“Kirk certainly wasn’t any weak sister,” said one of his aides, “… and he and Turner were on the mat all the time. The DNI was fighting to maintain the integrity of this section, but losing out.”12 By October, Kirk was ready to fight a different kind of war: He asked for and received command of a destroyer squadron in the Atlantic. The last indignities had been to learn that he had been spied on by a White House operative and that his assignment of a brilliant naval attache to Cairo had been withdrawn for other duties by the Department of State. Kirk’s replacement, Medal of Honor winner (Veracruz, 1914) Rear Admiral Theodore S. “Ping” Wilkinson, was the third officer to head the besieged ONI in a twelve-month period, and, more conciliatory than Kirk, he was made short work of by Turner, who continued unimpeded to arrogate to himself functions of naval intelligence about which he seemed to know little, while Wilkinson for his part showed lamentable lack of interest in the most fundamental data coming in from communications intelligence—to the point that, when asked by a congressional committee after the war if he had even discussed the possibility of a Pearl Harbor, he answered, “Unfortunately, no.”’13 This situation, combined with a power struggle between ONI and the Office of Naval Communications (ONC) and a disturbing display of professional backbiting and jockeying for personal advancement, led to an environment in which it was understandable that no high-ranking officer in the sixth wing seemed to be awake to the significance of the Japanese high-grade J 19 and JN 25 operational ciphers, of the “bomb plot” decrypt, and of the “lights code” message—all familiar items of evidence to Pearl Harbor inquisitors of a later time—and could only stand by mutely as the undetected carrier fleet of Admiral Chuichi Nagumo steamed across 180 degrees longitude into the Western Hemisphere.14
While the top ranks of operations and ONI engaged in their bitter turf struggles, in the midst of which Pearl Harbor might be described as a mere contretemps, the rank-and-file naval intelligence community—uniform and civilian, male and female, cryptanalysts and translators, Morse senders and radio technicians—were achieving excellent results on a near par with the work of the British Y Service and Bletchley Park. Their activities had begun long before, in January 1924, when a young lieutenant picked from command of a Yangtze River minesweeper conceived, built, and first organized naval Communications Intelligence (COMINT), later to be designated OP-20-G in department argot. In his rumpled uniform and with hair like an unmade bed, Laurence F. Safford contrasted sharply with the crisp upper-deck Navy, but “Saffo,” as his admiring colleagues called him, proceeded over the years to construct electronic interception, decrypting, and analysis systems that at the outbreak of World War II compared favorably in many respects with the best examples of British and German developments in the same fields. He had started interception activity in 1928, when he and his assistants recruited enlisted men to be Japanese-language Morse operators and trained them in four-month courses conducted in a classroom structure that he had erected secretly on the roof of Main Navy, leading the first graduates, who went on to man interception stations in the North Pacific and at Bainbridge Island near Seattle, to brand themselves the On the Roof Gang. By December 1941 there were eight interception stations in operation, including four on the Atlantic Coast, with 116 receivers. All included HF/DF capacity with directional antennas that could fix on target transmitters and plot bearings geometrically, diversity receivers to defeat selective fading, and syphon recorders for copying high-speed automatic transmissions. By 1939 “Huff-Duff” was tracking Japanese warships and merchant vessels throughout the Western Pacific. By May 1941 the East Coast strategic D/F net was having some success in identifying U-boat transmissions in the Atlantic and in exchanging directional bearings with OIC in London; although it must be said that U.S. technology in this field lagged behind that of the British, and as late as June 1942 the number of operators with solid bearing-computation experience was so small that U.S. Navy fixes were frequently offered with the qualifier that they might be “within two hundred miles” of the U-boat targeted, so that primary reliance on the British net and estimate continued.15
As the British distinguished themselves in the cracking of German Enigma, so at the same time U.S. codebreakers enjoyed striking success penetrating the Japanese ciphers, which also originated on an electromechanical machine, known in Washington in its progressively sophisticated forms as “Ml,” “M3,” “Red,” “Alphabetical Typewriter 97,” and finally, “Purple.” In the late 1930s both Navy and U.S. Army cryptanalysts attacked the Japanese diplomatic (DIP) and naval (J 19 and JN 25) machine-based random ciphers. At Commander Safford’s OP-20-G cryptology division in Room 1621, Main Navy (code named Station Negat), and at his basement branch office in the old Administration Building near Dock Ten Ten at Pearl Harbor (Station Hypo), the immensely talented duo of Mrs. Agnes Myer Driscoll (Negat) and Commander Joseph Rochefort (Hypo) had both succeeded by the beginning of 1942 in making partial manual penetrations of the naval ciphers. (Rochefort had not been authorized by Washington to work on the crucial JN 25 cipher prior to 7 December. It was Rochefort who, six months after Pearl Harbor, would make the single most important intelligence finding of the Pacific war when he correctly identified “AF” in JN 25 transmissions as being Midway, enabling Admiral Chester W. Nimitz to engage and defeat the major Japanese fleet en route to that island on 3-5 June 1942. A jealous Navy hierarchy in Washington, which had identified “AF” as the Aleutian chain, conspired to deny Rochefort the Distinguished Service Medal recommended by Nimitz for his accomplishment. Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman, Jr., made the award posthumously forty-three years later, on 8 October 1985.) Meanwhile, the Army’s Signal Intelligence Section (SIS), headed by the brilliant Lieutenant Colonel William F. Friedman, with a timely assist from civilian Leo Rosen, had achieved a prodigious breakthrough—though it put Friedman in Walter Reed Hospital with a nervous breakdown—by solving the wiring diagram (which employed telephone stepping switches instead of rotors, as electrical engineer Rosen discovered) of the Purple machine used for DIP. Safford generously acknowledged the feat (“The Army’s solution of the Purple machine was the masterpiece of cryptanalysis in the pre-war era.”16) and immediately offered the manufacturing services of the Washington Navy Yard for constructing analogs of the machine. The first two Navy-built copies cost $684.55 for hardware. Eight eventually were built, three of which went to Bletchley Park, but none was sent, by Navy brass decision, to Pearl Harbor. The omission may have been crucial: According to some students of the Pearl Harbor debacle, the Purple machine’s product, the Japanese diplomatic exchanges that Washington called “Magic,” could conceivably have provided Rochefort and his team with clues to the forthcoming attack.17 This failure, if it was one, together with mental lapses by an overworked staff in OP-20-G and the preoccupation of Washington’s top officers with internecine quarreling, led to the situation described succinctly by Gordon W. Prange: “Having brought off one of the most astonishing coups in the history of intelligence, the United States failed to take full advantage of it.”18 It was the situation defined provocatively in 1946 by the Joint Congressional Committee Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack: “Why, with some of the finest intelligence available in our history, with the almost certain knowledge that war was at hand, with plans that contemplated the precise type of attack that was executed by Japan on the morning of December 7—why was it possible for a Pearl Harbor to occur?”19 The answer was: The failure lav not with the lower ranks in naval intelligence but with the higher ranks in naval operations. It was a failure about to be repeated, with even more damaging results, on the nation’s Atlantic frontier.
That such a failure on the Atlantic was possible would never have occurred to the British Admiralty, which—as Patrick Beesly insisted to this writer a month before his death—shared everything it knew about naval Enigma, U-boat dispositions, and counter-U-boat operations with Washington in the pre-Pearl Harbor and pre-Paukenschlag periods. Despite the concern of some Britons about U.S.
security practices, no secrets were withheld. In February 1941, at OIC invitation, two Navy and two U.S. Army intelligence officers (including the newly commissioned Rosen) with strong communications and cryptanalysis backgrounds sailed to England on the shakedown return of the new battleship HMS King George V. Their earnest of confidentiality was the gift, authorized by SIS, of a Purple machine, the first of three to be given to the British. For ten weeks they studied closely the technical activities and functions of the Y Service, the huts at Bletchley Park, and the OIC, including Winn’s Tracking Room. As two of the team members reported on their return: “We were invited to ask questions about everything we saw, no doors were closed to us and copies were furnished of any material which we considered of possible assistance to the United States.” The naval officers returned with a complete Marconi-Adcock HF/DF installation, representing Britain’s furthest advances to date in that technology, which the naval team judged “to be far ahead of us in these developments.”20 In May the offer and reality of British assistance to U.S. antisubmarine warfare took a higher form, when—accompanied by later-to-be-famous Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming RNVR, as his personal assistant-British Admiral John A. Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, who superintended the OIC, visited ONI Director Captain Kirk in Washington and laid before him a detailed summary of every known fact, technique, and procedure that the OIC and BP had amassed in two and a half years of active anti-U-boat warfare. The “Most Secret” document undergirding Godfrey’s briefing of Kirk was one of the most significant printed artifacts of the Battle of the Atlantic. Patrick Beesly, who was in possession of “Copy No. 8,” showed it to the writer. It bore the formidable title: “The Intelligence Division. Naval Staff. Admiralty. Organization and Development of the Naval Intelligence Division, September, 1939-May, 1941. An account prepared in the first instance for the information of Captain Kirk, USN, Director of Naval Intelligence, Washington. Important. The contents of this document are for the PERSONAL information of the recipient and may on no account be divulged to a third person. (Sgd.) John A. Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, May 15, 1941.”
The document began with a description of the various functions of the OIC under the headings: enemy surface vessels and raiders; enemy naval air operations; enemy U-boat tracking; enemy merchant shipping; enemy minefields and other navigational obstructions; D/F plotting; enemy W/T intelligence; and the W/T technical section. Godfrey then elaborated on the various naval intelligence sources developed by the OIC: sighting reports by warships and aircraft; photographic reconnaissance of ports and harbors; D/F plotting and study of enemy W/T traffic; reports from Naval Attaches and observers in neutral countries; and Special Intelligence. The strength of the OIC’s U-boat Tracking Room, Godfrey pointed out, lay in the fact that all intelligence from whatever quarter came into that one Room. The last-named source, Special Intelligence, was of particular importance because in that same month, thanks to the “pinch” from U-710, BP was making its first large breaks into naval Enigma, and only months later Admiralty could begin sending Kirk daily and weekly summaries of U-boat dispositions throughout the North Atlantic. With OIC’s U-boat estimates, transmitted from London via the Intelligence Section (NID 18) of the British Admiralty Delegation in Washington, Kirk’s staff plotted all U-boat positions on daily situation maps.21 Should U-boats move against the U.S. East Coast, these data from Special Intelligence and D/F bearings would alert Washington to the fact day-by-day. U.S. Navy Intelligence, London assumed, was prepared. By December 1941 and the January that followed, U.S. Navy warships had been publicly engaged with the U-boats for a quarter year, running the convoy escort war in over two-thirds of the Atlantic, issuing orders to Canadian warships as well as to their own, hence there was no reason for the Admiralty and its OIC to doubt at that date that U.S. operational forces, too, were alert to any possible U-boat threats to U.S. waters and that they were poised and battle-ready to repel them. As the U.S. formally entered the war after Pearl Harbor, it was unthinkable in London that U.S. defenses on the Atlantic would be caught off guard and asleep. But London had not counted on that other war that was being waged on the second deck of Main Navy (from which the knowledgeable Captain Kirk withdrew in defeat). Nor had it counted on the unpreparedness, shortsightedness, rigidity, arrogance, and dereliction of the U.S. Navy operational command. The United States was about to suffer a six-months-long massacre, compared with which the defeat at Pearl Harbor was but a rap on the knuckles.
As 1941 passed into 1942, chaos reigned at the two major military headquarters buildings, Army and Navy, in Washington. Constant streams of officers poured in and out of their main entrance doorways, many of them in ill-fitting uniforms that they had not worn for years in mufti-minded Washington. Three kinds of Army caps—garrison, service, and campaign—might be seen mixed with Sam Browne belts and uniform parts as antiquated as 1918 puttee leggings. The smells of cedar and camphor were everywhere.22 Civilians could wander off the street into military offices without being challenged by a guard. Office furniture, typewriters, and filing cabinets piled up in the rear service areas for use in hastily devised new office spaces for staff or clerks assigned to handle this new responsibility or that. Inside, both service buildings were like anthills with their tops kicked off. Paper flew everywhere. After coming upon the scene at the Army’s Munitions Building on Christmas Eve, Major General Joseph W. Stil well wrote to his wife:
My impression of Washington is a rush of clerks in and out of doors, swing doors always swinging, people with papers rushing after other people with papers, groups in corners whispering in huddles, everybody jumping up just as you start to talk, buzzers ringing, telephones ringing, rooms crowded, with clerks all banging away at typewriters. “Give me 10 copies of this AT ONCE.” “Get that secret file out of the safe.” “Where the hell is the Yellow Plan (Blue Plan, Green Plan, Orange Plan, etc.)?” Everybody furiously smoking cigarettes, everybody passing you on to someone else—etc., etc.23
At the Navy Department, the problems posed to orderliness by intraservice squabbling and blame casting, which surely must have diverted attention away from essential war tasks, were compounded by the sense of confusion among all ranks that came from the ascending curve of war losses in the Navy’s special interest preserve, the Pacific: First, battleship row at Pearl Harbor; then the surrender of the U.S. river gunboat Wake at Shanghai and Japanese seizure of the 10,509 GRT U.S. freighter President Harrison loaded with Marines; the loss of the U.S. minesweeper Penguin; the fall of Guam, Tarawa, and Makin; the gallant death of Wake Island; the sinking of British battleship HMS Prince of Wales and battle cruiser HMS Repulse, both of which Prime Minister Winston Churchill had intended to send to Pearl Harbor to replace U.S. ship casualties; additional British naval and merchant losses in the fall of Hong Kong; and, on 2 January, the fall of the U.S. Cavite Navy Yard in the Philippines.
To the understandable tensions in the Department created by that litany of reverses were added the jitters of false contacts and alarms: On 9 December a report of a German air raid reached Naval Operating Base (NOB), Newport, Rhode Island, where the cruiser USS Augusta went to general quarters. On the same day the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics warned Operations of its belief that Japanese submarines “will surface at night in Santa Monica Bay and Coronado Road and bombard the aircraft plants of Douglas and Consolidated respectively.”24 On the eighth and again on the thirteenth came word that San Francisco had been hit by an “air raid” and that an attack on Los Angeles was imminent. (Some of the West Coast panic was not unfounded: Months later Japanese submarines would shell coastal targets at Astoria, Oregon, and Goleta, near Santa Barbara, California. Those attacks, more symbolic than real, combined with false alarms and racism would lead to the tragically misguided Civilian Exclusion Orders of 31 March that directed the evacuation of more than 100,000 Japanese American citizens and Japanese resident aliens to internment camps inland from the coast.) St. Louis, Missouri, weighed in with fears that Japanese battle
ships were coming up the Mississippi. On the Eastern Seaboard hallucinatory U-boat “sightings” poured into U.S. Navy and Coast Guard offices. On Christmas a U.S. ship sighted a periscope and a torpedo thirty miles off Savannah. On 29 December a Coast Guard pilot reported a submarine periscope “heading up Ambrose Channel between Buoy #3 and #5 [in New York Harbor].” The next day a periscope was sighted in Long Island Sound south of New London, and two days later Coast Guardsmen reported a periscope between Cushing and Ram Islands in Portland Channel off Maine. Soon afterward the Army Air Corps sighted “two [enemy] destroyers, two submarines, and two unidentified ships” at one position; and at another, “a large black submarine, large conning tower, gun forward on surface moving slowly NE.”25 The USN destroyer Trippe chose this alarm-filled moment to steam from Norfolk to Newport and was set upon by four U.S. Army Air Force planes whose four bombs missed their “enemy” target. In Washington, hysteria reached such proportions that a secret ONI document circulated, charging that many merchant marine radio operators were Communists and therefore disloyal—this despite the fact that, as events would show, radio operators were frequently the last men off torpedoed ships after heroically sending their sss [attacked by submarine] … sos.26
Meanwhile, at the White House, a calmer head looked for that one proven steady hand who could conn the Navy safely through the mounting tempest. President Roosevelt thought he knew the man: sixty-three-year-old Admiral, Commander in Chief Atlantic Fleet, Ernest J. King. Life magazine had just run a cover article on him (24 November): “King of the Atlantic: America’s Triple-Threat Admiral is the Stern, Daring Model of a War Commander.” King was the fighting Navy. He had been running the Atlantic war west of MOMP, or the “chop line,” since September.27 He had the experience of combat sea command. He also had a command personality born of years of active duty at sea. A native of Lorain, Ohio, he entered the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, in 1901 where he achieved the highest cadet rank and was commissioned fourth in his class. Years of sea experience followed, punctuated by marriage and one period of instructor-ship in ordnance and gunnery at the academy, years that included two difficult cruises under Captain, later Rear Admiral, Hugo Osterhaus, who mentioned in King’s service record the young officer’s propensity to whiskey, tardiness, and insubordination, with resulting punishments “under the hatches.” Redeeming himself, King became a destroyer division commander in 1911-12 and during World War I served commendably (winning the Navy Cross) as assistant chief of staff to Admiral Henry T. Mayo, Commander in Chief Atlantic Fleet, in the process acquiring a deep dislike for the Royal Navy and all things British. During the peacetime years King went into submarines and took command of the submarine base at New London in 1923. He won two Distinguished Service Medals for directing the salvage of submarines S-51 and S-4. At Pensacola he qualified as a naval aviator and during the 1930s made significant contributions to the development of carrier tactics. In 1939, by then a rear admiral, King, with a service record as diverse as it was successful, was passed over for chief of naval operations. Chosen instead was Harold R. (“Betty”) Stark, the candidate of surface-ship admirals who (as King thought) mistrusted air and underwater sailors. It appeared that his next appointment, to the General Board, a twilight cruise for admirals on their passage to retirement, would bring to a close his naval career. A year later, however, President Roosevelt, disregarding persistent rumors that King drank too much and womanized with other officers’ wives, agreed to the recommendation of Stark and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox that King be assigned as commander of the Atlantic Squadron. One year later, in February 1941, the squadron was redesignated the Atlantic Fleet, and King, promoted to full admiral, CINCLANT, could break his flag in one of the top commands at sea. It was not a fleet command in the sunny, starched-white Pacific to which every Navy man aspired. It was second-drawer command in the derogated Atlantic, with its gray, cold seas. But it was tons better than a desk on the General Board. His own personal fortunes brightened, while at the same time the Navy’s fortunes turned bleak and dangerous. To King it was clear that war with the Axis powers lay ahead. When the Reuben James went down, he gave up alcohol for the duration.
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