by Lindsey Qian
On the 26th of May, 1941, Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel of the US Pacific Fleet wrote a letter to Secretary of War Henry Stimson. The letter read: “The Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet is in a very difficult position. He is far removed from the seat of government, in a complex and rapidly changing situation. He is, as a rule, not informed as to the policy, or change of policy, reflected in current events and naval movements and, as a result, is unable to evaluate the possible effect upon his own situation. He is not even sure of what force will be available to him and has little voice in matters radically affecting his ability to carry out his assigned tasks.” The “he” in this letter was, in fact, Admiral Kimmel himself. Kimmel, the top command in Pearl Harbor at the time, knew that something was wrong and that an attack on the US would be imminent–yet he felt as if he were scrabbling blindly in the dark with scant information and contact with Washington. The sprawling and often disorganized structure of the government’s many war departments meant that not all critical facts could trickle upwards to the people who truly needed them. Too often, information was lost or forgotten; inevitably, details that could have saved lives were discarded or scrambled in the chaos of war. Some of this information pertained to an attack on December 7th, 1941: the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor.
A multitude of warning signs had come from the Japanese government regarding an imminent attack in the days and even months before Pearl Harbor. The Signal Intelligence Service had already broken a top-level Japanese diplomatic cipher, codenamed PURPLE, at the beginning of the war, and the government was already inundated with information such as Japanese diplomatic messages, British Ultra decrypts, and radio transmissions. However, some critical facts never made their way from the offices of American codebreakers to the most powerful officials of the Army and Navy. Directly after the attack, several different government organizations launched inquiries about the leadup to the event. The first was the Roberts Commission in 1942, which found Admiral Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Campbell Short guilty for the attack. The second was the Navy Court of Inquiry in 1944, which declared Kimmel and Short innocent and pinned the blame on Washington instead. In 1946, a joint committee was formed to consolidate both findings and deliver a final report. Among these investigations, the spark of Revisionism–radical views on the attack and on Roosevelt’s motives–turned into what would become a persisting blaze. After Roosevelt’s death, the government launched several more commissions and revealed more information and documents, while historians furiously cranked out articles arguing whether or not Roosevelt himself had let Pearl Harbor happen on purpose. The attack itself was a scalding blow to the American psyche, a catalyst to launch the United States into the crucible of war, and an event that has been debated and rehashed by historians countless times. With the amount of information the government had, juxtaposed against the scope and variety of mistakes that they made, it seemed improbable to Revisionists that the Pearl Harbor attack was not orchestrated by the government, and the release of new documents and records continue to feed conspiracies even today. Signs and Signals: Pre-Pearl Harbor Even before America entered the war, the government had a plethora of departments dedicated to discovering and absorbing as much information as possible through codebreaking and signal intelligence; however, disorganization and conflict between departments made that information difficult to disseminate and use. One of these departments was the Signal Intelligence Service, or the SIS. Similar to the more publicized and well-known British Ultra operation dedicated to cracking the German Enigma cipher, the SIS’s main work during the war involved the Japanese PURPLE cipher (also known as JN-25). The SIS eventually broke PURPLE in 1940; their solution resulted from years of experience working with older ciphers and studying the coded messages they intercepted. At first, each message had to be deciphered and translated by hand. Eventually, Frank B. Rowlett, William F. Friedman, and the rest of the SIS team reverse-engineered a PURPLE machine to decrypt the messages automatically. Although PURPLE was a top-level diplomatic Japanese code, it was rarely used for military information. No messages ever disclosed any names or locations of Japanese targets. This put the American government in a strange position; they had access to top-level diplomatic information and less-secured transmissions of less importance, but little to no knowledge of Japanese military communications. Despite the fact that PURPLE was a diplomatic cipher, it still was a profitable information mine for the government. In the months before Pearl Harbor, a constant stream of PURPLE messages were translated by the SIS. However, the SIS’s superiors in Washington and Pearl Harbor who could have used that information received only a small fraction of those messages. In 1941, the SIS received anywhere between 50-75 messages per day; from those, about 10% were translated to a readable degree. Out of the translated intercepts, only around 250 total messages were ever sent to Washington. The Navy and the Army had two separate intelligence programs; the rivalry between the two created a larger chasm, and battles of bureaucracy made it difficult to consolidate information. The SIS–the Army department– and Naval Communications Intelligence (COMINT), had somehow decided to switch off who would provide information every day, with COMINT sending messages to Washington one day and SIS the next. The two divisions forfeited collaboration in favor of each trying to garner more favor with the government. In his autobiography, Rowlett noted that the only direct contact between the SIS and the Navy were occasional meetings between Friedman, the head of his department, and Lieutenant Joseph N. Wenger, head of the Navy’s cryptanalytic unit. Not even Lieutenant Colonel Fielder, Army chief of intelligence and security at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, had access to the top-secret PURPLE decrypts. An Army general, General Douglas MacArthur, once said that he had to “barter like a rug merchant to get the intelligence [he had] needed from the Navy.” The disconnect between SIS, COMINT, Pearl Harbor leadership, and command in Washington culminated in chaos and inefficient use of the valuable PURPLE cipher. The government had other methods of obtaining information besides through PURPLE, but human error and lack of communication caused them to fail as well. One of these methods was traffic analysis–utilizing message frequency and chatter as well as locating the direction of radio transmissions to create a map of “hotspots” where activity was the highest. The Japanese fleet used mostly high-power unsecured long-distance radios to send their signals from ship to ship across a wide expanse of the Pacific, which allowed Americans to have a general sense of Japanese movements all throughout the 1930s into the early years of WWII. However, this method was far from foolproof. In fact, before Pearl Harbor, there were two weeks of radio silence from the Japanese. This had happened twice before, in February and July of 1941. Both times, the Americans believed that the Japanese carriers had returned home; both times, they were wrong. Although those two prior mistakes were not nearly as costly as Pearl Harbor, somehow the radio silence fooled American intelligence for a third time in late November of 1941. Whether it was wishful thinking or a lapse of judgement, the US government had obviously let their guard down as they prepared for war. Washington did indeed know that war was coming–in fact, they had been preparing to enter the fray since the war had begun in Europe. Army leadership knew that an attack from Japan was inevitable, but they were so desensitized to threats and warnings that their alarm was significantly dulled. On November 27th, 1941, the Chief of Naval Operations, Harold Stark, sent a message out to every American military post. The message read: “This dispatch is considered to be a war warning… Execute an appropriate defensive deployment preparatory to carrying out the tasks assigned in WPL46.” Stark was known for his dark predictions of war. On December 23, 1940, he had told Admiral Richardson, Kimmel’s predecessor, “Your flag officers and captains should be completely in the frame of mind that we will be in the fighting business most any time, and purely as a guess on my own part, I would say at any time after the next 90 days.” He had also warned that war was imminent on January 13th, 1941, October 16th, and November 7th. The Navy’s response to his November 27th message was lukewarm; since there were no concrete instructions, little action was taken. Washington had received a worrying message, known as the “14-Part Message”, from the Japanese government on December 6th, 1941, which they did not interpret as a war ultimatum; it was different from other ultimatums, but the Japanese seemed to believe it was essentially a declaration of war. The closing statement of the message read, “Thus, the earnest hope of the Japanese Government to adjust Japanese-American relations and to preserve and promote the peace of the Pacific through cooperation with the American Government has finally been lost. The Japanese Government regrets to have to notify hereby the American Government that in view of the attitude of the American Government it cannot but consider that it is impossible to reach an agreement through further negotiations.” Historically, all war ultimatums are extremely clear. This one, however, made no mention of war itself, but merely criticized the American government with an accusatory tone. The vagueness of this message was misleading; Secretary of State Cordell Hull, after reading the letter, said, “In all my 50 years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions - infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any Government on this planet was capable of uttering them.” No mention was made about imminent war. Hull saw the message as a rude nuisance, an offense to the government–but he did not immediately realize that it was a declaration of war. Looking back on the event, it seems like every error was carelessly sloppy and easily preventable. However, it was not purposeful sabotage or complete government incompetence that let information slip through the cracks–unfortunate coincidence, careless oversight, and human error were the main factors. Kimmel and Short: 1941-1945 Unfortunately, two men became the targets for these innumerable mistakes–Admiral Kimmel, and Lieutenant General Walter Short. They became scapegoats for the rest of the US; in three inquiries launched about the situation, the Navy thought they were innocent, but the outside commission did find them guilty. The first commission was the Roberts Commission in 1942, a presidentially-appointed investigation headed by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts. In the summary of facts, investigators spoke of prior communications between the Army and Navy. “The correspondence between the departments exhibits a deep concern respecting the probability of this form of attack. These commanders were acquainted with this correspondence. Nevertheless there has been amongst the responsible commanders and their subordinates, without exception, a conviction, which persisted up to December 7, 1941, that Japan had no intention of making any such raid.” They went on to write about the various warnings Kimmel and Short had received: “The warnings indicated war, and war only.” Kimmel, Short, and the rest of the Army, Navy, and the administration could not come to a clear conclusion despite all the information they had access to, yet Kimmel and Short were the ones who took all the blame. The next commission happened two years later: The Navy Court of Inquiry on the Pearl Harbor Attack released its own report on July 13, 1944. The Navy Court pinned the blame on Kimmel and Short’s superiors in Washington, accusing them of withholding information. Both men, they argued, had done as much as they could, given the information they had, to be prepared. About the “war warning” message of of November 27, they said, “There was nothing to indicate that defensive measures should take precedence over all others…. They did not consider that the expression ‘a surprise aggressive movement in any direction’ included the probability or imminence of attack in the Hawaiian area, specific mention having been made of the Philippines and Guam with no mention of Hawaii.” However, their defense of Kimmel, a man who ran a tight ship yet was well-liked by many in the Pacific Fleet, may have been tainted by bureaucracy and self-defense. In the Report’s conclusion, an accusatory finger starts to be pointed. “The Court is of the opinion that, as no information of any sort was at any time either forwarded or received from any source which would indicate that Japanese carriers or other Japanese ships were on their way to Hawaii… [was] delivered… [the attack] was unpreventable and that when it would take place was unpredictable.” Presumably, they were angry and offended at having their officers take all the blame for a problem that they believed could have stemmed from other departments’ information failures. The Navy Inquiry Court shifted blame from the two generals in Pearl Harbor to the command in Washington. Finally, due to the two differing conclusions, a Joint Committee was formed in 1946 to decide once and for all where the blame lay. Its results were mixed: “The estimate of the situation made by Admiral Kimmel and General Short is not altogether incredible in the light of the inevitable lassitude born of over 20 years of peace,” they wrote. However, they accused the men of being inattentive and lacking vigilance and a sense of urgency despite the information they were given. “Hawaii is properly chargeable with possessing highly significant information and intelligence in the days before Pearl Harbor… that there may have been other information which could have been supplied them cannot becloud or modify this conclusion. It is into the nature of this further information that we shall hereafter inquire.” Both Kimmel and Short, decorated and high-standing officers, took a devastating fall from grace in the public eye. Kimmel, once lauded by Roosevelt himself as “one of the greatest naval strategists of our time,” received a barrage of hate mail and death threats. It seemed as if the case of blame was finally closed–whether the verdict was true or not– but the issue was yet to be settled in its grave. The “further information” that the Joint Committee mentioned would gradually leak out in the years to come, and spur more rabid conspiracy throughout the years. The Navy’s accusations towards those in Washington were about to be pushed to the forefront of history. The anger, shame, and hurt from the attack made people demand a definite figure to blame, and President Roosevelt himself would be the next one. Roosevelt and the Revisionists: 1945-Present After President Roosevelt’s death, accusation moved from Kimmel and Short onto the deceased President himself. Roosevelt, while Navy and Army leadership often accused him of “playing admiral”, was not found to have ulterior motives over the course of several investigations, including one top-secret, full-access inquiry. Despite this, he became a primary target for Revisionist historians who believed that Roosevelt had hidden motives all along. While some historians believed that Roosevelt and the rest of Washington were simply careless, Revisionists saw Pearl Harbor as a purposeful move to enter the United States into World War II. Roosevelt had gained a track record for being avoidant, inconsistent, sometimes contradictory, and frustratingly unreadable in his years in office. This reputation, combined with the conspiracy-seeking nature of Revisionists, made him a prime target for their anger. Admiral Richardson once called Roosevelt a “meddling amateur”, and Roosevelt tended to be maddeningly elusive, avoiding questions about Japanese attack. Revisionist accusations against him ranged from mild, such as saying his policies prolonged the Great Depression, to extreme theories about Roosevelt orchestrating Pearl Harbor himself or aiding the rise of Russian communism. Overall, the Revisionists as a group were generally marginalized people who wanted a different take on history; they believed that the outlook on every event could be turned around and modified. Revisionism had roots in the pacifist movement and disillusionment with foreign affairs in the 20s, and clashed with the ideology of “court historians”, who usually were proponents of Roosevelt and supported more commonly held historical views. Revisionists believed that Roosevelt lied about wanting peace, and allowed Pearl Harbor to happen in order to enter WWII. The second Pearl Harbor investigation led by the Navy Court of Inquiry became the catalyst for Revisionism when John T. Flynn, an ultra-conservative writer and essayist, released pamphlets detailing his belief that Washington purposefully did not give the correct information to Kimmel and Short to start the war. His first pamphlet, “The Truth About Pearl Harbor”, was published in September 1944. He released the second pamphlet, “The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor”, a year later in September 1945. Neither pamphlet was widely circulated, but both held the first Revisionist accusations about Pearl Harbor. Flynn cited Roosevelt’s unrealistic demands towards the Japanese, the cracking of PURPLE–which he called a “gift from the gods”–and the lack of information that Kimmel and Short were given as the main evidence for his convictions. The third investigation in 1946 brought another critical Revisionist into the fray: a man named George Morgenstern. In 1947, he wrote Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War. “For years before Pearl Harbor Mr. Roosevelt had talked of peace. For months he had schemed for war,” Morgenstern wrote. The Joint Court investigation revealed the scope and the exact text of many of the PURPLE messages intercepted, and Morgenstern used those messages in his attack. The perseverance of Revisionism is the result of the continuous reveal of new information and records over time. During the initial rise of Revisionism in the late 1940s and early 50s, Revisionism was heavily criticized by court historians and the general public alike. Many people thought Revisionists were hateful, vitriolic, blindly partisan, hysterical, and delusional. However, even today, it still has not died out. In 1953, Harry Elmer Barnes published the revisionist symposium “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace”; he was accompanied by peers such as Charles A. Beard (“American Foreign Policy in the Making”, “President Roosevelt and the Coming of War”), and Charles Tansill (“Back Door to War”). As more information was revealed, more accusations were made. Charles Hiles wrote an article in the Chicago Tribune in 1966 about the “Bomb Plot” messages intercepted by the US on December 3–messages that the Japanese were sending about tracking US warships. Wartime governments are naturally secretive and information is easily hidden or lost; documents and records will inevitably be excavated, dusted off, and revealed to the public by the passage of time. In hindsight, it is easy to see so much information and believe that the government allowed Pearl Harbor to happen on purpose. Conclusion In a 2004 New York Times article titled “What Did He Know, and When?”, arguing against the advance knowledge conspiracy, author Joseph E. Persico wrote, “Neat, suspenseful plots create high drama, while the truth is often messy, contradictory, even dull.” There is much truth in his words, and in the crucible of war, nothing is ever as simple as it seems. Revisionists, however, may not have had malicious intents or desire for drama and conspiracy. None of those things are unique to them, and however crazy their ideas may seem, they are rooted in a mistrust that stems from the very nature of government: secrecy. Information is as valuable as gold, especially in times of war; its discovery, use, and transfer determines the path of every decision and battle. Though some accusations may spiral out of control, they all come back to the failure of the Army, Navy, and government to efficiently utilize the information that they acquired. In 1994, historian Alvin D. Coox slammed Pearl Harbor and Washington for their oversights: “The many-layered American intelligence and command communities missed, ignored, or pigeonholed innumerable warnings of a possible Japanese strike at Pearl Harbor.” Coox and other historians of the era such as signal intelligence specialist Rebecca Wohlstetter were not Revisionists, but they too saw the blatant errors in management that led to the attack. Revisionists took that idea a step further, and connected the government’s errors to a purposeful entry into World War II. Roosevelt’s motives, and what anyone’s thoughts and justifications at this time, might never be truly revealed. Those moments are lost to time and the erosion of memory. Historians may well wonder forever about the truths surrounding Pearl Harbor, as new information will spawn new theories, and unless the government can stabilize the precarious equilibrium of truth and concealment about military history, that will be the way it always is.