Pearl Harbor Betrayed (38 page)

In the meantime, Commander Murphy received a call at his office from Lt. Comdr. Logan Ramsey, operations officer of PatWing 2, who reported receipt of a signal from patrol aircraft 14P1, “to the effect that a submarine had been sunk in the Defensive Sea Area” one mile off the entrance. Murphy now called Admiral Kimmel. The time was “about 7:30.” Eighteen minutes had passed since
Ward
's message was placed in the hands of Kaminski. Kimmel, who had not yet shaved, dressed, or breakfasted, said, “I will be right down.” He testified in the following month that “I was telephoned at my quarters that an attack had been made on a submarine near Pearl Harbor. We have had many reports of submarines in this area. I was not at all certain that this was a real attack.”
83

But it was, and the sunken submarine had tipped off Pearl Harbor that an attack was afoot—just as Fuchida had feared. In the twenty minutes remaining, however, no one went to full alert. And the Army was never notified.
84

NINE

THIS IS NO DRILL

Our air force … achieved a great success unprecedented in history by the Pearl Harbor attack.… This success is owing to the Imperial Navy's hard training for more than twenty years.… Nothing could hold back our Imperial Navy, which kept silent for a long time. But once it arose it never hesitated to dare to do the most difficult thing on this earth. Oh, how powerful is the Imperial Navy!

Commander Sanagi Sadamu
Operations Section, Japanese Naval Staff
Diary entry for 8 December 1941

 

Kimmel was unaware of it, as was Short, as was every other commander or senior staffer in the two services who was capable of doing anything about it, but one of the Army's mobile radar (AWS) stations picked up the incoming Japanese air fleet and reported it to the Army's Information Center at Fort Shafter. On 7 December, the six radar stations positioned around Oahu shut down operations at 0700, which was just over a half hour after sunrise, the predicted danger period.
1
There is no document found by this writer to indicate that the Japanese knew that General Short's radar stations stood down at that hour on Sundays, or that they even knew that Oahu was equipped with this detection technology. Even Kimmel did not know that Short's radar screens went dark on schedule at 0700 that morning.
2
It was only luck, it appears, that led the Japanese aircraft to approach the island just “over” the radar—with one notable exception.

That exception was the long-range mobile station at Opana, near Kahuku Point, 230 feet above sea level, at the northern tip of Oahu. Until 25 November there had not been a radar set at the site, but on that date an SCR-270B training set at Schofield Barracks was relocated there.
3
On the morning of 7 December, the two Army privates operating the radar equipment at Opana decided to keep the five-inch diameter oscilloscope on power after the normal 0700 shutdown hour. “We figured that we might as well play around,” said Joseph Lockard, of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the more experienced of the two, “because the truck had not come in yet to take us back for chow.” He was about to hand the controls over to the “new man,” George Elliott, from Chicago, so that he could get some training in, when an anomaly—“it looked like two main pulses”—appeared on the scope. He looked at the clock. The time was 0702.

At first, he thought there might be something wrong with the equipment, but “finally decided that it must be a flight of some sort.” He asked Elliott to start plotting the jagged vertical lines both on the Record of Readings and on an overlay chart with a mileage radius rule and grid lines running true north imprinted on transparent paper. Position: five degrees northeast of azimuth. Range: 136 miles. By the time the range reached 132 miles, Lockard decided that this was “the largest group [of aircraft] I had ever seen on the oscilloscope,” and he directed Elliott to use the direct-line telephone for a sighting call to the Information Center at Fort Shafter.
4

The telephone operator at the center, Private Joseph McDonald, wrote down the message, including the information that the scope image seemed to have been generated by “an unusually large number of planes.” McDonald told Elliott that he was the only person in the center: taking advantage of their first day off in a month, the seven or eight plotters had packed up and left promptly at 0700. Elliott asked him to look around for
anyone
who could handle this information. He was speaking “in a very nervous tone of voice.” Against regulations, McDonald left his switchboard and did find someone, an Air Corps fighter pilot named Lt. Kermit Tyler, who was sitting at the plotting table with “nothing to do,” waiting to be relieved at 0800.
5
A four-year veteran, Tyler had been sent to the center to be trained as a “pursuit officer.” His responsibilities, once oriented, were to assist the center controller in directing Army planes to intercept enemy planes. This was his second day: his first tour was on the preceding Wednesday, and he still did not know what all his duties were.
6
At Opana Lockard grabbed the phone and asked McDonald to put Tyler on. “I gave him all the information that we had—the direction, the mileage, the apparent size of whatever it was.” Tyler's reply was, “I told him not to worry about it.”

The time was approximately 0725. Fuchida's air fleet was now sixty miles distant from Opana.
7

Tyler's reasoning was that the flight was one of two possibilities. The first was that it was a flight of B-17s, a bit off course, coming into Hickam from the West Coast. A bomber friend-pilot had told him that when the B-17s staging through Hawaii approached the islands, the local radio stations played Hawaiian music through the night to serve as identifiable signals for the pilots to home in on. That morning, before 0400, as he drove to the center, Tyler had listened on his car radio to the wistful music of the islands and surmised that bombers were coming in—and they were,
just three degrees off Fuchida's course and five minutes behind
. The other possibility that occurred to Tyler was that those aircraft were a Navy launch from an aircraft carrier north of Oahu. Frequently, when the carriers came into port from exercises on Saturdays or Sundays, their aircraft would participate in air raid drills on Sunday mornings.
8
On this particular Sunday, though Tyler did not know it—“The movement of the Navy was usually secret, more so than we are”—two of the three carriers were at sea to the west and west-northwest, and the third was in overhaul on the West Coast.
9

Suppose the planes were the enemy's? During the 1944 Army Pearl Harbor Board, Maj. Gen. Henry D. Russell bore home on that
third
possibility:

G
ENERAL
R
USSELL:
You knew that the pursuit officer in that information center was there to get planes in the air, to intercept incoming hostile planes if they appeared, did you?

C
OLONEL
T
YLER:
Yes, sir.

G
EN.
R
USSELL:
And you knew the only thing you had to do was to get in touch with the people who could put those up, isn't that true?

C
OL.
T
YLER:
That is not exactly true, sir, because we had nothing on the alert. We had no planes.
10

The Army aircraft were at parade attention in closed ranks to prevent sabotage. General Short conceded that, if Tyler had sounded the alarm at 0720, there would not have been enough time to arm, refuel, and warm up the engines of fighter aircraft before the dive-bombers were overhead. But there would have been sufficient time, he said, to disperse many of the planes, which probably would have reduced losses.
11
The Army would also have been able to man and arm some of its AA guns.

On the Navy side, the thirty-minute window that Tyler's alert would have provided (if the Army shared the alert with its sister service) an opportunity for all ships in harbor to sound general quarters, which would have meant among other actions taken, that all AA guns would be manned with ammunition boxes at the ready, and all ships would go to material readiness Condition Zed, which required that all double bottoms, compartments, passageways, and access openings be closed, except for those necessary to fight the ship. As a result, the battleship
California
might have been saved from sinking, with the loss of ninety-eight lives, by the closing of manhole covers that had been left open for maintenance.
12

*   *   *

It has often been pointed out that, if General Marshall or Admiral Stark had used the scrambler telephones on their respective desks in Washington to call Short and Kimmel, the window of emergency preparedness in Hawaii would have been a more gainful one hour and thirty-five minutes. Why did they not do so? Marshall, who was the more concerned of the two about alerting Hawaii to the one o'clock trigger, stated in 1944 and 1945 that he never considered using the scrambler because it was not secure. If the Japanese had succeeded in tapping and descrambling the transpacific lines, as he was sure the Germans had done with the transatlantic cable, his mention of one o'clock would have given away the fact that the United States was reading the Purple cipher. “I had a test made of induction from the telephone conversations on the Atlantic cable from Gardiners Island [off the eastern tip of Long Island],” he testified. “I found that that could be picked up by induction. I talked to the President not once but several times. I also later, after we were in the war, talked with the Prime Minister [Churchill] in an endeavor to have them be more careful in the use of the scrambler.” This line of reasoning is persuasive. But another reason Marshall offered for not having used the scrambler strains credulity. It was that the heightened defensive posture adopted by the Army in Oahu as a result of his alert call would have been taken by Japan as an overt provocation justifying a Japanese declaration of war. In the JCC hearings the general was asked by Senator Homer Ferguson (R. Mich.), “Now, how could the use of that telephone to Hawaii have been an overt act of war by America against Japan in alerting Hawaii?” Marshall answered: “I think, Senator, that the Japanese would have grasped at most any straw to bring to such portions of our public that doubted our integrity of action that we were committing an act that forced action on their part.”
13
Surprisingly, Senator Ferguson did not follow up his question. If he had, these additional questions would have been appropriate: Why then did you send the cabled alert, which, though slower in reaching Hawaii, would have had exactly the same effect? Why did you send General Short your warning of November 27, which you have testified was meant to put the Army on full alert? Why was that warning not provocative and this one was? Do you mean to tell me that every time the Army held field maneuvers there, or practiced air raid defense, Japan would feel justified in declaring war?

Marshall stated further that, if he had used the telephone, he would not have called Hawaii first. The Philippines would have come first, and the Panama Canal second. “We were open in a more vulnerable way in the Panama Canal than we were in Hawaii.”
14

Stark, who was reluctant at first to send an alert to Kimmel, similarly mistrusted the security of the scrambler phone. But he had a better reason than Marshall for not using his scrambler to call Hawaii.
The Navy had no descrambler at the other end
.
15
Stark may have been averse to using telephones of any kind for transoceanic communications. Kimmel had a regular commercial line in his office, but Stark, despite their long association and friendship, had never called him on the telephone during the whole of 1941.
16
When asked in 1960 why he did not urge Stark to pick up a telephone and call Kimmel, Kelly Turner answered, obliquely:

Why weren't I and a lot of others smarter than we were? I didn't put all the Two's and Two's together before Savo [the Battle of Savo Island, 8–9 August 1942, a U.S. Navy defeat] to get four. Maybe I didn't before Pearl, but damned if I know just where. If Noyes had only known that Kimmel couldn't read the diplomatic Magic, If Kimmel had only sent out a few search planes. If the words “Pearl Harbor” had only survived the redrafting of the warning messages.… You find out the answers and let me know.
17

Admiral Richardson, whom Kimmel had relieved at the start of the year, was unforgiving on this point. He delayed publication of his somewhat intemperate book,
On the Treadmill to Pearl Harbor,
until 1973, after Stark's death:

I consider that “Betty” Stark, in failing to pick up the telephone and give Kimmel a last-minute alert on the morning of Pearl Harbor, committed a major professional lapse, indicating a basic absence of those personal military characteristics required in a successful war leader. I believe his failure in these respects were far more important derelictions than those of any of his subordinates.
18

In the interest of preserving the secrecy of Magic, which was one of Marshall's arguments, much was sacrificed at Pearl: many of the 2,403 lives and the reputations of two commanders. The losses could have been much less. One is reminded of the false story—still circulating—of Churchill sacrificing Coventry to the Luftwaffe rather than warn its population and thus betray Britain's penetration of the German Enigma cipher.
19
In the present true case there was no credible intent on the part of Marshall and Stark to make such a sacrifice: after all, they did send a message. Their failure was in their decision not to use the most expeditious means: the telephone.