceremoniously brushed off.
Roosevelt was, however, so deeply involved in his anti-Japanese war plans and his commitments to Churchill and others by the late summer of 1941 that it is extremely doubtful if he would have accepted any Japanese diplomatic proposals short of complete surrender. He would have been surprised, shocked and annoyed if the Tojo government had been willing to humiliate themselves enough to resume negotiations on the basis of Hull's ultimatum of the 26th. The desire to prevent this was a major consideration of Roosevelt and Stimson in connection with formulating the fake warnings to Short and Kimmel on the 27th.

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VII. THE OVERALL RESPONSIBILITY OF ROOSEVELT FOR THE SURPRISE ATTACK

The essential facts and details explaining why and how Pearl Harbor was surprised on Sunday, December 7, 1941, have now been presented. There remians the question of the responsibility for the overall trends and developments which led to the attack itself. Here, I believe that fundamental responsibility can also be overwhelmingly--almost solely--attributed to Roosevelt and his policies, in which there was far more deliberation than inadvertence.
Our entering the second World War was mainly the product of a political program: Roosevelt's turning to armament and war to bail himself out of the difficulties created by the failure of his domestic program. The surprise attack was a political rather than a military scandal. It may, of course, be open to argument as to whether Roosevelt's New Deal was not ideologically and morally superior to the program and methods of his conservative political opponents at home and that the latter must share the responsibility for his shift to armament and war because of their stupid hostility and often malicious resistance to domestic reforms.
Secretary of State Hull has been vigorously criticized for his arrogant and pharisaical diplomacy, based on unrealistic platitudes, beatitudes, and banalities, and designed to make it impossible to arrive at a fair and decent understanding with Japan over Far Eastern problems. But for all this Roosevelt was primarily responsible. He had no hesitation whatever in being his own Secretary of State

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when Hull's policies did not coincide with his own, even to the extent of insulting Hull by relying heavily on Raymond Moley, Stimson and Henry Morgenthau in such matters. Roosevelt permitted Hull to carry on diplomatic relations with Japan in the manner which he did because Hull's policies, strongly influenced by his principal advisor on Far Eastern matters, the Japanophobe scholar, Stanley K. Hornbeck, agreed perfectly with Roosevelt's program. There has rarely been a greater meeting of minds between a president and his secretary of state than in the accord between Roosevelt and Hull over our negotiations with Japan in 1941. If Hull had entertained contrary views Roosevelt would no more have hesitated to push Hull aside over Japan than he did in the case of the Morgenthau Plan dealt with at the Quebec Conference in September, 1944.
So far as the economic background of Pearl Harbor is concerned, the responsibility was almost solely that of Roosevelt, whether we consider the effort to save and prolong his political career by creating a military economy to replace the New Deal or his use of economic and financial methods to produce the economic strangulation of Japan and force her into war. In the latter, he was vigorously opposed, at least when instituted, by the top army and navy officials. Even Admiral Turner strongly criticized this move.
Roosevelt's militant program was thoroughly in accord with his personal attitudes and aims. His hostility to Japan went back to a deep-seated boyhood affection for China and antipathy to Japan that were closely related to his China-oriented family financial history, and to the alleged bad impression of the traits, behavior and political ambitions of the Japanese people made on him by a "Japanese schoolboy", who was a fellow student with Roosevelt at Harvard. Months before he was inaugurated, he had a long conference on January 9, 1933, with Stimson, the most eminent and passionate Japanophobe among the prominent American statesmen of the present century. They were brought together by Roosevelt's close adviser, Felix Frankfurter, who had been a subordinate of Stimson in Frankfurter's early legal career. Stimson's hatred of Japan and his erratic ideas about "aggressor nations" appealed to Roosevelt, and these became the basis of the latter's Japanese policy from January 9, 1933, when he met Stimson, to the attack on Pearl Harbor. When Raymond Moley and Rexford G. Tugwell vigorously urged Roosevelt not to accept Stimson's bellicose attitude toward Japan, he answered that he could not very well help doing so in the light

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of very satisfactory personal and financial relations that his maternal grandfather had enjoyed with China.
Roosevelt's first striking gesture in revealing his aggressive foreign policy, the Quarantine formula enunciated in the Chicago Bridge speech of October 5, 1937, was straight Stimson political and diplomatic ideology, and Stimson almost immediately released an approving statement. It would be unfair, however, to attribute to Stimson full responsibility for Roosevelt's hostile behavior toward Japan. He did not have to accept Stimson's position, and he did so only because it was in full agreement with his own personal attitude and public policy. Late in 1937, as noted earlier, Roosevelt sent the very able American naval officer, Captain Royal E. Ingersoll, to London, and in January, 1938, Ingersoll discussed the possible relations and operations of the United States and Great Britain in case they "were involved in a war with Japan in the Pacific which would include the Dutch, the Chinese, and possibly, the Russians." From this time onward Ingersoll had no doubt that Roosevelt had war with Japan in the back of his mind and made no bones of this fact in his confidential discussions with his professional associates.
In the summer of 1941, when Roosevelt felt ready really to put the screws on Japan, he logically summoned Stimson, already made Secretary of War, to come forth and actively implement the Stimson doctrine, while Hull proceeded with his evasive and procrastinating diplomatic homilies. When Roosevelt allowed or directed Hull to kick over the modus vivendi on November 26th, he did this in direct opposition to the policy of Marshall and Stark, who wished more time to get ready for war with Japan.
Roosevelt has been criticized by some on the ground that he got entangled with Churchill, and that the latter dragged him into war. There is no doubt of the powerful but unneeded efforts of Churchill in pressing Roosevelt towards military action, but Roosevelt opened the door for British importuning when he sent Ingersoll to Europe in the winter of 1937-38, asked for an opportunity to collaborate in September, 1939, and later agreed with and cooperated in the Anglo-American joint effort against Germany. The over two years of voluminous secret communications between Roosevelt and Churchill, which determined the course of relations between the United States and Britain, completely hidden from the American public, were instituted at Roosevelt's request.

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Marshall's directed behavior from December 4 to 7, 1941, which so cleverly and successfully helped us into war bv assuring the launching of a successful Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, was one of the most masterly products of Roosevelt's genius for deception but was directly opposed to Marshall's personal views about starting war at this time. Indeed, it is certainly high time that revisionist scholars should cease placing the main blame for compelling Short and Kimmel to remain unwarped on foreign collaborators or on Roosevelt's American agents or stooges, like Hull, Marshall, Stark and Turner, and put it squarely where it belongs, on the source of their directions and operations: Roosevelt himself.
Anti-revisionist partisans of Roosevelt will pounce upon the above conclusions as a striking example of the "devil theory of history". Even if it were, which I do not concede, it is fully as valid as their own "saint theory of history": the portrayal of Roosevelt as "Saint Franklin"! They utilize the latter unhesitatingly and almost invariably in defending Roosevelt against all charges of duplicity and responsibility in producing war with Japan and in bringing about the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. They proclaim him a superb statesman and a major benefactor of all mankind through his encouraging the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 and bringing the United States into the war as soon as he was able to do so in the face of the strongly anti-interventionist public opinion in the United States right down to Pearl Harbor. This "saint theory" in regard to Roosevelt has been valiantly, even aggressively in some cases, upheld by writers like Admiral Samuel E. Morison, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Thomas A. Bailey, Herbert Feis, Samuel Flagg Bemis, Roberta Wohlstetter and T. R. Fehrenbach; indeed, by virtually every opponent of the revisionist approach to 1939 and 1941. Revisionist historians can logically insist that, if the anti-revisionist writers wish to attack the "devil theory" mote in the eyes of revisionist scholars, the "saint theory" devotees must remove this saintly beam from their own eyes.
More important, however, is the fact that the indictment of Roosevelt as overwhelmingly responsible for war with Japan and the surprise at Pearl Harbor is in no sense any literal application of the devil theory of history. We are here concerned only with the rejection of peacef ul overtures from Japan long preceding Pearl Harbor and American responsibility for a successful surprise attack there on December 7, 1941. For these deeds and actions Roosevelt was primarily and personally responsible. There is no

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pretense here of dealing thoroughly with the causes of wars in general, the responsibility for the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, the reasons why Roosevelt turned from peace to armament and war after the campaign of 1936, the basis of Roosevelt's desire for the glamor of being a war president, the wisdom of his domestic opponents in opposing the New Deal system, and the like.
Even less is there any attempt here to present and analyze the basic geographical, biological, economic, sociological and psychological causes of wars in general, which account for the genesis of all modern wars including the second World War. Neither the devil nor the saint theory is any explanation of such fundamental considerations. Nobody understands this fact better than I do. Whatever defects my writings on Revisionism and diplomatic history may have, it is beyond reasonable dispute that I have given more attention to the fundamental causes of wars in my writings than any professional diplomatic historian who has ever dealt with the subject. Not even the case of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the second World War can induce me to abandon this basic approach to wars.
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VIII. HOW WE ENTERED WAR WITH JAPAN FOUR DAYS BEFORE PEARL HARBOR

Our naval losses at Pearl Harbor that resulted from the surprise attack there have become a major item in American and world history primarily because it is almost universally believed that it was the Japanese attack that brought the United States into war with Japan. Actually, the United States had been put into war with Japan by the action of the Dutch authorities at Batavia, approved by the Dutch government, on December 3rd, Washington time, four days before the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor.
Roosevelt remarked, when, about 9:30 P. M. on December 6th, he read the first thirteen parts of the Japanese reply to Hull's ultimatum of November 26th, that "This means war." He had known by the forenoon of the 6th, if not two days earlier, that we were already involved in war with Japan. How this had come about requires a brief review of the plans, arrangements and agreements whereby the United States could be involved in war without any attack by Japan upon American territory, forces or flag, a situation which was a repudiation of Roosevelt's promises to the American

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people and of the Democratic platform of 1940. They were the ultimate development and implementation of Captain Ingersoll's visit to Europe in the winter of 1937-38.
Unneutral American acts even prior to Roosevelt's election in 1940 on the platform of avoiding war had furnished Germany with a legitimate basis for making war on the United States. Such were the Destroyer Deal of September, 1940, and the allotting of large quantities of arms and ammunition to the British. Immediately following the election of 1940, plans to involve us in war with Japan got under way in real earnest, in case the Axis Powers should not rise to the bait afforded by "Lend Lease" and convoying on the Atlantic. These have been mentioned earlier but may be reviewed here.
Anglo-American joint-staff conferences in Washington held from January through March, 1941, drew up general plans for cooperation in war against the European Axis Powers and also envisaged a containing war with Japan They were known as the ABC-1 plans (land and sea) and ABC-2 (air). In April, another conference was held in Singapore, and the Dutch were brought in more directly through ABD. While still regarding Germany as the main immediate enemy, provisions were also made for joint action against Japan if the latter proceeded beyond the line 100° East and 10° North or 6° North and the Davao-Waigeo line, or menaced British or Dutch possessions in the southwest Pacific or independent countries in that area. This agreement between the United States, the British and the Dutch was known as ADB. Together, the agreements were known as ABCD. Stimson and Knox approved the ABC-1 plan for the United States to make it look good for the record. Although approving them verbally, Roosevelt did not officially sponsor these agreements in writing and they did not call for congressional approval. Marshall and Stark balked at ADB and its inclusion in ABCD because it introduced political considerations in a military program, but they had to play along with Roosevelt and did so to the very end in early December, 1941.
When the joint-staff conferences were over, the American military services drew up specific war plans to implement these staff agreements ending in ABCD. The joint Army and Navy basic war plan was known as Rainbow 5, also usually called WPL 46 in relation to naval operation in the Pacific. The subsidiary part that related to the operations of the Pacific fleet under Admiral Kimmel was known as WPPac 46. It was developed to implement the basic war plan and

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to coordinate the Pacific fleet operations with the provisions of Rainbow 5 (WPL 46).
Roosevelt apparently had indicated to Marshall and Stark that he intended to place the basic war plans before Congress prior to their being implemented, but whether he so intended or not, he had failed to do so when his hand was called on December 5th and 6th. The essence of the matter is that Roosevelt had approved an agreement that the United States would go to war to protect the interests and territory of allies in the Antipodes, thousands of miles from the United States, without even the semblance of an attack on the United States by Japan. On the heels of these ABCD agreements and the derived war plans, Admiral Stark, when promulgating Rainbow 5 (WPL 46), sent word to his admirals in leading outposts that the question of war was no longer a matter of whether, but of when and where. Marshall distributed Rainbow 5 to his field commanders, and Roosevelt unofficially approved it in May and June.
The ABCD agreement and Rainbow 5 hung like a sword of Damocles over Roosevelt's head. It exposed him to the most dangerous dilemma of his political career: to start a war without an attack on the American forces or territory, or refusing to follow up the implementation of ABCD and Rainbow 5 by Britain or the Dutch. The latter would lead to serious controversy and quarrels among the prospective allies, with the disgruntled powers leaking Roosevelt's complicity in the plan and exposing his mendacity.
He apparently took this risk rather lightly until July, 1941, because he had felt confident that Hitler would give him a valid pretext for war on the Atlantic. But when Hitler had failed to provide a suitable provocative act it became apparent that the United States must enter the war through the back door of Japan. When the latter had been consigned to economic strangulation in July 1941, when the back door plan had apparently been definitely implemented at the Argentia meeting, and when the peace efforts of Konoye had been rejected, this agreement to start a war on Japan without an attack on American forces or territory became a pressing and serious political problem for Roosevelt if he wished to have a united country behind him to support his war effort. It became increasingly so when the Japanese began to send extensive convoys of troops and equipment into the southwest Pacific in November. These convoys might pass the magic line specified by the ABCD agreement, and the Dutch, British and Australians might call his hand by invoking the American promise to act jointly

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against the Japanese as envisaged in ABCD and Rainbow 5 (WPL 46). The matter of getting a suitable Japanese attack somewhere now became the most vital of all Roosevelt's political problems. There would no longer be any serious difficulty in inciting Japan to accept war, but Japan had to commit the "first overt act" and it had to be against the United States.
There was always the probability that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor because this action had been implicit in Pacific naval strategy for years, but a Japanese task-force attack at Hawaii involved a long ocean voyage and there was always a possibility that it might be intercepted en route. It was this consideration, as well as the fact that this belated plan might also save the fleet at Pearl Harbor, which led Roosevelt to turn to his "three small vessels" stratagem on December 1st, to which reference has already been made several times.
Roosevelt appears to have obtained his inspiration to set up this scheme through reports of the menacing attitude and behavior of Japanese naval ships toward two American Yangtse River gunboats, the Luzon and Oahu, as they approached and passed Formosa on a voyage from Shanghai to Manila on November 29th and 30th (Washington time). Hitherto, the Japanese had not paid any serious attention to routine American ship movements off the coast of Asia But on the 29th and 30th, they all but fired on the gunboats Luzon and Oahu.
On December 1st, immediately after his return from Warm Springs, Roosevelt summoned Admiral Stark and instructed him to order Admiral Hart, commander of the Asiatic fleet stationed at Manila, to select, equip and man three "small vessels" which could move out into the path of the Japanese task forces going southward and draw fire from Japanese planes or ships, thus giving Roosevelt his all-important and indispensable attack, and one that was on an American ship. The ostensible purpose of equipping and sending out the three "small vessels", as explained by Stark to Hart, was to have them carry out reconnaissance operations relative to Japanese ship movements and to reports--to act as a "defensive information patrol".
Admiral Hart, as also did Stark, recognized from the outset that any such operation for these little ships was palpably "phony". Hart was carrying out the needed reconnaissance and reporting the results to Washington. For

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this he had suitable vessels and planes, while for such a role the use of the three "small vessels" was nothing short of fantastic. To retain Hart's respect, Stark had made it clear that the whole conception of equipping and dispatching the three "small vessels" for reconnaissance was Roosevelt's and not his, a fact which Mrs. Wohlstetter characteristically conceals in her treatment of the three "small vessels" episode.
Only two of the "small vessels" had been made ready to sail out into the path of the Japanese convoys and invite attack before the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor. To get this baiting stratagem under way promptly, Roosevelt had Stark suggest to Hart that he might use the converted yacht Isabel, which had been made over into the dispatch boat of the Asiatic fleet and the Japanese had been acquainted with its identity for some time. Hart realized that on this assignment the Isabel was to be bait for a Japanese attack, which displeased him since the vessel was very useful to the fleet. Yet he did not wish to seem to be defying the President's wishes. He sensibly solved his dilemma by sending the Isabel out as directed but under instructions which rendered it as unlikely as possible to be attacked and sunk by the Japanese. These instructions were directly contrary to Roosevelt's plans and intentions, and Hart knew they were. The Isabel was not even repainted before being dispatched, which assured that the Japanese would be able to recognize it, and the sailing orders given by Hart were such as to make it appear very unlikely to the Japanese that it was a provocative "man-o-war".
These precautions may well have saved the Isabel from attack, the Japanese recognized it and were not stupid or rash enough to fire on it. Although out on its mission for some five days, only one Japanese plane even buzzed the Isabel. Despite his protective directions Hart had feared that the Isabel would be sunk, and he told the commander when he returned that he had never expected to see him alive again after his departure. If the Isabel episode had been handled in the manner that Roosevelt wished and provided the maximum provocation to trigger-happy Japanese pilots or gunners there might not have been any attack on Pearl Harbor and the fleet there could have been saved.
The second "small vessel", the little schooner Lanikai, which was commanded by Lieutenant (now Admiral) Kemp Tolley, although equipped with a cannon and machine gun to bait the Japanese into thinking it was a warship, had only a dilapidated radio unfit either to receive or transmit

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messages. If Tolley had seen the whole Japanese fleet assembled in front of him he could not have sent back any report. Although Tolley at once reported its useless condition, there was no attempt to replace his radio equipment and provide him with suitable instruments to report his observations. The Lanikai was awaiting dawn on December 7th to leave the entrance to Manila Bay and expose itself to Japanese gunfire when news came of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the "small vessel" turned back. The combination of the utter lack of usable radio equipment and the haste shown in trying to get the Lanikai manned and sent out in the path of Japanese planes and ships provides the best evidence of the real purpose of the "three small vessels" scheme. The third "small vessel" had not even been selected because of lack of time, but there is no reason to believe that it would have been superior in nature or equipment to the Lanikai.
Roosevelt's timing of the three "small vessels" stratagem was, as noted earlier, much too belated to work out as he had hoped. The order to equip and dispatch them should have been issued at least as early as Hull's ultimatum of November 26th. As a result of Hart's sensible evasion of Roosevelt's wishes, the Isabel sought to avert a Japanese attack. The Lanikai was not able to put to sea effectively to challenge Japanese fire before the attack on Pearl Harbor on the 7th, and, as will be shown shortly, the United States had been already involved in war with Japan without any attack on this country through the Dutch implementation of the ABCD agreement and Rainbow 5 (Rainbow A-2 for the Dutch) on December 3rd, Washington time. Roosevelt gave the order concerning the three "small vessels" as soon as the idea occurred to him, but he appears to have forgotten the Panay incident of 1937 and he could not have known of the menacing Japanese behavior toward the Luzon and Oahu before the afternoon or evening of November 30th. Hence, he could not have sent out the order to equip and dispatch the "three small vessels" before he did on the forenoon of December 1st as soon as he returned from Warm Springs. The brilliant and ingenious inspiration came too late.
That the United States was involved in war with Japan by 10:40 A.M. on the morning of December 6th because of the British invocation of ABCD and Rainbow 5 has been shown in detail by Charles A. Beard in his book President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War 1941. and by George Morgenstern in his chapter (6) in Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. But there was authentic evidence presented

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during the post-war Pearl Harbor investigations that this country was actually involved in war with Japan by December 3rd, Washington time, when the Dutch at Batavia, with the approval of the home government, invoked the ABCD agreement and Rainbow 5 (A-2) because Japanese forces had passed the line 100 East and 10 North and was thought to be threatening the Dutch possessions as well as the Kra Peninsula and Thailand. The Dutch reported that the Japanese might arrive within sixty hours.
This astonishing information was revealed in the so-called Merle-Smith message sent out of Melbourne, Australia, on the morning of December 5, 1941 (December 4th, Washington time) to Generals MacArthur and Short. It is remarkable that even most American revisionist historians have missed its full significance. The essential facts about the message were noted by George Morgenstern in his Pearl Harbor, published in 1947 and the first comprehensive book on the subject, and some six years later by Percy L. Greaves on pages 430-431 of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. But Morgenstern and Greaves failed to follow through because they accepted as valid the official statement by Washington that the Merle-Smith message did not reach Washington until 7:58 on the evening of December 7th, several hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
The full import of the Merle-Smith message was first revealed by Commander Hiles in the spring of 1967, and it was precisely mentioned and briefly described a little later by Ladislas Farago in his book The Broken Seal (Chapter 26) but Farago, who learned the significance of the message from Hiles, did not develop its full significance.
Colonel Van S. Merle-Smith was the American military attache in Melbourne, Australia, in December, 1941, and his aide was Lieutenant Robert H. O'Dell. Most of our information about this Merle-Smith message comes from the testimony of O'Dell before the Clarke Inquiry and the Army Pearl Harbor Board in 1944, especially the testimony before Colonel Carter W. Clarke, who allowed O'Dell to testify in straightforward fashion. Merle-Smith had died in the interval between 1941 and 1944.
About 5:00 P.M. on Thursday, December 4th, Australian time (Wednesday, December 3rd, Washington time), Merle-Smith and O'Dell were invited to a conference at which were present Air Chief Marshal Charles Burnett, commander of the Australian air force, and Commander Saom, the Dutch liaison officer from Batavia.

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Burnett told Merle-Smith that he had received information from Vice-Admiral C. E, L. Helfrich, commander-in-chief of the Dutch Navy in the East Indies, that Japanese naval forces had crossed the magic line of 100 East and 10 North and were threatening the Dutch or American possessions. Commander Saom then informed Burnett, for the special benefit of Merle-Smith, that the Dutch authorities in Batavia had ordered the execution of ABCD, and Rainbow 5 (A-2), the Dutch phase of Rainbow 5, which was to be invoked only in the case of war. He further told Burnett and Merle-Smith that the order to execute Rainbow 5 (A-2) had already gone into effect and that the Dutch counted on the assistance of the American Navy. Burnett then brought the conference to a close because he had to attend an Australian War Council meeting that evening.
When Merle-Smith returned to his office, he discussed this sensational information with Captain Charles A. Coursey, the American naval attache at Melbourne, but the latter apparently declined to send any warning to naval authorities in cooperation with Merle-Smith. If he sent one to Hart, Kimmel or Stark it must have been suppressed and destroyed later on. Merle-Smith remained determined to alert MacArthur and Short. Hence, he drafted an identical message to each of them, and ordered O'Dell to code it, which was done. At Burnett's request by telephone that evening the message was held up until the forenoon of December 5th, Australian time (December 4th, Washington time.) It was sent to MacArthur and Short by fast cablegram about 11:00 A.M. the morning of the 5th, Australian time (4th for Washington). Short was requested to decode and read it and then transmit it to Washington. The message should have reached Manila and Fort Shafter on the early afternoon of the fifth (the 4th at Washington), and Short could have been able to forward the message to Washington before evening.
The evidence indicates that the message was not decoded by Short at Fort Shafter, possibly due to lack of trained personnel or proper code keys, but was sent on to Washington, where it was suppressed for at least two, and possibly three, days. It could have reached the Army Signal Corps in Washington during the evening or night of December 4th, Washington time, since it was sent from Melbourne to Hawaii at about 11:00 A. M. on December 5th, Australian time, or December 4th, Washington time. According to the official Signal Corps report in Washington, however, the Merle-smith message was not received in Washington until 7:59 P. M. on December 7th.

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Commander Hiles has cogently pointed out that this alleged late arrival of the Merle-Smith cable in Washington is most probably a fraudulent evasion: "We are not dealing here with intercepts of Japanese messages but with regular service communications whereby such functions normaIly proceed promptly and in an orderly fashion. Encoded messages from military attaches in time of crisis such as this one do not lie around neglected unless for ulterior purposes of no honest portent or through gross negligence."
At any rate, nothing in the Merle-Smith message was sent back to Short after being decoded and read by the Signal Corps in Washington. Had it been sent back to Short in full immediately after it should have been received and processed, it could have produced a full alert at Hawaii on the early morning of the 5th, Washington time. It certainly could have been sent back to Short in time to produce an alert during the 5th, Washington time, and averted the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. When O'Dell was called to testify before the Army PearI Harbor Board, the government only presented a paraphrase of the original Merle-Smith message which arbitrarily changed some of the dates and modified the content in other places. For instance, it represented the defensive action of the Dutch and Australian planes as starting at 8:00 A. M. on the 7th, when this actually took place on December 5th, Australian time, or December 4th Washington time. Even the original copy of the Merle-Smith message in the Clarke Inquiry exhibits bears a phony date for the transmission of the message from Melbourne, giving it as December 6th when it should have been the 5th, AustraIian time, or the 4th Washington time.
The crucial and decisive news about the ominous movement of a Japanese convoy beyond the magic line established by the ABCD agreement and Rainbow 5 (Rainbow Plan A-2 to the Dutch in this instance) and the defensive action of the Australian and Dutch planes, which had been confided to Merle-Smith on the afternoon of the 4th and morning of the 5th, Australian time (3rd and 4th Washington time), definitely meant that Holland, Great Britain and the United States were now committed to war with Japan. The Far Eastern situation was in full conformity with the ABCD agreement and Rainbow 5 (A-2), as confirmed by the American "War Cabinet", made up of Roosevelt, Stimson, Hull, Knox, Marshall and Stark, at noon on November 28th.
The United States, Britain and the Dutch were already discussing the critical situation created by the obligations

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under ABD, ABCD and Rainbow 5 (A-2) and the southward movement of Japanese forces even before the Merle-Smith message could have reached Washington. At 5:30 P. M. on December 4th, Admiral Stark was advising London that the Dutch warning of the possibility of a Japanese attack against the Philippines and the Netherland East Indies could not be ruled out, and went on to say: "If Dutch authorities consider some warning should be given Japan CNO [Stark] believes that it should take the form of a declaration to Japan that in view of the current situation Japanese naval vessels or expeditionary forces crossing the Davao-Waigeo line would be considered hostile and would be attacked. Communicate these views to the Admiralty and Dutch Naval Command in London." In discussing this statement with Hull, Stark indicated that he had shown it to Roosevelt and the latter had approved it. If Washington had been directly and independently informed of the Australian-Dutch action on the afternoon of December 3rd or the 4th (Washington time) before the Merle-Smith message could have arrived there is no record of it.
The next move to activate the understanding and actions related to ABCD and Rainbow 5 came on the early evening of the 5th when Lord Halifax, the British ambassador in Washington, called on Secretary Hull at his apartment in the Carlton Hotel, and informed Hull, who had already been well primed by Stark's message to London on the 4th, that the British Foreign Office believed that the time had now come for the immediate cooperation of the British and Americans with the Dutch in defending the Far East against the Japanese movements in the southwest Pacific according to the ABCD agreement and Rainbow 5. Hull may have told Halifax that Stark's message to London, and also informing the Dutch, on the afternoon of the 4th, approved by Roosevelt, indicated that the latter agreed with Halifax. At any rate, Hull expressed his "appreciation" of Halifax's call and information, and Halifax left, apparently content. At least, he informed London that the United States would back up the implementation of the ABCD agreement and Rainbow 5 (A-2) by the Dutch and Australians with armed support.
London sent this critically important information to Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, commander of the British forces in the Far East, with headquarters in Singapore. Brooke-Popham forthwith informed Captain John H. Creighton, the American naval observer in Singapore, about the definitive message he had received from London that the United States was approving the Anglo-Dutch

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implementation of ABCD. Creighton immediately sent the information to Admiral Hart at Manila.
On December 6th, two messages from the American ambassador in London, John G. Winant, were received in Washington and were immediately put into the hands of Roosevelt and Hull. The first reached Roosevelt and Hull at 10:40 A.M.; and the second at 3:05 P.M. The first called attention to the Japanese violation of the magic line in the Far East and to the threat to the Dutch and British possessions and independent countries in the Southwest Pacific. The second gave further information about the menacing Japanese movements and stated that Britain was hard-pressed for time in getting information from the United States that was needed to be able to guarantee the protection of Thailand, which the Dutch had reported on December 3rd might by reached by the Japanese in sixty hours.
These two messages confirmed the information given by Halifax to Hull on the evening of the 5th to the effect that Britain regarded the situation in the Far East as activating the ABCD agreement for Anglo-American-Dutch cooperation in the Far East to repel Japan in that region. The conditions required for cooperation and war according to ABCD and Rainbow 5, and the decision of the Washington War Cabinet on November 28th had all been met by the Japanese movements.
The crucial agreement that war against Japan had now begun in the Far East was made in an all-important top secret conference at the White House on the afternoon of the 6th at which Roosevelt, Hull, Halifax and Robert G. Casey, the Australian Minister in Washington, were present. Halifax was apparently satisfied that Roosevelt was backing up Hull's response of the previous evening, for he at once informed the British Foreign Office to that effect. Indeed, there had never been any valid reason for imagining that Roosevelt would repudiate his agreements under ABCD and Rainbow 5, as much as he may have regretted having to enter a war before he had an attack on either one of the three "small vessels" or on Pearl Harbor. As was usual in such vital situations, Roosevelt kept no notes or official record of this crucially significant conference on the afternoon of the 6th.
Roosevelt had given Halifax and Casey this confirmation without in any way informing or consulting Congress. Although he approved the Anglo-Dutch-Australian imple-

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mentation of ABCD and Rainbow 5 that involved war in the Far East with full American participation, he informed Casey that he would postpone public announcement of this fact until Tuesday, December 9th, when he would officially warn Japan. Doubtless, this decision to delay was based on the hope that in the interval between Saturday and Tuesday he would get the desperately desired news of an attack on either one of the three "small vessels" or on Pearl Harbor. He would have preferred the former but he got the latter.
The first definite information given to an American representative in the Far East that Roosevelt had confirmed the participation of the United States in the war that was now under way after having been initiated by the Dutch implementation of ABCD and Rainbow 5 (A-2) on Wednesday, December 3rd, Washington time, came in the precise and conclusive statement of Air Marshal Brooke-Popham to Captain Creighton at Singapore to which reference has already been made. This contained London's confirmation that Roosevelt had approved the Dutch and British implementation of Rainbow 5. Captain Creighton sent this information to Admiral Hart from Singapore on December 6th, at which time Hart was being visited by Vice-Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, who had just been placed in command of all British naval forces in China. Hart showed the Creighton message to Phillips, who immediately departed to return to Singapore. As he left Hart's office, the latter told him that he would send the American destroyers then based on Borneo to aid Phillips and the British naval forces, thus confirming the agreement that the United States was at war in the Far East.
The importance of the Creighton statement, in establishing the case against Roosevelt in regard to the violation of his "sacred" promises to "American fathers and mothers" and his repudiation of the Democratic platform of 1940 by abandoning his assurance that this country would not enter war without an attack on American forces, is emphasized by the desperate effort made during the Joint Congressional Committee Investigation of Pearl Harbor in 1945-46 to blot out the validity, if not the very existence, of Creighton's crucial statement that he sent to Hart.
By this time Admiral Hart had retired from military service and was a U. S. Senator from Connecticut. When Senator Ferguson pressed him about the Brooke-Popham message before the JCC, he "passed the buck" and refused to discuss it, stating that Creighton, who was to follow him

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on the witness-stand, was the best qualified person to know the facts. Creighton was not present but he heard about Hart's statement, contacted Hart, and told him that he had no knowledge whatever that any such message as that from Brooke-Popham and allegedly forwarded by him to Hart had ever existed. Hart informed Creighton that he had the latter's own copy with him in a locked case and directed that Creighton should come at once to get it for his testimony the next day. Creighton did so and had it in his possession when he appeared the next day before the Joint Congressional Committee. He was compelled to produce it and admitted that it must be authentic because it bore his code signature and was signed in Singapore. When, even then, Creighton persisted in maintaining that he could not recall ever having sent such a message and, if he did, his statements therein were only a matter of hearsay, Senator Barkley, chairman of the JCC, came to Creighton's rescue and by devious rhetoric was able to dismiss this critically important message as nothing more than a rumor. It was emasculated and buried despite Ferguson's efforts, which were really not up to par on this occasion. Senator Brewster might have done much better.
There were a number of disillusioning collapses of integrity on the part of witnesses during the post-Pearl Harbor investigations but probably no other was as pathetic as that of Creighton. His behavior on the stand has been exposed and castigated by Beard and Morgenstern, although they and other fair-minded students of the affair have recognized the tremendous pressure that seems to have been exerted on Creighton to falsify his testimony, which may have been even greater and more intimidating than was evident on the surface at the time when he was testifying before the JCC. This had happened with other witnesses whose testimony departed impressively from the facts with which they were acquainted.
A friend of mine, who was very familiar with military Magic and messages and the post-Pearl Harbor investigations and was a personal friend of Creighton, has informed me that the latter was, at the time of his testimony before the JCC, already sadly afflicted with a serious tropical disease contracted at Singapore that had virtually ruined his memory. His health failed steadily and he died prematurely. Hence, it is possible that Creighton actually could not remember the message he had sent to Hart. In that case, his condition should have been recognized and he should not have been subjected to the ordeal of testifying. If this is not the explanation, then he was either obviously

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intimidated or was consciously trying to put on a show to muddle up the Brooke-Popham episode. Fortunately, it does not really matter for other corroborative evidence we now have enables us to complete the picture and the patterns.
While we are discussing testimony, it may be well to call attention to the nature of O'Dell's testimony before the Clarke Inquiry and the Army Pearl Harbor Board. O'Dell knew he was in on a big secret, had heard of the Pearl Harbor investigations, and wanted to get his story into the record. He had stirred up too much curiosity safely to be ignored. As it turned out, it would have been better for the Roosevelt record to have ignored him. The Clarke Inquiry had been designed solely to deal with the question of military Magic for General Marshall, and O'Dell was the only witness that Clarke called who did not have some relation with Magic, of which O'Dell knew nothing. But he could not prudently be ignored any longer and apparently Clarke thought he would let O'Dell testify and then leave his story to be buried in the record.
It is quite evident that Clarke and Gibson, his assistant, were nonplussed when O'Dell got started and poured forth like an opened floodgate, letting more cats out of the bag than any other witness in any of the post-Pearl Harbor investigations. He was one of the few witnesses who did not have to be prompted or have information wormed out of him; he could not get it out fast enough. It was vital information, spontaneously offered and with no punches pulled, and his testimony was dynamite for the defenders of the Administration. This is emphatically proved by the bogus three-day delay alleged by Washington in "receiving" the Merle-Smith message. Although it could have reached Washington by the evening of the 4th, Washington time, and must have arrived by the 5th, it has been represented as arriving at 7:58 P. M. on the 7th, hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
When the Army Pearl Harbor Board examined O'Dell later on the same day, they treated him far more cautiously, and produced only the partly falsified paraphrase of the Merle-Smith message and sought unsuccessfully to confuse O'Dell. The Joint Congressional Committee very carefully kept O'Dell from testifying at all, even in the light of the vital material he had revealed before Clarke and the APHB.
When, by the afternoon of December 6th, Roosevelt recognized that war in the Far East was under way beyond

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possible recall he decided to send to the Japanese Emperor his appeal for peace which had been discussed with Hull and others but left unsent for some time. He summoned his personal secretary and dictated the final revision of the message to the Emperor which he sent off to Hull to be dispatched to Hirohito. Both Roosevelt and Hull recognized and Hull openly admitted, that this was solely for the record". That his "record" was understandably much on Roosevelt's mind during the evening of the 6th is apparent from his remark to Harry Hopkins when Lieutenant Schulz brought him the first thirteen parts of the Japanese reply to Hull's ultimatum at about 9:30.
It is also highly probable that the report of the very relaxed condition of Roosevelt when he received the message brought by Schulz was also prepared for the "record". It is repeated by Farago, right on the heels of a crisp summary of how Roosevelt had a few hours before put this country into war, even if not attacked, in violation of his assurances to American fathers and mothers and the 1940 platform and campaign pledges. It is far more likely that Roosevelt's state of mind was more like that of Wellington who, when on the afternoon of June 18; 1815, Napoleon's army at the Battle of Waterloo seemed within reach of victory, looked nervously at his watch and, according to the legend, wished "for night or Blucher" (the Prussian general who was bringing decisive armed aid to Wellington.) On the evening of Decmeber 6, 1941, Roosevelt was longing for news of an attack on American forces on one of the three"small vessels" or at Pearl Harbor. These had now exhausted the only possibilities for a surprise Japanese attack on American forces or territory.
The material reviewed in this section makes all the more edifying and illuminating Roosevelt's remark about 9:30 on Saturday evening, after he read the first thirteen parts of the Japanese reply to Hull: "This means war!" Before 4:00 P.M. on the preceding afternoon, at the very latest, he must have learned that the Dutch had unleashed the fateful chain of events that had put this country into war on the previous Wednesday. His remark to Hopkins that: "We have a good record" does not look so "good" against the facts, implications and results of the Merle-Smith message. Roosevelt's sole responsibility for the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor may still be debated for years. There is little ground for valid debate in connection with the reality and results of the secret ABCD commitments to the Dutch and British under which he had placed this country and would

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surely have immediately brought us into active warfare with Japan even if Pearl Harbor had not been attacked.
While the attack on Pearl Harbor may have saved Roosevelt's political record at home, from the point of view of Japanese military interests it would certainly have been far better for the Japanese to have refrained from attacking Pearl Harbor. They would have gained much more from Roosevelt's desperate embarrassment end formidable handicaps in being involved in a war that started in the distant East Indies without any attack on American forces or territory or Congressional sanction than they did by sinking the battleships at Pearl Harbor and uniting the country behind Roosevelt's war effort. War started under such circumstances as the invocation of Rainbow 5 (A2) in behalf of the Antipodes could have provided a Roman holiday for the anti-interventionist forces in the United States led by America First.

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IX. ROOSEVELT LUCK!

On the face of it, President Roosevelt's daring gamble in providing a Japanese surprise attack on an unwarned Pearl Harbor appeared at the time to be a glorious success. Considering the magnitude of the political stakes in the game he was playing, the loss of a few strategically antique dreadnaughts and the death of three thousand men were trivial, indeed. Roosevelt's operations had enabled him to bring the United States into the war with a country strongly united behind him. That it turned out in this manner was only because of several strokes of almost incredibly good luck which could hardly been expected and which he did not deserve. But for these the surprise attack might well have proved the major military disaster in the history of the United States.
First of all, was the personality, policy and operations of Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who commanded the Japanese task force that made the attack. He was a member of the Japanese moderate party which wished to keep peace with the United States. He was a personal friend of Saburo Kurusu who had been sent to Washington in the autumn of 1941 to aid Ambassador Nomura for this purpose, and he opposed precipitating war with the United States. Moreover, as a matter of naval strategy, Nagumo never approved of Admiral Yamamoto's bold plan to attack Pearl Harbor,

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believing it far too risky and likely to end in disaster. Nevertheless, due to the rigorous Japanese seniority rule, he had to be placed in command of the task force assigned to attack Pearl Harbor although his record as a naval officer was not distinguished.
Nagumo was nervous and worried during the trip from the Kurile Islands to Hawaii. As soon as the successful attacks of the Japanese planes on Pearl Harbor on the morning of the 7th was reported to him, Nagumo ordered the task force to head back toward Japan. If Commander Minoru Genda, who had handled the strategic planning and details of the surprise attack, or Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, who directed the actual attack on the 7th, had been in command of the task force and attacked Pearl Harbor again on December 8th, the Pacific War might have been turned in favor of Japan in the course of the next few days, or even few hours. As the most favorable outcome for the United States, victory could have been postponed for several years, at great additional expense and appalling losses of war vessels and manpower.
The machine shops and other mechanical equipment, the army and navy supplies, and the large store of oil at Pearl Harbor were highly vulnerable to bombing. The oil was still above ground. The planes that remained available at Pearl Harbor after the attack on the morning of the 7th could have put up no decisive resistance to Japanese fighter planes and bombers. The anti-aircraft batteries were not sufficient to repel another Japanese bombing attack, although they might have inflicted more damage than was the case on the morning of the 7th. With the machine shops, military equipment and oil supplies destroyed, the heavy cruisers and carriers that had been sent on to Wake, Midway and Johnston Islands might have been rendered helpless as soon as their oil supply ran out and been captured by the Japanese unless they had been scuttled by their own commanders. The damaged or sunk ships at Pearl Harbor could not have been reconditioned.
Admiral Yamaguchi, commander of the second Japanese carrier division, announced that he was ready to send out fresh planes for a third attack even on the afternoon of the 7th, and those which had been used on the morning of the 7th could have been made ready for a better planned attack on the morning of the 8th. Yamaguchi, Genda and Fuchida begged Nagumo to remain and continue the destruction at Pearl Harbor, but Nagumo refused, and Yamamoto declined to intervene and compel Nagumo to remain and press the

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attack, which would surely and inevitably have destroyed Pearl Harbor for a year or two, at least, as our great Pacific naval base in the mid-Pacific. To have recaptured Hawaii from the Japanese or defeated Japan from the Western coast of the United States would have been a colossal, prolonged and expensive undertaking and would have seriously reduced or slowed down our effectiveness on the European front.
It has been said that the Japanese could have landed and taken over the Hawaiian Islands immediately after attacks on the 7th and 8th. This is not likely because the task force did not have any landing craft for an extensive occupation. But with the American heavy cruisers and the carriers rendered useless after their oil and gasoline ran out, the Japanese could certainly have returned with all the landing craft and other equipment needed and very possibly taken over the Hawaiian Islands before the United States could have provided successful resistance. To be sure, General Short had an excellently trained army of over 30,000 troops in Hawaii, but with their facilities, equipment end armament devastated by Japanese attacks on the afternoon of the 7th and the morning of the 8th, their effectiveness would have been greatly impaired. All of these possibilities were clearly foreseen in a panicky message sent by the top Washington military brass to the Pearl Harbor command on the morning of December 9th which is described below.
Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, who ultimately succeeded Admiral Kimmel and directed the naval warfare which delivered the decisive victories over the Japanese in the Pacific, agreed with Genda and Fuchida: "Future students of our naval war in the Pacific will inevitably conclude that the Japanese commander of the carrier task force missed a golden opportunity in restricting his attack on Pearl Harbor to one day's operations, and in the very limited choice of objectives." Hence, it is no exaggeration to maintain that it was Admiral Nagumo's timidity, hesitation and lack of strategic vision and courage which transformed Roosevelt's desperate gamble of goading the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor from a major national calamity into a great American strategic and political success for the moment.
Nagumo did have some relatively minor considerations to support his hesitation about remaining to renew the attack on the 7th and 8th. He knew that the carriers Enterprise and Lexington were somewhere between Wake and

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Pearl Harbor with their escorts of heavy cruisers, and he did not know when the carrier Saratoga might be returning from the West Coast. He feared they might all converge on his task force if he lingered to devastate Pearl Harbor and the Army installations. He needed more fuel to indulge in any prolonged further action. His worries were actually unjustified, for Kimmel, right after the attack, had ordered Halsey and Newton to take their station with the two carriers southeast of Wake to await Nagumo's return and launch an attack on all or a part of his task force, and the Saratoga was only just leaving the West Coast. Nagumo would have been safe in remaining until he destroyed the installations and equipment at Pearl Harbor on the 8th.
Even with the benefit of Nagumo's stubborn timidity, the naval war with Japan might not have turned out to be a string of naval victories if our naval cryptanalysts had not been able to break the Japanese Naval Code JN-25 for the late summer of 1940 [this date should read 1942—ed.]. Through Commander Rochefort and others it was then possible to supply Nimitz and other naval commanders with the Japanese naval battle plans before the major conflicts. This breaking of JN-25 and earlier Japanese naval codes was a long and slow process, the result of good organization and teamwork rather than the feat of any one genius in cryptanalysts. The work was started by Commanders Safford and Rochefort in 1923-1927 and not completed until late summer in 1940 [again, this date should read 1942—ed]. Further checking was, of course, constantly required to deal with minor changes in the code, new ciphers and the like.
This assertion of the indispensable services of Rochefort and his associates is well confirmed by our defeat at Savo in August, 1942, when our naval forces were commanded by Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner and met heavy losses, only escaping virtual annihilation because the Japanese commander did not recognize the seriousness of the losses he had inflicted. As a leading naval expert on the Pacific War, and himself a crucially important participant, wrote me: Savo was a more disgraceful defeat than Pearl Harbor, but whereas Kimmel, who was surprised in the bargain was dismissed in disgrace, Turner came through his disgraceful performance at Savo in a blaze of glory and was allowed to continue as head of amphibious operations." My informant did not add that Turner was saved from possible further disgrace later on mainly by the genius of Admiral Raymond A. Scruance our real expert in directing amphibious warfare. 10.
Even with the aid of Nagumo, Nimitz, Safford, Rochefort, and Spruance, Roosevelt's gamble might have been temporarily frustrated if he had not had aid from across the Atlantic and from, of all persons, Adolf Hitler, through the latter's idiotically precipitate declaration of war on the United States on the Thursday after Pearl Harbor. Japan had failed to support Hitler in 1939, and especially in the summer and autumn of 1941. Hence, he did not have the slightest moral reason for honoring his formal commitments to Japan in the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, but had every political and military reason for ignoring them. If he had been adroit and realistic, after the fashion of Churchill and Roosevelt, Hitler would have sent the American people a strong note of condolence over our losses as a result of the "treacherous Japanese surprise attack", and declared his firm neutrality in the forthcoming war between Japan and the United States. This would have seriously upset Roosevelt's intrigues with Churchill and their joint arrangements with Russia, as well as gravely hampering and delaying the prosecution of the war in both Europe and the Pacific.
Instead, in one of the most rash, ill-considered and fateful acts of his whole career, Hitler did not wait long enough even to discover the reactions of the American people to the Pearl Harbor attack, once the initial shock of our losses had worn off. He declared war on the Thursday after the Japanese attack on Sunday. This virtually destroyed the possibility of American anti-interventionists being able soon to demonstrate that the attack was due to Roosevelt's withholding warning information from Pearl Harbor. Of this the Intelligence and Communications operating groups in Washington were well aware at the time and might have leaked the information as a result of their indignation. Somebody, apparently, did leak this information to Dewey's headquarters in the autumn of 1944.
The directors of America First were actually debating about continuing operations when a rumor of Hitler's imminent decision on war arrived and frustrated this possible decision. Confirmation of this is contained in a letter written to me by the distinguished American industrialist and railroad magnate, Robert R. Young, on June 2, 1953. Young wished America First to continue even after Hitler's declaration of war:


I happened to be one of the three dissenting voices when the Directors of the America First Committee voted to disband on the Wednesday after Pearl 125 Harbor. I felt then and still feel that if the Committee could only have been kept going some of these people who will become national heroes could have been made to pay for their sins by their liberty or even by their lives. If the Republicans had not been equally corrupted they could have had the whole damned crowd in jail.

At any rate, Roosevelt's gamble paid off handsomely for the moment, within the pattern of his bellicose program. Whether it paid off in the long run for the benefit of the United States, the Far East, or the world, can best be left to those who are now assessing our domestic and political crises, the current political and military conditions in the Far East, our military budget, and the battle mortality of men and planes in Vietnam. The Korean War, the wars in the Middle East, the Vietnam War, and the bloody conflicts and confusion in Africa, as well as the communization of Eastern Europe and China and its threat to the Far East, all grew directly our of the second World War and, to a large extent, out of American participation in it.
It might be well to observe in conclusion that Admiral Nagumo may have had his share of good luck as a result of panic and misjudgment at Washington during the days immediately after Pearl Harbor, in which Roosevelt does not seem to have been involved, although Stimson, Marshall, Stark and Turner were.
Immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Kimmel ordered all the craft that could still move at Pearl Harbor to leave at once and join the heavy cruisers, destroyers and carriers that had previously been sent out to Wake and Midway under Halsey and Newton. Rochefort had informed Kimmel that Nagumo would probably deploy some of his task force to attack Wake on his return, and Kimmel ordered Halsey to take his station with the combined forces of the two carriers and heavy cruisers southeast of Wake and await the arrival of any of Nagumo's task force diverted to Wake.
There was a real possibility of surprising a considerable part of the Japanese task force on its way back to Japan and inflicting serious damage upon it. The total Japanese task force, of course, outnumbered anything the United States could muster at Wake at the time, except in the matter of heavy cruisers, in which we were much superior, but the element of complete surprise might have outweighed this disparity in armament in favor of the United States. Both 126 carriers, the Enterprise and the Lexington, had a complement of planes and plenty of fuel. Since it was unlikely that more than a portion of Nagumo's task force would be sent to Wake on the return trip, the American force gathered there might have equalled or surpassed the Japanese. It is doubtful if the American forces could have run down Nagumo's whole task force on the return trip for the latter would have had a considerable head start and had proved to be a fast-moving group of ships.
Admiral Nagumo did not have the slightest precise knowledge as to the actual location of any of the American warships except for those at Pearl Harbor at the time of the attack. But Commander Rochefort, who was in charge of the direction-finding and ship-location operations at Pearl Harbor, knew the location of the returning Japanese task force. He has assured me repeatedly, and no other authority dead or alive could be better informed on the matter, that he believes that the rallied and concentrated American naval force could have inflicted very serious injury on the returning Japanese task force if a substantial portion of it had been diverted to Wake. It might even have accomplished almost as much as was achieved at Midway in June, 1942, thus markedly shortening the time required to defeat Japan. We should recall that the most decisive damage done to the Japanese fleet, especially to their carriers, at the Battle of Midway was accomplished mainly by the planes from the carrier Enterprise, and the Japanese fleet moving on Midway in June, 1942, was vastly larger than Nagumo's task force that attacked Pearl Harbor. And it was the same Admiral Nagumo who was to lose the battle at Midway by his hesitation and lack of strategic genius, even when he was not surprised. It is likely that he would have proved even more imcompetent if he had been surprised and attacked by the American forces in early December, 1941.
All this was nullified by a panicky message sent out of Washington with top priority on the morning of the 9th by Stark and Turner, with the approval of Stimson and Marshall, indicating their belief that there was grave danger that the Hawaiian Islands could not be defended successfully against further expected Japanese raids, ordering that aggressive naval operations around Wake and Midway should be abandoned, and directing that all naval resources controlled by the Pearl Harbor command should be devoted to the defense of the Pearl Harbor area, pending the possible retirement of American forces to the Pacific coast. Washington authorities have sought to defend the panicky message 127 of the 9th by alleging that the Navy could not afford serious damage to or the loss of our two carriers, that the latter had never delivered a successful naval attack, and that the leadership for a carrier operation in war was as yet untested.
The receipt of this message on the 9th led Admiral W. S. Pye, who had replaced Kimmel, to call off the plan that Kimmel had ordered, thus possibly saving Nagumo from undetermined losses, which might have been decisive, and if so preventing the United States from having an early and glorious naval victory that would have more than offset the humiliation and naval losses in the Pearl Harbor attack and notably shortened the war in the Pacific.
This Washington panic relative to the Pearl Harbor situation, until it was evident that the Japanese task force was on its way home and there was no probability of any further immediate Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, was momentarily so extreme that even some persons of high rank in Washington envisaged an actual Japanese occupation of the west coast of the United States. The United States would then trade space for time and meet the advancing Japanese forces at the crest of the Rocky Mountains, with a final rampart around Denver. Stimson was one of those who were much alarmed and this may have suggested to him the cruel and precipitate action in moving the Japanese off the Pacific coast for which he was mainly responsible.
That Roosevelt was not involved in sending this panicky message of the 9th seems to be proved by the fact that both Secretary Knox and Admiral Beatty, who was Knox's aide and accompanied Knox on his trip to Pearl Harbor right after the attack, assert that Roosevelt was more disappointed by the cancelling of Kimmel's plan for operations against Nagumo than he was by the losses at Pearl Harbor. This, of course, raises the question of why Roosevelt did not countermand Pye's order.

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X. THE FINAL QUESTION

We may well close the discussion of Pearl Harbor with reference to some basic considerations that relate to the historiography of the subject, The critics of the revisionist historians dealing with Pearl Harbor have violently criticized the latter for placing the responsibility for the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor overwhelmingly on Roosevelt, They reveal thereby a strange lapse of logic. Actually,

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Roosevelt's success in producing a surprise attack was an immensely, even uniquely, adroit achievement in piloting an overwhelmingly pacifically-inclined country into the most extensive and destructive war of history without any threat to our safety through aggressive action from abroad.
These selfsame anti-revisionist critics, who so heatedly denounce Revisionists for revealing and underlining Roosevelt's responsibility, are the very ones who also vehemently contend that, as a fundamental moral imperative, we simply had to enter the second World War to preserve our national self-respect and promote the safety and preserve the civilized operations of the human race. Hence, Roosevelt's success in putting us into this war should appear to them to be greatly to his credit as a statesman--"a good officer", as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. has described him in this connection. Elementary logic would make it seem clear that the anti-revisionist writers should be grateful to Revisionists for having demonstrated Roosevelt's responsibility for this great and benign achievement far more definitively and clearly than the anti-revisionists have ever done. By denying his responsibility for what is to interventionists a superlative act of humanitarian statesmanship the anti-revisionists are depriving him of the credit due him for his allegedly comprehensive services to mankind.
Two historians, Professor Thomas A. Bailey of Leland Stanford University and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. of Harvard, were very early logical in this matter. They admitted decades back that Roosevelt lied us into war, but contend that he did so for the good of our country, which was not wise enough to know what was for its best interests at the time. At the Republican convention of 1944, Clare Boothe Luce called attention to Roosevelt's lying the United States into war, but with a somewhat more cynical and sardonic leitmotif. A complete and frank treatment of the matter is provided by T. R. Fehrenbach in his F. D. R.'s Undeclared War (1967).
If political deception was required to save the human race in 1941, then it was fortunate that Roosevelt was at the helm in the White House at this moment and a superb virtuoso in public mendacity (the "credibility gap" ) was thus directing the destiny of mankind. An eminent American general, and a personal friend of mine, sent me this reminiscence:

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The day that F, D. R. died, I drove General MacArthur home. We talked of those who had disappeared from the scene since the war started, especially of F. D. R. As MacArthur got out of the car, he turned to me and said: "Well, the Old Man has gone; a man who never told the truth when a lie would suffice!"

It may be conceded that MacArthur's appraisal of Roosevelt's veracity is possibly a bit exaggerated, but it is certainly an understatement to observe that the material presented in this article makes it clear that the "credibility gap" in the White House did not begin with Lyndon Johnson and his Vietnam War. Moreover, those who believe that it was indispensable for the welfare of humanity for the United States to enter World War II, should not speak too unkindly of the "credibility gap". According to their own assumptions, it was the sole means of saving the human race from September, 1939, to December, 1941. At least one interventionist historian has possessed the logic and honesty to agree with my contentions. Writing in the Chicago Tribune of December 20, 1967, Professor John H. Collins of Northern Illinois University, summarizes the situation more competently than any other statement that I have read:

Prof. Harry Elmer Barnes . . . has produced a detailed account of the events leading up to Pearl Harbor (as reported in The Tribune Dec, 7), using documents generally unknown to the public. And what does it all come to?
That Roosevelt, while hypocritically pretending to desire peace, was actually provoking, or rather plotting, a Japanese attack, and that Roosevelt was driving for war against the Axis from 1939 on, and never meant his "again and again" statement of the campaign of 1940,
I say Barnes is bringing a microscope to show us an elephant. If there were naive souls in 1940 who did not know that Roosevelt was for war, and was pulling every wire known to political manipulation to get war, their simplicity cannot now be set right by any documentary proof.
As to Pearl Harbor, it was what Roosevelt had been hoping for. If he was very pious, it was what he had been praying for. If there had been any incantation that could have summoned it up out of a witches' caldron, he would have been boiling newts'
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heads and snakes' eyes in the White House kitchen. But wherefore all the moral indignation? It was Roosevelt's highest duty to get the United States into the war by whatever means would achieve that result. Because the American people were so stupid, ignorant, and complacent as to believe in ignoble ease and complacent sloth, Roosevelt was compelled to lie, bamboozle, and scheme behind a facade of pacifism.
He had the courage to disregard morality to save the country, and his Machiavellian policy should be given its proper meed of historical praise.


Whether our entry into the second World War was for the good of America and the world will be debated for a long time, and how it is settled should depend on the ultimate verdict as to whether the world and the United States did benefit from our entry. The opposing viewpoints are still as sharply drawn and vigorously stated today as at the time of Pearl Harbor. In an article in the New York Times of August 21, 1966, Professor A. J. P. Taylor, the popular British historian, contended that:

There was, in my opinion, one statesman of superlative gifts and vision between the wars. This was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is likely to appear to posterity as the greatest man of his age.

The opposing view was set forth vividly and with more factual support in a private letter to me by Henry Beston, one of the most learned and cultivated American scholars, literary critics, and publicists of this century:

Roosevelt was probably the most destructive man who ever lived. He left the civilized West in ruins, the entire East a chaos of bullets and murder, and our own nation facing for the first time an enemy whose attack may be mortal. And, to crown the summit of such fatal iniquity, he left us a world that can no longer be put together in terms of any moral principle.

As a realistic appraisal of the second World War, I know of nothing better than the following comments of the distinguished journalist, author and critic, Malcolm Muggeridge, in Esquire, February, 1968:

In all the immense literature about the 1939-1945 war, one may observe a legend in process
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of being shaped. Gradually, authentic memories of the war--of its boredom, its futility, the sense it gave of being part of a process of inevitable decomposition--fade in favor of the legendary version, embodied in Churchill's rhetoric and all the other narratives by field marshals, air marshals and admirals, creating the same impression of a titanic and forever memorable struggle in defense of civilization. In fact, of course, the war's ostensible aims--the defense of a defunct Empire, a spent Revolution, and bogus Freedoms--were meaningless in the context of the times. They will probably rate in the end no more than a footnote on the last page of the last chapter of the story of our civilization.

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