Fighting to Lose (36 page)

Army 23260 Trans 10/9/41 (S)5

This, like Popov’s questionnaire, is so obviously a prescription for air attack that it has become known over the years as the first “bomb-plot” message —
plot
being used here in the sense of plotting targets on a map. It was followed the next day by another message that assigned code letters to the berthing locations of the warships.

29 September 1941

(J19)

Honolulu to Tokyo #178

Re your 3083

(Strictly Secret)

The following codes will be used hereafter to designate the location of vessels.

1. Repair Dock in Navy Yard. (The repair basin referred to in my message to Washington #45): K8.
   
2. Navy dock in the Navy Yard (The Ten Ten Pier): KT
   
3. Moorings in the vicinity of Ford Island: FV
   
4. Alongside in Ford Island: FG. (East and West sides will be differentiated by A and B respectively)
   

Relayed to Washington, San Francisco.

JD-1: 5730 23313 (D) Navy Trans. 10-10-4: X6

Tokyo wanted to know what ships were where
within
the harbour. That could only be for air attack purposes, and it was asked
only
of Pearl Harbor. Admiral Kimmel would have seen it instantly. Yet none of these messages, or others like them, were given to him or to Short.7

The postwar congressional inquiry was told that the army did not share these decrypts with General Short because the codes used for army communications were less secure than those of the navy. This is nonsense — for such short messages super-secure, one-time pads could have been used. The Office of Naval Intelligence claimed it did not give the messages to Kimmel because it assumed that the Japanese were merely keeping track of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in excessive detail.

What the inquiry did not hear was that the other Pacific command, the Philippines, which was under General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Thomas Hart, continued to receive MAGIC and did receive the bomb-plot messages. This was described in the 1956 biography of MacArthur by his former chief of staff. General Charles Willoughby:

We saw some of the intercepts in Manila, on a relay through special channels…. It was known that the Japanese Consul in Honolulu cabled Tokyo reports on general ship movements. In October the daily reports were “sharpened.” Tokyo called for specific instead of general reports. In November the
daily
reports were on a grid system of the inner harbor with coordinate locations of American men-of-war.

It was plain to see, Willoughby continued, that “our battleships had become targets.”8

Also, just after the Atlantic meeting, General Marshall ordered that the written summaries, or “gists,” of the incoming decrypts that normally accompanied the army’s distribution of the day’s MAGIC in Washington be discontinued. The MAGIC recipients affected included the secretaries of state, war, and the navy, the army chief of staff (Marshall), and the chief of naval operations (Stark), as well as the chiefs of army and navy intelligence and war planning. From then on, they received only the raw decrypts. As they were “For Your Eyes Only,” each man was required to keep track of their unfolding story by himself.

Consequently, when asked by the congressional inquiry why he missed the “bomb-plot” messages, Marshall was able to reply, “If I am supposed to have final responsibility for the reading of all MAGIC, I would have ceased to be Chief of Staff in practically every other respect…. It was very difficult for me to read MAGIC sufficiently, even as it was.”

General Gerow, chief of the General Staff Operations Division, made the same excuse. Both must have been slow readers, however. MAGIC deliveries averaged twenty-six messages a day, the majority of them being fewer than two hundred words.9

Admiral Stark also claimed that he never noticed these Honolulu–Tokyo messages, even though they involved the ships and sailors under his ultimate charge. All must have crossed his desk, but apparently neither he nor his director of intelligence gave them any special heed,10 causing Kimmel’s intelligence officer at the time, Lieutenant-Commander Edwin Layton, later to write, “the failure of the office of naval operations to ensure that the bomb plot messages were sent to us at Pearl Harbor was blind stupidity at the least, and gross neglect at best.”11

The two intelligence officers in Washington responsible for selecting and distributing the decrypted messages were Lieutenant-Commander Alwin Kramer for the navy and Colonel Rufus Bratton for the army — both Japanese linguists. It can be safely assumed they would have been expected — even ordered — to get on the telephone to their higher-ups if they spotted a decrypt of urgent importance in the original Japanese. This did not come out at the inquiries, leaving the impression that Marshall and Stark first knew of the content of any decrypt only after it had been formally translated and sent around. This is highly unlikely.

Of the two officers handling MAGIC, Kramer was the more important, in that he had Admiral Stark and the White House on his daily distribution list. Prior to mid-November, the task of delivering MAGIC to the White House had been shared by the army and navy month over month, the former that fall responsible for July, September, and November, and the latter for August, October, and December. The army, however, alleging security problems, unilaterally cut the White House off from its deliveries; and in October, a navy aide appointed to the White House to receive the day’s decrypts filtered them out, passing only summaries to the Oval Office instead. Intentional or not, this gave Roosevelt an iron-clad excuse — should he ever need it — for not knowing about the bomb-plot messages.

In any case, apparently the president did learn that he was not getting the full MAGIC, insisted that from that point on he see the “raw intercepts,” and gave the White House delivery job solely to the navy effective November 12.12

Upon his return from their Atlantic conference, Roosevelt kept his promise to get even tougher with the Japanese. On August 17 he summoned the Japanese ambassador and warned him that Japan’s behaviour in Southeast Asia risked war. The ambassador proposed that the Japanese prime minister, Prince Fumimaro Konoye, meet with the president face-to-face, possibly in Hawaii, to talk out their differences. Roosevelt prevaricated, rudely replying that his schedule was very tight. Meanwhile, Japan struggled with the crippling embargo imposed by the U.S., especially on oil and gas. Japan had oil reserves for only two years, so the country was being pushed into an intolerable position. The government of Prince Konoye fell in October and he was replaced by the former war minister, General Hideki Tojo.13

At this same time, the British were breaking much of the same Japanese diplomatic traffic as the Americans — including at least some of the “bomb-plot” messages — and could follow Japan’s inexorable drift toward war.14 Nevertheless, over the objections of his own naval chiefs, on October 25 Churchill sent the
Prince of Wales
and the battle cruiser
Repulse
to Singapore, even though the British then had no appreciable air cover in the Far East and the Japanese in Indochina were in easy torpedo-bombing distance of the Malayan coast.

Historians have long puzzled over Churchill’s move. He claimed he intended the ships to serve as a deterrent, but with the recent fatal wounding of Germany’s ultra-modern pocket battleship
Bismarck
by obsolete British carrier-launched biplanes, it must have been perfectly obvious what would happen should war bring down onto the ships scores of modern, land-based enemy aircraft. Churchill also uselessly reinforced Hong Kong, acknowledged to be untenable, with two battalions of Canadian troops. If Japan threw down the gauntlet, they, too, were doomed.15

There have been other “countdowns” to December 7 in the many previous accounts of the Pearl Harbor attack, but the following includes new information found in British and Commonwealth archives, and documents lately found in American archives.

November 3:
Military Intelligence (MID) in Washington circulated a “reliable” secret-source report that the Japanese director of intelligence and former prime minister of Japan, Koki Hirota, had told the Black Dragon Society in late August that the new Japanese prime minister, Tojo, had ordered general military preparations to be made for an “emergency” with the United States. “War with the United States would best begin in December or in February,” Hirota was reported to have said. This information was passed on to the State Department, the U.S. Navy, to all U.S. Army departments, and to the FBI. Apparently, it did not get to Admiral Kimmel or General Short, though.16

November 5:
The Americans intercepted a message from Tokyo to Japan’s ambassador in Washington describing two proposals to be tried on the Americans in an effort to avoid war. The message would have been in the MAGIC package delivered to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, to the chief of naval operations, Admiral Stark, and to the U.S. Army chief of staff, General Marshall. Roosevelt would have only been told about it, as it would be another week before he started receiving the actual decrypts again.

November 10
: Against the backdrop of the bombed-out ruin of London’s medieval Guildhall, Churchill delivered another speech condemning Nazi atrocities:

The condition in Europe is terrible to the last degree. Hitler’s firing parties are busy in a dozen countries … and above all else, Russians are being butchered by thousands and by tens of thousands after they have surrendered, while individual and mass executions in all the countries I have mentioned have become part of the regular German routine….

I must say generally that we must regard all these victims of the Nazi executioners, who are labelled Communists or Jews — we must regard them as if they were brave soldiers who die for their country on the field of battle. Nay, in a way, their sacrifice may be more fruitful than that of a soldier who falls with his arms in his hands. A river of blood has flowed and is flowing between the German race and the peoples of all Europe. It is not the hot blood of battle, where good blows are given and returned. It is the cold blood of the executioner and scaffold, which leaves a stain indelible for generations and for centuries.17