by Craig Nelson
The committee took special notice of the missed communications between Washington and Oahu, especially the point that, while everyone at Navy in DC apparently knew that Tokyo’s cables to its consulates to destroy their codebooks meant war was imminent, Kimmel and his intelligence officer, Captain Edwin Layton, did not comprehend this. Congress recommended, “Supervisory officials cannot safely take anything for granted in the alerting of subordinates,” and went on to describe this key failure: “Admiral Kimmel was ordered to execute an appropriate defensive deployment. Everyone in Washington in testifying before the committee seems reasonably certain as to just what this meant; Admiral Kimmel did not feel that it required his doing anything greatly beyond what he had already done, even though he knew that Washington knew what he had previously done. In using the words ‘this dispatch is to be considered a war warning’ everyone in Washington felt the commander in chief would be sharply, incisively, and emphatically warned of war; Admiral Kimmel said he had construed all the messages he had received previously as war warnings. Everyone in Washington felt that upon advising Hawaii the Japanese were destroying their codes it would be understood as meaning ‘war in any man’s language’; Admiral Kimmel said that he did not consider this intelligence of any vital importance when he received it.”
Though this section of the public record paints Kimmel as somewhat dim, Washington did not escape criticism: “The committee feels that the practice, indulged by the Navy, of sending to several commanders an identical dispatch for action, even though the addressees may be located in decidedly different situations, is distinctly dangerous. In the preparation of messages to outposts the dispatch to a particular officer should be applicable to his peculiar situation. . . . It is believed that brevity of messages was carried to the point of being a fetish rather than a virtue. . . . The Magic intelligence was preeminently important and the necessity for keeping it confidential cannot be overemphasized. However, so closely held and top secret was this intelligence that it appears the fact the Japanese codes had been broken was regarded as of more importance than the information obtained from decoded traffic. The result of this rather specious premise was to leave large numbers of policy-making and enforcement officials in Washington completely oblivious of the most pertinent information concerning Japan.”
Kimmel and Short’s work together, meanwhile, was judged “the epitome of worthy plans and purposes which were never implemented. . . . They played golf together, they dined together—but they did not get together on official business . . . to effect coordination and integration of their efforts. . . . The people are entitled to expect greater vigilance and alertness from their Army and Navy—whether in war or in peace.” The committee also concluded that both Kimmel and Layton had difficulty in admitting their mistakes.
Federal investigations into Pearl Harbor were not done. On June 13, 1944, a Joint Resolution of Congress instructed the secretaries of war and navy to investigate Pearl Harbor and initiate courts-martial. On August 29, 1945, Navy Secretary James Forrestal revealed the findings of Admiral Kent Hewitt’s further inquiries. Hewitt determined that Kimmel and Stark “particularly during the period 27 November to 7 December, 1941, failed to demonstrate the superior judgment necessary to exercising command commensurate with their rank and assigned duties.” After spending two years interviewing over one hundred servicemen and civilians for an eight-hundred-page report to Henry Stimson, Henry Christian Clausen of the Judge Advocate General’s Department, a civilian Washington lawyer who’d made his bones with the Truman Commission’s investigation into military fraud, decided that the United States had suffered an intelligence failure. Using the example of Lieutenant Colonel Kendall Fielder, Clausen found that the chief of army intelligence for Hawaii had no training in the field, was not cleared for top-secret information, and was appreciated by Walter Short more for his skills at golfing and magic shows than for anything he accomplished as an officer. Clausen learned that whenever General Short was busy and needed someone to escort his wife to her many social events, the man chosen was a good dancer—Kendall Fielder. “There was no relevant intelligence communications between Layton and Fielder, or between Kimmel and Short,” Clausen determined. “The Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor had wanted to have everything its own way. It wanted to control intelligence information, and it did not share the information with Short’s command, yet it wanted the Army to protect the fleet at Pearl Harbor. . . . All the testimony . . . points to the conclusion that Kimmel was merely following the Naval practice of hoarding secret intelligence and using it for his own purposes. This does not excuse Kimmel for what he did. But, for the first time, it explains why he did it.”
Clausen’s other findings led to the Joint Congressional Committee’s recommendation “that immediate action be taken to assure that unity of command is imposed at all joint military and naval outputs.” Though this would lead to the merging of the navy and army under the Department of Defense, no actual unity of command would occur until 1991’s Operation Desert Storm, which, as of this writing, remains one of the Pentagon’s more significant post–World War II victories.
• • •
Pearl Harbor’s aftermath, which continues to this day, often reads like a history of finger-pointing, beginning with Congress’s joint committee, which spent little effort at attempting to understand what the Japanese did to succeed compared to the great effort it spent investigating which American deserved blame. Republicans blamed Democrats, Hawaii blamed Washington, admirals blamed other admirals, the navy blamed the army, and intelligence blamed command.
Rear Admiral Robert “Fuzzy” Theobald, who had commanded destroyers in December 1941 and who had offered to act as counsel for Husband Kimmel during the Roberts Commission investigation, published The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor in 1954. By going through the vast amount of evidence to highlight such incriminating documents as the bomb-plot message and the winds code, Theobald concluded that Washington deliberately withheld MAGIC intelligence from Kimmel and Short, that the only reason to do so was to ensure Japanese success, and that the only reason why anyone in Washington would want the Japanese to succeed would be to drag America into the fight against Hitler. After Theobald published his book in 1954, Rear Admiral Kimmel released his memoirs, which included the charge that Roosevelt, Stimson, Marshall, and Knox had information showing an attack on Hawaii was imminent that they did not share with him, and for which “they must answer on the day of judgment like any other criminal.”
Theobald and Kimmel began a popular theory that continues to this day, the advance-knowledge or back-door-to-war theory, which holds that President Roosevelt, his most senior cabinet members, and various senior army and navy officials secretly colluded to instigate the attack on Pearl Harbor. Japanese historian Takeo Iguchi has a clear idea of how this thinking began: “The almost incredible success of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor also opened the eyes of the American people to the unpreparedness of the US military, and the conspiracy theory gained currency as a salve for the nation’s wounded psyche.”
In 1962, Roberta Wohlstetter’s Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision argued, “The United States was not caught napping. . . . We just expected wrong [in] a failure of strategic analysis [and] a failure to anticipate effectively.” Due to her profound influence, the CIA and its cousins in military intelligence came to believe that the enduring lesson of December 7 was in separating “signals” from “noise.” In this needle-in-the-haystack perspective, inspired again by the bomb-plot and winds messages, the Americans had plenty of information the attack was coming, but couldn’t piece together these clues into a meaningful warning because they were buried by so much other data. But in fact no signal said specifically that Japan was going to attack Hawaii, and when a very few in command raised that possibility, they were dismissed.
On March 9, 1949, Walter Short died in Dallas, Texas, where he worked for Ford Motor. On May 14, 1968, Husband Kimmel died of a heart attack at the age of eighty-six. Two ye
ars before, he said, “They made me the scapegoat. They wanted to get the United States into the war. That was President Roosevelt and General George Marshall and others in the Washington high command. FDR was the architect of the whole business. He gave orders—I can’t prove this directly—that no word about Japanese fleet movements was to be sent to Pearl Harbor, except by Marshall, and then he told Marshall not to send anything.”
Japanese Imperial Navy commander Masataka Chihaya summed up the key weakness of the conspiracy theory: “Even if one admits . . . that President Roosevelt wanted to have Japan strike first, there would have been no need to have all the major ships of the US Fleet sit idly in the harbor to be mercilessly destroyed and many killed.” A second major point comes from even a cursory knowledge of FDR: if he were involved in any sinister conspiracy, it wouldn’t be anything detrimental to his beloved navy. A third is that Nazi submarines were at that time causing so much trouble with American merchant shipping in the Atlantic that FDR hardly needed to instigate Pearl Harbor to trigger American war fever; it would have arrived at any time on its own. And a fourth is that during the “day of infamy” speech Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war only against Japan and did not include Germany or Italy.
George Marshall, meanwhile, insisted he had proof there that there was no back door to war since he couldn’t even get enough money for troops to defend Alaska: “I remember in 1940, when [President Roosevelt] was trying to keep within a fifty-billion-dollar debt limit and was cutting out some of the defense measures I proposed. In 1940, before France fell, I advocated eleven million dollars for defense housing in Alaska. I couldn’t even get this. Congress cut it out and President Roosevelt concurred. You don’t remember what it was like then. The army had little or nothing. When I wanted that little eleven-million-dollar appropriation, newspapers and columnists came out against me. They said I was trying to drag this country into war.”
As part of a defense appropriations bill for the year 2000, Congress requested that the president clear the names of Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short of responsibility for failing to defend Pearl Harbor since the two officers “were not provided necessary and critical intelligence that would have alerted them to prepare for the attack.” Sponsored by Delaware senators Joe Biden and William Roth, the measure was one more effort by Kimmel’s son, Edward, to clear his father’s name, even though, as late as 1995, a Pentagon investigation (undertaken primarily through Edward Kimmel’s efforts) had refused to do so, concluding: “The intelligence available to Admiral Kimmel and General Short was sufficient to justify a higher level of vigilance than they had chosen to maintain.”
Kimmel and Short were indeed treated unfairly as scapegoats by the press and public opinion, but were they really mistreated by the Roosevelt administration? Officially, they were never charged with dereliction of duty, errors of judgment, or any other malfeasance; they were merely relieved of command and categorized as retired. Considering the American emotional reaction to Pearl Harbor, could either have served as a commander during World War II?
The need to assign blame for every great American tragedy, from Pearl Harbor to the Kennedy assassination to 9/11, is now a subject of social studies called conspiracism, first analyzed by historian Richard Hofstadter in a 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which includes, “Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination.”
One student of conspiracism, Fred Kaplan, said, “If horrible events can be traced to a cabal of evildoers who control the world from behind a vast curtain, that’s, in one sense, less scary than the idea that some horrible things happen at random or as a result of a lone nebbish, a nobody. The existence of a secret cabal means that there’s some sort of order in the world; a catastrophic fluke suggests there’s a vast crevice of chaos, the essence of dread.” Writer Robert McKee has noticed that, since conspiracism is now so widespread, “instead of the British mystery where the investigator narrows the focus to six possible suspects, in America a murder is committed, we start to investigate, and it turns out to encompass all of society.” Harry Truman went so far as to pin the fault for Pearl Harbor on the United States of America as a whole: “The country was not ready for preparedness. . . . I think the country is as much to blame as any individual in this final situation that developed in Pearl Harbor.”
With the passing of another half century, will the only thing the general public knows about 9/11 be conspiracy, and scapegoats? Do these kinds of national tragedies inflict a type of post-traumatic stress disorder on American leaders and thinkers, with endless investigations by the government, and accusations of conspiracy by civilians, no matter what information is revealed or judgments rendered? Will we ever accept the truth? If we accept it, will we be healed? Since the truth we have is clearly no balm.
APPENDIX 2
* * *
THE MEDAL OF HONOR
Bennion, Mervyn Sharp.
Rank and organization: Captain, US Navy.
Born: 5 May 1887, Vernon, UT.
Citation: For conspicuous devotion to duty, extraordinary courage, and complete disregard of his own life, above and beyond the call of duty, during the attack on the Fleet in Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces on 7 December 1941. As Commanding Officer of the USS West Virginia, after being mortally wounded, Captain Bennion evidenced apparent concern only in fighting and saving his ship and strongly protested against being carried from the bridge.
Finn, John William.
Rank and organization: Lieutenant, US Navy.
Born: 23 July 1909, Los Angeles, CA.
Citation: For extraordinary heroism, distinguished service, and devotion above and beyond the call of duty. During the first attack by Japanese airplanes on the Naval Air Station, Kaneohe Bay, on 7 December 1941, Lieutenant Finn promptly secured and manned a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on an instruction stand in a completely exposed section of the parking ramp, which was under heavy enemy machine gun strafing fire. Although painfully wounded many times, he continued to man this gun and to return the enemy’s fire vigorously and with telling effect throughout the enemy strafing and bombing attacks and with complete disregard for his own personal safety. It was only by specific orders that he was persuaded to leave his post to seek medical attention. Following first aid treatment, although obviously suffering much pain and moving with great difficulty, he returned to the squadron area and actively supervised the rearming of returning planes. His extraordinary heroism and conduct in this action were in keeping with the highest traditions of the US Naval Service.
Flaherty, Francis C.
Rank and organization: Ensign, US Naval Reserve.
Born: 15 March 1919, Charlotte, MI.
Citation: For conspicuous devotion to duty and extraordinary courage and complete disregard of his own life, above and beyond the call of duty, during the attack on the Fleet in Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces on 7 December 1941. When it was seen that the USS Oklahoma was going to capsize and the order was given to abandon ship, Ensign Flaherty remained in a turret, holding a flashlight so the remainder of the turret crew could see to escape, thereby sacrificing his own life.
Fuqua, Samuel Glenn.
Rank and organization: Lieutenant Commander (LCDR), US Navy, USS Arizona.
Born: 15 October 1899, Laddonia, MO.
Citation: For distinguished conduct in action, outstanding heroism, and utter disregard of his own safety above and beyond the call of duty during the attack on the Fleet in Pearl Harbor, by Japanese forces on 7 December 1941. Upon the commencement of the attack, LCDR Fuqua rushed to the quarterdeck of the USS Arizona to which he was attached where he was stunned and knocked down by the explosion of a large bomb which hit the quarterdeck, penetrated several decks, and started a severe fire. Upon regaining consciousness, he began
to direct the fighting of the fire and the rescue of wounded and injured personnel. Almost immediately there was a tremendous explosion forward, which made the ship appear to rise out of the water, shudder, and settle down by the bow rapidly. The whole forward part of the ship was enveloped in flames which were spreading rapidly, and wounded and burned men were pouring out of the ship to the quarterdeck. Despite these conditions, his harrowing experience, and severe enemy bombing and strafing, at the time, LCDR Fuqua continued to direct the fighting of fires to check them while the wounded and burned could be taken from the ship and supervised the rescue of these men in such an amazingly calm and cool manner and with such excellent judgment that it inspired everyone who saw him and undoubtedly resulted in the saving of many lives. After realizing the ship could not be saved and that he was the senior surviving officer aboard, he directed it to be abandoned but continued to remain on the quarterdeck and directed abandoning ship and rescue of personnel until satisfied that all personnel that could be had been saved, after which he left his ship with the last boatload. The conduct of LCDR Fuqua was not only in keeping with the highest traditions of the US Naval Service but characterizes him as an outstanding leader of men.