Pearl Harbor Betrayed (23 page)

All of the coast artillery, all of the anti-aircraft artillery, and all of the air would have immediately taken up their duties as described in that alert. Part of the coast artillery was right in the middle of the town. Fort de Russy was within two or three blocks of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. The public couldn't help seeing that they were manning their seacoast guns. Placing live ammunition. Some of the guns were practically in the middle of the park.
25

Use of Alerts No. 2 or No. 3 would also have interfered with his training mission, Short argued. In large part, his command was made up of newly commissioned officers and recent enlistees and inductees. They required constant training in order to achieve battle readiness. If they were taken out of training to man alert posts, they would not be properly prepared to carry out their specialized tasks. “The War Department message had not indicated in any way,” Short testified to the JCC, “that our training mission was modified, suspended, or abolished, or that all troops were to go immediately into tactical status.”
26
The same problem would face the Army Air Forces, which had the mission of training bomber combat crews and of ferrying B-17s to the Philippines. General Martin was then making maximum use of his few bombers and more numerous pursuit (fighter) planes for combat training. “If war were momentarily expected in the Hawaiian coastal frontier,” Short said, “these considerations would give way. But every indication was that the War Department expected the war to break out, if at all, only in the far Pacific and not at Hawaii.”
27
No warning of a possible Japanese attack on Hawaii had been received at Fort Shafter since the Marshall-Herron alert of June 1940. In the Army Pearl Harbor Board investigation, Marshall confirmed Short's reading of those facts:

We anticipated, beyond a doubt, a Japanese movement in Indochina and the Gulf of Siam, and against the Malay Peninsula. We anticipated also an assault on the Philippines. We did not, so far as I can recall, anticipate an attack on Hawaii; the reason being that we thought, with the addition of more modern planes, that the defense there would be sufficient to make it extremely hazardous for the Japanese to attempt such an attack.
28

Yet, as Short was to learn shortly after exactly that attack on Hawaii materialized on 7 December, Generals Marshall and Gerow, as well as Colonel Bundy, were all the while confident that Short had
at the least
ordered Alert No. 2 against air raids. Marshall particularly was amazed and acrid that Short had failed to go on all-out alert, when the commanders in the Philippines, the Canal Zone, and at San Francisco, who had received basically the same message,
did
go on full alert. Short's basic defense was, Why, when I sent my acknowledgment stating the alert I had ordered, was I not told that it was insufficient? As he stated in the JCC, “The War Department had nine days in which to tell me that my action was not what they wanted. I accepted their silence as a full agreement with the action taken.”
29
(On the twenty-ninth Short sent the War Department a detailed report on the precautions he had taken against subversion and sabotage. That report, specifically acknowledging the sabotage warning, No. 473, was not answered either.)

We can track the course of Short's first acknowledgment (No. 959) through the corridors of the Munitions Building, from the time, 5:57
A.M
. on the twenty-eighth, when it arrived in the WD code room. Specifically marked as a reply to WD's No. 472, the dispatch was clipped together with a dispatch from General MacArthur (who was responding to the parallel warning sent him the day before), which had arrived in the code room about an hour before. MacArthur had declared an all-out alert that included extensive air reconnaissance. In the way the two dispatches were clipped, the MacArthur message was on top. Their first distribution was in Marshall's office, where the chief wrote on the top document (MacArthur's), “To Secretary of War GCM.” He did not initial either the top or the under document at the space marked “Chief of Staff.” The routing slip shows that the two messages left Marshall's office at noon on the twenty-eighth and made their way to Stimson's office, where the secretary initialed each of them, “Noted—H.L.S.” The messages were then walked to the War Plans Division, where General Gerow initialed both, “L.T.G.” While there, both messages were read by Colonel Bundy, head of the Plans Group, and by Colonel Charles K. Gailey, executive officer of the division. Gailey initialed the routing slip that had been attached in Marshall's office, and the messages passed thenceforth into the War Department files. Not one of the officers (or the secretary) through whose hands Short's reply passed found any reason to correct it by transmission of a more explicit warning. In the JCC hearings, Marshall was asked,

Would this be true from an Army viewpoint, that when an overseas commander is ordered to take measures as he deems necessary and to report measures taken to you, is he correct in assuming that if his report is not the kind of action that you had in mind that you would thereafter inform him specifically of the difference?

General Marshall: I would assume so.
30

In the Army Board investigation of 1944, General Gerow accepted the blame for not having recognized the insufficiency of the reply from Fort Shafter. He agreed that, as War Department rules read, “The merit of a report is not measured by its length. A concise presentation of important points usually is all that is required.” And to the question asked him, “Would General Short's reply comply with that regulation?” he answered, “Yes, sir,” although he suggested that, if the message had read, “alerted against sabotage only,” he might have caught its import more clearly.
31
Marshall refused to let Gerow accept the blame for not picking up on the inadequacy of Short's report. “He [Gerow] had a direct responsibility and I had the full responsibility.”
32
Marshall went on to express the breakdown in this language: “It did not register on Colonel Bundy, it did not register on General Gerow, it did not register on me and it carries Mr. Stimson's initials also.”
33
Marshall's biographer Forrest C. Pogue has commented that Marshall was attempting to do so many things—“hold too many threads of operations in his hand”—that he simply missed noticing the kind of signal Short was sending and missed as well his own opportunity to intervene. Inability to take each order in turn and to give it exactly the attention it deserved was to Pogue “a reasonable defense from an overworked Chief of Staff, but it did not exonerate him.”
34
Marshall testified that the officer expressly charged with checking on compliance with orders sent was Bundy. About an hour and a half after the Pearl Harbor attack, Marshall had a conversation with Bundy. The officer stated to the chief that he had gotten the impression from the words “liaison with Navy” that Short and Bloch had activated the Joint (Coastal Frontier) Defense Plan.
35
Which they had not.

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!

Macbeth,
Act II, Sc. 3

Bundy was killed in an airplane crash while en route to Hawaii shortly after 7 December.

*   *   *

On the morning of the twenty-seventh, just prior to receiving his war warning from Washington, Short met for three hours with Kimmel at the latter's headquarters. With Kimmel were Admirals Bloch, Halsey, Brown, and Bellinger, and certain staff members, including “Soc” McMorris. Short had brought along Major General Martin and his chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel James. A. Mollison. At conferences such as this one Short had learned that, according to the best naval intelligence, the Japanese carriers were either in home ports or were proceeding south. That knowledge would give him some confidence later in the day in declaring the alert against sabotage only. He had to have been reassured, too, when, in the course of this particular conference, Colonel Mollison having observed that the Japanese had the
capability
of making an air attack on Oahu, Kimmel turned to his fleet war plans officer and, according to Short, asked, “What do you think about the prospects of a Japanese air attack?” and McMorris answered, “None.”
36
(Ten days later, Short, Kimmel, and, of course, McMorris would rue that fateful response.) Even the principal item on that morning's agenda lent itself to easing disquiet: the War and Navy Departments had authorized the reduction of Short's P-40 fighter strength on Oahu by about half, the balance to be sent to Wake and Midway Islands. The fact that Marshall and Stark felt comfortable in making that recommendation persuaded those around the conference table that Washington “did not consider hostile action on Pearl Harbor imminent or probable.”
37

*   *   *

On Oahu Short ordered all aircraft, following each day's training exercises, to be cleared of all ammunition and to be clustered together on the “warming up aprons,” wingtip to wingtip, nose to tail, so that they might be more efficiently guarded against ground sabotage. At Hickam that meant ten feet between wingtips and 135 feet between noses and tails. Of course, when Japanese bombers and strafers came streaking in over the hills of Oahu after dawn on 7 December, they found their Army aircraft targets unbelievably bunched together for best effect. Short
could
have chosen a different expedient that would have allowed his aircraft to remain dispersed, fueled, and armed, requiring only warm-up time to get airborne: to quadruple or quintruple the guard on aircraft from his garrison of 21,273 men at Schofield Barracks.

The sabotage never happened.

When confronted later with that irony, Short stated that, if he had been sent certain Magic intercepts that he did not learn about until 1944, he would have ordered things otherwise.
38

His fellow service commander, Admiral Kimmel, would say the same.

*   *   *

About the same time, on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh, that Kimmel was handed a copy of Short's war warning, the Pacific Fleet commander received his own Navy war warning dispatch from Washington. It began, somewhat dramatically, “This dispatch is to be considered a war warning.” Kelly Turner claimed pride of authorship of that opening sentence. He and Royal Ingersoll, with an assist from Stark, were the principal architects of the text that followed. The language was vetted by Roosevelt. Sent by Naval Operations (OpNav) at 2337 on the twenty-seventh, the message, addressed to both Kimmel (CINCPAC) and Hart (CINCAF), read in its entirety:

SECRET

FROM CHIEF OF NAVAL OPERATIONS FOR ACTION

CINCAF-CINCPAC

NOVEMBER 27, 1941

272337   (CRØ921)

THIS DISPATCH IS TO BE CONSIDERED A WAR WARNING X NEGOTIATIONS WITH JAPAN LOOKING TOWARD STABILIZATION OF CONDITIONS IN THE PACIFIC HAVE CEASED AND AN AGGRESSIVE MOVE BY JAPAN IS EXPECTED WITHIN THE NEXT FEW DAYS X THE NUMBER AND EQUIPMENT OF JAPANESE TROOPS AND THE ORGANIZATION OF NAVAL TASK FORCES INDICATES AN AMPHIBIOUS EXPEDITION AGAINST EITHER THE PHILIPPINES THAI OR KRA PENINSULA OR POSSIBLY BORNEO X EXECUTE AN APPROPRIATE DEFENSIVE DEPLOYMENT PREPARATORY TO CARRYING OUT THE TASKS ASSIGNED IN WPL46 X INFORM DISTRICT AND ARMY AUTHORITIES X A SIMILAR WARNING IS BEING SENT BY WAR DEPARTMENT X SPENAVO INFORM BRITISH X CONTINENTAL DISTRICTS GUAM SAMOA DIRECTED TAKE APPROPRIATE MEASURES AGAINST SABOTAGE
39

Before exegeting this message in its parts it would be advisable to examine it as a whole. Turner insisted in December 1945 that “there was only one war warning and that was on the 27th of November.”
40
But that could be so only if one considered messages containing the words “war warning” and none others. Just three days before, on the twenty-fourth, OpNav sent Kimmel and Hart a signal that was no less a war warning. It read:

SECRET

FROM CHIEF OF NAVAL OPERATIONS FOR ACTION

CINCAF CINCPAC COM 11 COM 12 COM 13

COM 15

242005   CRØ443

CHANCES OF FAVORABLE OUTCOME OF NEGOTIATIONS WITH JAPAN VERY DOUBTFUL X THIS SITUATION COUPLED WITH STATEMENTS OF JAPANESE GOVERNMENT AND MOVEMENTS THEIR NAVAL AND MILITARY FORCES INDICATE IN OUR OPINION THAT A SURPRISE AGGRESSIVE MOVEMENT IN ANY DIRECTION INCLUDING ATTACK ON PHILIPPINES OR GUAM IS A POSSIBILITY X CHIEF OF STAFF HAS SEEN THIS DISPATCH CONCURS AND REQUESTS ACTION ADEES [ADDRESSEES] TO INFORM SENIOR ARMY OFFICERS THEIR AREAS X UTMOST SECRECY NECESSARY IN ORDER NOT TO COMPLICATE AN ALREADY TENSE SITUATION OR PRECIPITATE JAPANESE ACTION X GUAM WILL BE INFORMED SEPARATELY

COPY TO WPD, WAR DEPT, AND TO OP
-12
BUT NO OTHER DISTRIBUTION.
41

In fact, Turner is recorded as having been disappointed that the November 24 phrase “in any direction” was not included in the warning of the twenty-seventh.
42
What Turner could have acknowledged further, if he had sifted through the contents of CINCPAC's in basket, was that, prior to the twenty-fourth Kimmel had received
five
other official messages from Stark that could broadly be characterized as “war warnings”: on 21 January, 3 February, 13 July, 21 August, and 16 October.
43
Kimmel also received during those eleven months a stream of personal letters from Stark, many of which reflected the darkening skies and rising waters, though some, as shown earlier, nixed or fudged on warning information given in the official communications. Typical, and particularly interesting because it fell between the twenty-fourth and twenty-seventh, was a letter from the CNO, dated the twenty-fifth, written after that day's notable noon meeting at the White House. Leading with a comment about Roosevelt and Hull, Stark wrote: