Reply to Admiral Richardson, Regarding the Events Surrounding the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941

Admiral Richardson distorts both the events surrounding the attack on Pearl Harbor and what I have written about them. Far from being “preoccupied with blame-fixing,” I wrote that Adm. Husband Kimmel and Gen. Walter Short, the Navy and Army commanders at Pearl Harbor “were dedicated, patriotic men who served their country to the best of their ability and should not be singled out for censure,” and that “I, for one, would have nothing against restoring them to their full ranks…”

My objection was and is to a congressional resolution that not only urged the President to exculpate both men, but which added that they “were not provided necessary and critical intelligence…that would have alerted them to prepare for the attack.” I believe this to be simply wrong. Worse, it was disingenuous—a way to slip the main crux of a conspiracy theory past unwitting congressmen, and into the historical record. Adm. Richardson claims that this supposed plot is “peripheral to my objectives”—then proceeds to perpetuate the myth of a conspiracy with various, dark insinuations.

As I wrote, there is plenty of blame to go around for what happened at Pearl Harbor. There was additional information that the Washington high command could and should have shared with the commanders at Pearl. The base was undermanned, and our general lack of military preparedness at the time was, as I termed it, “unforgivable.”

Yet I cannot agree that Kimmel and Short should be absolved of all command responsibility—or that they were deprived of information that could have made any meaningful difference in the battle. On the face of it, I find the contention preposterous that an American military base could not be defended from an enemy that had to travel over three thousand miles to attack it.

In response, Adm. Richardson seems to be arguing along two, contradictory tracks. On the one hand, he claims that Pearl Harbor did not have the aircraft available to make an effective reconnaissance of the waters around Hawaii. Fine. If the commanders at Pearl did not have the tools to do the job, what was the “necessary and critical intelligence” they were lacking? The problem is then one of preparedness, not intelligence—or conspiracy.

Were Kimmel and Short actually unable to make any effective reconnaissance by air? Certainly they could have benefited from more—and more modern—planes. Yet Gordon Prange, in At Dawn We Slept, cited several occasions during war crises earlier in 1941, when both services instituted more extensive surveillance. He concluded, “Obviously, Kimmel and Short could go all out when they believed the situation justified; therefore, it is difficult to understand why they did not take similar action upon receipt of the war warning [of November 27, 1941].”

Above all, Prange chided the commanders for failing to make any attempt to cover the northwest sector of the approach to Hawaii. He quoted the judgement of Rear Admiral Patrick Bellinger that this area “was considered the most vital…because the prevailing winds were from the northeast, and enemy carriers could thus recover their planes while retiring from the Oahu area.” The northwest sector was also the most empty approach to Hawaii—and thus the one through which any attacking force would have the best chance to surprise the base.

Yes, as Adm, Richardson points out, the planes in question were not equipped with radar, and they could not have conducted a constant, efficient search of the area for an idefinite period. Yet it was still possible to make visual sightings of ships, even out in the middle of the Pacific; the battle of Midway turned on one such lucky sighting.

Nor does any of this explain why nearly all our aircraft were caught largely on the ground, without their ammunition readily available. To argue, as Adm. Richardson does, that Washington was also more worried about sabotage than surprise attack at Pearl, is to say only that Kimmel and Short compounded the errors of their superiors. Gen. Short, in this regard, seems to have been much more influenced by his distrust of the local Asian population, than he was by the lack of timely intelligence from Washington.

We must also exam what surveillance was being conducted by Pearl’s defenders on the morning of December 7. Pearl Harbor’s planes did not have radar, but its ground defenders did. They even picked up the first wave of Japanese planes as it flew in toward Honolulu. Unfortunately, the Army team assigned to work the radar reported its findings—and were told by their superior officer that the attackers must be a (much smaller) number of American planes, due in that morning, and that they should fold up their equipment and come down to breakfast.

Defenders of Gen. Short have argued that radar was a new weapon that was not yet fully understood. But the men operating it had certainly ascertained that it picked up incoming planes. Was it to be only used for announced incoming planes? In fact, Gen. Short had been given a powerful new surveillance capability that he did not adequately inform himself about, and handed over to officers who were insufficiently trained or derelict in their duty. If this is not a failure of command responsibility, I do not know what is.

Then there is the issue of the midget submarine attacks on the morning of December 7. This is a more understandable failure of Pearl’s defenses. But the fact is that when Japanese midget submarines were spotted and fired upon by U.S. ships just outside the harbor, and this was promptly reported to Adm. Kimmel, his only response was to tell his staff to “keep him informed.” This despite the fact that the only way in which Kimmel actually feared the Japanese would assault Pearl was through submarine attacks.

Then there is Adm. Richardson’s second track. Despite his contention that the defenses of Pearl were fatally underequipped, the admiral insists that further warnings from Washington might have made a real difference, particularly when it came to our extended negotiations with the Empire of Japan. He claims that “it is a basic right of a combat force commander to receive ‘and be free to act upon’ late breaking information.”

Far from being a “right,” such a situation would probably make most urgent diplomacy all but untenable. As it was, the commanders at Pearl Harbor had been warned repeatedly by Washington, throughout the fall of 1941, that war with Japan appeared to be imminent. These warnings included the November 27 message that began, “This despatch is to be considered a war warning,” and ending by ordering Adm. Kimmel to “execute appropriate defensive deployment…”

Was this sufficient? Adm. Kimmel’s commander of submarines at the time, Rear Admiral Thomas Withers, later told a Navy court of inquiry that, on being shown the dispatch, he told Kimmel, “I think it means war.”

It is true that most of the warnings that fall emphasized the likelihood of Japanese actions in the South Seas, including the Philippines. That is, after all, where most of the American military establishment, including Kimmel and Short, expected the first blow to fall, based on what they could trace of Japanese ship and troop movements, and considering Japan’s main objectives. It is also true that Washington generally warned area commanders against firing the first shot. This was due in general to the fact that we were a peace-loving democracy that respected the rule of international law, and in particular because we were loathe to fight a war in the Pacific at that time. If this denied Kimmel and Short the “preemptive attack” Adm. Richardson mentions, well, such is the glorious burden under which all of our servicemen labor.

It did not mean that Washington would object to the forces at Pearl Harbor firing on a Japanese task force that was about to attack it, and these instructions did not significantly alter their behavior. As Adm. Kimmel himself later testified at the same Navy court of inquiry, “…if we had sighted anything 700 miles from Oahu, I think I would have found some means to handle the situation, insofar as the forces I had available would have permitted me.”

Adm. Richardson refers to several other warnings that he claims the commanders at Pearl were not given. The first of these is known as the “bomb plot” warning. It was a message sent from the Japanese Foreign Ministry to the Japanese consulate in Honolulu, ordering that the consulate divide the waters of Pearl Harbor into a grid, and report on all ship movements within the grid blocks. It read as follows:

“With regard to warships and aircraft carriers, we would like to have you report on those at anchor (these are not so important), tied up at wharves, buoys and in docks. (Designate types and classes briefly. If possible we would like to have you make mention of the fact when there are two or more vessels along side the same wharf.)”

The message was sent on September 24, 1941, intercepted, and translated by U.S. Army intelligence on October 9. It never did get to Kimmel and Short. Of the many individuals who testified before both services’ boards of inquiry, some did not recall seeing the intercept, a few thought that Pearl Harbor had the capacity to translate all such intercepts itself—and most had simply considered the message itself a small but inconsequential refinement of ongoing Japanese espionage in Hawaii.

The general interpretation of the message was that the Japanese were most interested in seeing what American ships sortied, and how fast, in order to get a heads-up if the American fleet left Pearl Harbor. Others thought the Japanese were planning submarine attacks. Whatever they thought, it is useful to note that not one of the men questioned on this stated or implied that they had been ordered to withhold the information from Pearl Harbor by a superior.

Of course, the “bomb plot” message should have been forwarded to Pearl Harbor, and both Short and Kimmel were understandably bitter about not receiving it. Yet it is not at all clear that it would have made a difference—in light of their inaction after the warnings they did receive.

The same can be said for the “east wind, rain,” message that Adm. Richardson mentions—one of the most notorious bits of conspiracy theory lore. On November 29, 1941, the Japanese Foreign Ministry sent out a message informing Adm. Nomura, its ambassador in Washington, that in case diplomatic relations were about to be terminated—and if communications were cut off—one of a series of messages would be added to the middle of the daily, Japanese-language, short-wave radio broadcast. These messages were:

1) For Japanese-US relations: “East wind rain.”
2) For Japanese-Soviet relations: “North wind cloudy.”
3) For Japanese-British relations: “West wind clear.”

These codes were to be uttered at the middle and the end of each forecast, and to be repeated twice. Consulates and ministries around the world were to respond by burning their codes and other papers. Washington took this directive to heart upon intercepting it, and immediately assigned four language officers to monitor all relevant broadcasts from Tokyo around the clock.

Commander Laurence Safford did tell both a Navy 1944 board of inquiry and a 1945 Congressional investigation that an “east wind rain” message had indeed been received. Yet to the best of my knowledge, receipt of this message has never been “thoroughly corroborated,” as Adm. Richardson claims, and certainly not for December 5, 1941, or any other specific date.

At the time, no other officer could recall ever picking up such a message. Nor could Safford remember much of anything about when he had heard “east wind, rain,” or how his superiors had reacted when he had told them about it. Other listeners testified that there had been a number of false alarms—but none remembered intercepting anything like “east wind rain.”

And why would they? After all, communications between Japan’s foreign ministry and its diplomats in the U.S. were never terminated until after the attack on Pearl Harbor. There was no need to send such a message—and there is no credible evidence that Japan ever did.

But let us assume for the sake of argument that Adm. Richardson is right—that the “east wind, rain” message was received on December 5, 1941, and that every officer who saw it, save for Commander Safford, either lied about it to both a Navy board and the U.S. Congress, or somehow forgot. Would receiving this information have made any difference to Kimmel and Short?

On December 3, 1941, Kimmel was informed by his chief intelligence officer, Lt. Commander Edward T. Layton, that Japanese embassies and consulates around the world were destroying their code machines. This was never denied by Kimmel—who in fact later testified that he did not find the widespread destruction of the Japanese codes to be “of any vital importance…” [my italics]

Instead, Adm. Kimmel went on to say that “Japan would naturally take precautions to prevent the compromise of her communication system in the event that her action in southeast Asia caused Britain and the United States to declare war, and take over her diplomatic residences.” [again, my italics]

This testimony provides an invaluable window to Kimmel’s mindset on the eve of the war. Like everyone else he was convinced that any war would start in Southeast Asia. Even more important, he found nothing significant in the Japanese destroying their code machines. Thus, Adm. Richardson wants us to believe that Kimmel would have been alarmed by an order to Japanese consulates and embassies around the world to burn their codes and code machines—when in fact, Kimmel was not alarmed by a report from his own intelligence officer that the Japanese were doing just that.

Nor was Kimmel alone in his complacence. On December 6, 1941, Gen. Short was advised by his assistant intelligence officer, Lt. Col. George Bicknell, that the Japanese consulate in Hawaii was burning its papers—something he felt was “very significant, in view of the present situation.” Short later admitted that he did not consider this “a matter of importance.”

Finally, Adm. Richardson refers to the famous, 14-point, final Japanese reply to the latest U.S. proposals. The first 13 parts of these were intercepted by U.S. codebreakers, before they could be officially presented to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. They were translated and delivered to the White House by sometime after 9 PM, on the night of December 6. There is no credible account of President Roosevelt of telling his family or anyone else that the U.S. would definitely be at war the next day, but never mind. FDR clearly indicated to Harry Hopkins that he expected war in the Pacific. Yet he still did not believe it to be absolutely inevitable—that very day, he had fired off an eloquent, personal appeal to Emperor Hirohito, in a last-ditch attempt to preserve the peace. And there is no record that Roosevelt indicated in any way that he thought war would come first to Pearl Harbor.

Moreover, the Japanese note was not a declaration of war. Not even the 14th part—which was not intercepted and decoded until sometime between 8:30-9 AM, December 7, Washington time, or between 3-3:30, Hawaiian time. In fact, the Japanese note did not even break diplomatic relations, it merely broke off negotiations.

Around the same time, early on the morning of December 7, another Japanese message was intercepted, which read, “Will the Ambassador please submit to the United States Government (if possible to the Secretary of State) our reply to the United States at 1:00 P.M. on the 7th, your time.”

This specified time immediately raised all sorts of suspicions among both Army and Navy intelligence officers, and they scrambled to get copies of it to Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, and the Navy Chief, Harold Stark. This took a little time on a Sunday morning, but the messages were passed on. Thereafter followed a well-documented fiasco, in which atmospheric conditions blocked the sending of the Army’s message directly to Hawaii. The communications officer in charge decided to send the message by Western Union, and it arrived only after the attack was already in progress.

Was this, then, the necessary and critical piece of information withheld from Pearl, albeit only by accident? It’s plausible enough—until one considers that at approximately the very time the Army was trying to send its message—6:30 AM, Hawaiian time—U.S. ships were busy engaging and sinking a Japanese sub just outside Pearl Harbor. Thus we are supposed to believe that Kimmel would have been jolted into action by word that negotiations had broken off—when he was not especially alarmed by the actual start of the Japanese attack.

It is in discussing the failure to pass on this final warning that Adm. Richardson again veers into the territory of conspiracy theorizing. He writes that, “In some way not recorded, the administration made the decision not to notify Hawaii for fear Kimmel would sortie the fleet.” This was not recorded because it did not happen.

For evidence, Adm. Richardson claims that Adm. Stark’s “briefer” urged him to call the Adm. Kimmel after receiving the 14th part of the Japanese message. At the time, Stark was conferring with Commander Arthur H. McCollum, and Commander Theodore S. Wilkinson. Both men testified before Congress and the Navy court, and neither claimed that they urged Stark to call Hawaii. Cmdr. Wilkinson specifically told Congress that “It never occurred” to him that “it would be appropriate or advisable” to warn Pearl Harbor, chiefly because he thought “that an approaching force would be detected before it could get into attack range.”

Nor is there any record that Adm. Stark tried—as Adm. Richardson writes—to call President Roosevelt, but was not put through. This does not even make any sense as part of a conspiracy. Why would Roosevelt refuse even to speak to his co-conspirator—and Navy chief of staff—without knowing what he had to say? What if something had gone wrong with their supposed conspiracy?

Far from being locked away, incommunicado, in the White House, Roosevelt spent the time in question in the presence of, first, his own naval aide, Rear Admiral John R. Beardall, then his physician, Rear Admiral Ross T. McIntire, and finally the Chinese ambassador to the United States. Adm. McIntire later recalled that FDR was “deeply concerned” over negotiations with Japan, but was convinced that “Japan’s military masters would not risk a war with the United States.” He reported Roosevelt’s conviction that if the Japanese struck anywhere in the Far East, it would be against Singapore or some other British possession; “an attack on any American possession did not enter his thought.”

Adm. Stark did call Gen. Marshall, at 11:25 AM on December 7, and apparently talked over with him whether he should send a new warning out to Navy bases everywhere. He thought that “we had sent them so much already” that he “hesitated to send more.” In the end, he decided to let Marshall send out the warnings, with instructions that the Army pass them on to their Navy counterparts.

Adm. Richardson also makes much of Stark’s and Marshall’s “unbelievable claims that they couldn’t remember where they were that night of the 6th.” He neglects to mention that both men were first asked about their whereabouts in the summer of 1944—nearly three years later, and still in the midst of a war in which both men had staggering, daily responsibilities. Several witnesses put Stark at a play in Washington that night—one he did remember seeing, if not necessarily that night. Marshall could not swear to where he had been, but Army records showed that someone was in his quarters to answer the phone, at least. These were some conspirators—able to engineer a war, but so unsure about their alibis three years later, even with copious records and witnesses to back them up.

Ultimately, most conspiracy theories fall apart over their own, internal logic. The supposed Pearl Harbor plots are no exception. If FDR was in fact colluding with Marshall and Stark, why, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, would he angrily demote Stark and pack him off to a lesser job in Europe, while honoring Marshall with a position of supreme importance? Why would dozens—if not hundreds—of American Navy and Army officers lie repeatedly about a conspiracy, even after the war was over?

If FDR and his alleged co-conspirators really wanted the garrison at Pearl to be caught so completely by surprise, why would they send on the numerous war warnings they did? If they wished to use Pearl Harbor to bring the U.S. into the Second World War—the usual motive, according to the conspiracists—why not give the base a last-minute warning? This would not only have achieved the same goal, but might also have saved some American men and ships—and made their commander-in-chief look much better.

Roosevelt was undoubtedly eager to have the United States enter the war in Europe against the Nazi regime. But if anything, our involvement in a war in the Pacific would have only made the American people and the Congress less likely to fight in Europe. Germany was allied with Japan through the Tripartite “Axis” Pact, but Hitler had been known to violate the occasional treaty before. In any case the Tripartite Pact was only a defensive treaty, calling on the signees to assist each other in the event that they were attacked.

Hitler was under no obligation to declare war on the U.S. as he did, on December 11, 1941; this was a lucky break. Indeed, as one reader wrote in, there is nothing that would have stopped Hitler—displaying the same sort of diplomatic creativity he did in his earlier pact with the Soviet Union—from announcing his sympathies with the United States and declaring war on Japan.

Adm. Richardson quotes my assertion that any last-minute warning to Pearl Harbor would have caught the Japanese fleet “flatfooted.” He interprets this as a claim that the U.S. would necessarily have won the resulting battle. No. The result of any such engagement between the Japanese task force and an alerted Pearl Harbor is, of course, unknowable. By “flatfooted,” I mean that any Japanese fleet discovered in such a place, at such a time, would have been exposed as the aggressor it was.

Perhaps “redhanded” would have been a better word, but in any case the whole question of Japan’s aggression leads us to some of Adm. Richardson’s more disturbing allegations. According to his mysterious Capt. Smedburg—a low-level naval aide somehow privy to the highest councils of state—Adm. Stark and Gen. Marshall went to see the President shortly before Pearl Harbor, and “told Roosevelt that under no circumstances could the United States accept a war in the near future.”

This must have been a remarkable interview. War was clearly imminent by this time, in the Pacific or in Europe, and for Marshall or Stark to have said that the United States could not “accept” it would have been ludicrous. Clearly, whether or not war came was no longer in our control.

Or was it? Like many conspiracy theorists, Adm. Richardson implies that the war in the Pacific was something that we thrust upon the Japanese Empire. He refers to the “virtual ultimatum” we handed to Japan on November 26, 1941, and suggests that some nefarious influence was used on both Roosevelt and Hull to make this ultimatum as stringent as possible.

In fact, our note of November 26 was not an “ultimatum.” It contained no threat of war. All it said was that we would continue our embargo of war materiels against Japan, unless it ceased its policy of conquest in East Asia, recognized Chiang Kai-Shek’s Chinese government, and terminated its odious pact with Hitler and Mussolini. This position was widely supported by Americans across the political spectrum—appalled as they were by the atrocities the Japanese Empire had already committed in waging almost continuous war against its Asian neighbors between 1931-41.

Nor did this note come out of thin air. The U.S. had proposed much more lenient terms to contain hostilities in the Far East. Then, on the morning of the 26th, President Roosevelt learned that the Japanese, while supposedly in the middle of serious negotiations, were surreptitiously moving five divisions toward Southeast Asia, and the bases and colonies the U.S., Britain, and the Netherlands held there. On hearing of the troop movement, Secretary of War Henry Stimson recorded, Roosevelt “fairly blew up, jumped up into the air, so to speak.”

Negotiations between Japan and the United States in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor were often characterized by mistrust, misunderstandings, and miscommunications that sometimes bordered on the comic. Yet throughout, the policy of the Roosevelt administration was clearly to try to keep Japan quiescent in the East through an alternating, carrot-and-stick approach of negotiations and embargoes.

That this policy was unsuccessful is certainly beyond question, but neither the embargo nor any other U.S. action made war inevitable. The brutal, military clique that controlled Japan in 1941 had convinced itself that the nation could not survive unless it conquered Manchuria, vast chunks of China, Indo-china, Burma, Thailand, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, most of the Pacific Ocean, and—presumably after that—India, Australia, and New Zealand. In short, about a good half of the physical world. Such a policy was bound to bring grief upon the Japanese people, no matter what the United States did.

To suggest that we had no right to apply sanctions against a ruthless, paranoid dictatorship is to abridge our rights as a sovereign nation. It is also the sort of thinking that has been characterized as “Blame America first.”

Adm. Richardson writes that when he is asked who to blame for the disaster at Pearl Harbor, he replies, “The Japanese.” I agree. Yet the admiral, like so many other conspiracy theorists, goes on to find other, American culprits. I do not consider his allegations to be credible, and I would not have bothered to reply to them at such length—save that I fear such mania is destroying our national sense of reality. Recently, the Fox television network ran a documentary “exploring” whether or not the first moon landing really took place. An otherwise reputable publisher put out a book a few years ago, claiming that General Eisenhower purposely starved hundreds of thousands of German prisoners to death in 1945. Millions of Americans now firmly believe in the most outlandish conspiracies concerning space aliens, devil-worshippers, child molesters, and every major assassination in our history.

In order to continue as a mature and rational people—in order to continue as a democracy—we cannot continue to believe that our destiny, that our every course of action, is controlled by dark and mysterious forces beyond our control. This sort of fantasizing promises us enlightenment, but in fact it will bring us only apathy, paralysis, and submission.

 

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