Discovery of Japanese sub proves sailors of USS Ward hit target in 1941

bttt

Hey Southack - I must have fell on my head.

We are in 100% agreement.

No, Kimmel and Short were NOT set up, although their respective families have paid large sums of money to spread that very rumor.

Kimmel and Short were sent to Pearl in February of 1941 to specificly defend Pearl from the Japanese. Rather than use their existing B-17 bombers as long range patrol aircraft, they instead wrote letters to FDR "demanding" specialized long range patrol aircraft, and they waited by sitting on their hands until they got such aircraft. In other words, they didn't patrol their own airspace due to their petty budget fight with FDR and Congress.

Moreover, they didn't station men at all available anti-aircraft batteries on weekends. Nor did they fly fighter aircover on Sundays.

You can blame FDR for quite a lot of things, but FDR wasn't in charge of watching that base. It was Kimmel and Short who failed to man the anti-aircraft batteries and fly fighter aircover.

Kimmel and Short had only been at Pearl since February of that year, yet they were clearly complacent and more interested in the Honolulu nightlife than in fulfilling their military duties.

And if you are ever in command of a base, expect me to bash you the very same way if you don't cover the basics, either.

Kimmel and Short were court-martialed.

I find your charges against ADM Kimmel and GEN Short ill informed. In addition, I don't think you could produce records of a courts martial. The general and the admiral requested but never received a courts martial.

Again, I have to recommend the movie "Tora, Tora, Tora!", which AMC showed over the weekend.

This sub sinking, and many other actual events from December 7, 1941 were portrayed very faithfully in that movie. Seeing the movie is pretty close to reading a detailed history.

You are correct. They were relieved of their command, but not court martialed. Frankly, they got off lightly for their lax commands.

The Attack on Pearl Harbor. A day which will live in infamy, but may remain shrouded in mystery.

Part 3: Dereliction of Duty or Sacrificial Lamb?

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The Pearl Harbor attack led to eight investigations between 22 December 1941 and 15 July 1946. During these sessions, a presidential commission, headed by Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts, found the commanders of Pearl Harbor, Rear Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, guilty of "dereliction of duty" due to the fact that there had been enough tangible evidence to show that an attack was imminent. The commission concluded that the political crisis alone was grounds for the commanders to place the entire facility on alert.

Early Warning Messages

On Nov 24 and Nov 27, 1941, Admiral Harold Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington, sent the following messages to Admiral Kimmel and Lt. General Short.
Nov 24, 1941... Chance of favorable outcome of negotiations with Japan very doubtful....This situation coupled with statements of Japanese government and movements [of] 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.

Nov 27, 1941...This dispatch is to be considered a war warning.... 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...Execute appropriate defensive deployment preparatory to carrying out the tasks assigned in WPL 46 [the Naval war plan].

In order to buttress the accusations, the Roberts commission also found four major blunders on the part of Kimmel and Short. First, they discovered that in August 1941, the Army Air Corps had warned Pearl Harbor of the possibility of a Japanese attack and that is would probably occur on a Sunday -- a period of relative inactivity for the facility. Then, on 27 November, intelligence officers in Washington notified Kimmel and Short that Japanese ships and troop carriers were moving south along the coast of China and that war would come at any day. Rather than concluding that this aggressive Japanese move was a sign of a pending attack on American installations, Kimmel and Short decided to turn their attentions to the prospect of sabotage activities, since there was a large Japanese population on Oahu.

A third finding which led to the "dereliction of duty" charge was the fact that on the morning of the attack (4:00 AM), the American destroyer Ward intercepted and fired upon a Japanese midget submarine trying to enter Pearl Harbor. Although there were witnesses to the action who claimed that the Ward had struck the submarine so as to create a visible hole in its tail section, a report of the event did not reach headquarters for several hours. There was even speculation after the attack that this vessel had actually made it through the outer defenses and sunk the U.S.S. Arizona. The fourth argument by the Roberts commission dealt with the apparent sighting of a large force approaching Oahu from the northwest at 7:10 AM by the new Opana radar station. The crew at Opana misinterpreted this as a group of B-17 bombers arriving from the continental U.S., even though these American bombers would naturally be arriving from the northeast.

After the war, a committee was formed again in order to investigate the bombing. This bipartisan committee, which met from 15 November 1945 - 15 July 1946, obtained classified documentation regarding the MAGIC system, a method by which the U.S. could decipher diplomatic codes sent through their "Purple" machine. After scrutinizing this information, their results were inconclusive. They found that although there was intense monitoring of Japanese naval radio traffic in December 1941, the U.S. only had access to diplomatic communiqués (In fact, from March to December 1941, the U.S. missed only 4 messages out of 227 which were sent from the Japanese consulate.) It wasn't until the development of ULTRA in 1942 that the Americans could decipher any Japanese military codes. Ultimately, the debate over who was to blame for the blunder at Pearl Harbor became a partisan squabble. Republicans criticized the Roosevelt administration for their lax attitude while the Democrats placed the blame entirely on the shoulders of Kimmel and Short. In the end, no one ever assumed the burden of responsibility. Kimmel and Short were not court martialed.

Every American should be forced to read this article!

Dear Franklin Roosevelt Jr:

You are incorrect. Hawaii had no B-17's the first flight was on their way to Pearl during the attack and got caught.

Kimmel's predecessor was retired early because he insisted that the main body of the fleet be kept on the west coast of California where there were better defenses and dockyards to maintain the Pacific Fleet, and where it had traditionally been.

Kimmel had the fleet on standby pretty much constantly but did not have the fuel or the spare parts for extended patrols. In fact he pretty much used up his flying patrol boats doing that.

As something for you to consider, Kimmel had the fleet out and in position to the north and east of Hawaii (that's where the Japanese fleet came in) just before December 7th, but was ordered by Stark (Roosevelt's CNO) to put back in to Pearl Harbor.

Naval Intelligence (located at Pearl) had all kinds of intercepts including inter-ship traffic from the Japanese fleet that they never shared with Kimmel.

Dig a little more into this and you might be surprised at what you learn.

Regards,

Hoorah the Naval Reserves!

JOC Junior, USNR

As something for you to consider, Kimmel had the fleet out and in position to the north and east of Hawaii (that's where the Japanese fleet came in) just before December 7th, but was ordered by Stark (Roosevelt's CNO) to put back in to Pearl Harbor.

Interesting point. I haven't read anything yet, including Edwin Layton's memoir(....And I Was There), finished posthumously by Roger Pineau (Layton was Kimmel's intelligence officer, the one to whom he directed that famous question, "You mean to tell me, they could be rounding Diamond Head....?"), that addresses the patterns of ship movement around Pearl immediately before the raid.

I recall reading that the USS Lexington was seen leaving Pearl on Thursday before the raid by the Japanese spy Yoshikawa, and Enterprise was out, too, delivering fighters to the Marine base on Wake. So where, indeed, were the carriers? Why did the carriers all "happen" to be out when Admiral Nagumo showed up? And, more to the point, who ordered them out?

This is a very important statement which I've never heard before. Could you source it, please? I'd like to read more. Admiral Stark was "in the loop" which he labored to keep Admiral Kimmel out of.

I also noticed in John Toland's Infamy, on p. 317, that the PBY squadrons flying out of Alaska were stood down on orders from DC precisely one day before the attack; the exhausted crews, glad of a break, threw a big drinking party.

Naval Intelligence (located at Pearl) had all kinds of intercepts including inter-ship traffic from the Japanese fleet that they never shared with Kimmel.

The TBS (Talk Between Ships) traffic was LF- or VLF-band traffic that was copied in the East Indies by Dutch intelligence and by COMTEN's direction-finder facility in San Francisco. An Alaskan army command was also copying the traffic, and it was picked up by the radio crew of the S.S. Lurline, which docked in Honolulu on the 4th and whose radiomen immediately showed their logs to COMFOURTEEN's intelligence officer (who died during the war). The Naval Districts reported directly to ONI in Washington, not CINCPAC, and "Betty" Stark and his bullyboy Plans director, VADM Richmond "Kelly" Turner (who spent the war directing amphibious ops and getting drunk) stuck a cork in the information and never let any of it get back to Kimmel or Layton.

This went beyond General Marshall's or anyone else's professed or inferred "fear" of compromising MAGIC. The raw intercept information from the HF-DF net would not have been as highly classified as decrypts, and the whole premise of traffic analysis is that one can easily infer confidential information from unclassified traffic patterns, secret conclusions from enough confidential information, and top-secret conclusions from secret information. I once, 30 years ago, saw a message classified TS restricted very tightly to a TS/SI reading list on this very principle, because the message was long enough and broadly enough scoped that one could make inferences that were classified at the level of compartmented information. The information from the HF-DF network would probably have been classified secret or (plain-vanilla) top secret back then, but if it had all been provided Layton, he could have made the necessary inference about the location of Kido Butai. The fact that he and Kimmel were denied this information despite its lower level of classification is extremely damaging to President Roosevelt, inasmuch as the actions of Stark, Turner, Marshall, and Marshall's principal staff officers, as well as the service secretaries, had to reflect Roosevelt's wishes and his strategy for receiving the attack he absolutely knew was coming.

Dig a little more into this and you might be surprised at what you learn.

I'm always collecting new Pearl Harbor titles. Wilford's Pearl Harbor Redefined: USN Radio Intelligence in 1941 and Stinnet's Day of Deceit are currently on my wish list.

I get a big kick out of you conspiracy buffs.

If you want a conspiracy to dig into, check out the murder of Vince Foster.

Pearl Harbor was just a plum, ripe for picking on a lazy Sunday morning.

It was a disaster waiting to happen.

"Day of Deceit" makes good reading for fiction ...

... but that's just about as far as it goes.

"Would have ...", "Could have ...", and "Might have ..." make for interesting alternate-history fiction, but Kimmel and Short got everything that was coming to them.

Sounds like you've been reading Gordon Prange. Prange was on MacArthur's staff, and has always busted the Hawaiian commanders' chops without explaining why MacArthur, with several more hours' warning than Kimmel and Short had, still lost almost his entire air corps.

As to Prange's being a MacArthur staffer, that is in itself a qualifying statement: as General Marshall once said to MacArthur in a famous retort, "Doug, you don't have a staff. You have a court."

And as for Justice Roberts and his investigation you rely on so heavily:

Justice Owen Roberts was Roosevelt's whore on the Supreme Court. He was the swing vote, the guy who turned the Court from the path of constitutionalism and began the careers of the "great" Liberal justices Brandeis, Cardozo, and Stone by opening the floodgates to their novel distortions of the Commerce Clause and other Liberal fictions about the Constitution. What's more amazing is that Roberts wasn't even a Roosevelt appointee. That's red flag number one.

And, tellingly, when Roberts's name was put up to the President, by Assistant Sec'y of the Army John McCloy, as the civilian on the Pearl Harbor inquiry that Secretary Stimson in particular had already determined must lay the responsibility at the feet of the Hawaiian commanders (red flag number two), in order to justify their immediate removal and scapegoating, Roosevelt commented over dinner to Mrs. Charles Hamlin, who was visiting the White House, that Justice Roberts "seemed very friendly lately" -- red flag number three.

Herewith a precis of Justice Roberts's role in the Supreme Court in the years when it swung from conservative and constitutionalist to swinging and liberal:

The Court-packing plan was defeated despite the President's landslide victory at the polls only a few months earlier and despite the overwhelming popular support for New Deal legislation. The President's disingenuous explanation made the plan vulnerable to factual criticism. Justice Louis D. Brandeis, widely known as a progressive dissenter from his colleagues' conservative philosophy, joined Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, demonstrating that the Court was fully abreast of its docket and would be less efficient if converted into a body of fifteen Justices. Although much of the opposition was partisan, the resistance to the Court-packing plan ran much deeper. At its source lay the American people's well-nigh religious attachment to constitutionalism and the Supreme Court, including their intuitive realization that packing the Court in order to reverse the course of its decisions would not only destroy its independence but erode the essence of constitutionalism in the United States.

Roosevelt had counted on conservative opposition and had probably anticipated some of the liberal defections, but he failed to reckon with the power of the Court itself. On March 29, in a 5-4 decision in which Roberts joined the majority, the Court upheld a Washington mimimum-wage law similar to the New York statute it had erased in the Morehead Case. Two weeks later, Roberts joined once more in a series of 5-4 rulings which found the Wagner Act constitutional. These decisions marked a turning point in the history of the Supreme Court. They upset the historic verdict in the Adkins Case and appeared quite contrary to the Court's rulings in the Carter and the Schecter cases.

On May 18, prodded by Senator Borah, Justice Van Devanter announced his retirement from the bench. Since Robert's "conversion" had given Roosevelt a 5-4 court willing to approve New Deal legislation, Van Devanter's departure made possible a 6-3 division. The need for drastic reform no longer seemed pressing. However, it would not be until July 22 that Roosevelt finally conceded defeat and the bill died.

Source: http://fc.mosesbrown.org/~dmacleod/ND_and_Supreme_Court.html

Their sources:
Archibald Cox, The Court and the Constitution ; Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987, pp 148-150
Leuchtenburg, William: Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal ; Harper Torchbooks, 1963, pp 143-145, 170-171, 232-237

Furthermore, in addition to all the foregoing, you also had the fact that the man appointed to the Roberts Commission to represent the Army Air Corps was, in fact, one of General Marshall's favorites and his right-hand man. Red flag number four. Which paled next to the fact that the senior Army uniform on the commission, Major General Frank McCoy, had been Stimson's trusted friend for over 30 years and had previously been Stimson's catspaw in his politicking to get President Hoover to accept Stimson's anti-Japanese position, and later in Stimson's successful campaign to force the Japanese either out of Manchuria, or out of the League of Nations. Red flag, huge red flag, number five.

And lastly, we have the comments of one of the two former CINCPAC's on the Commission, Admiral Wm. Standley, who was boxed in between the hanging squad from Marshall's and Stimson's offices and Justice Roberts, on the one hand, and Admiral Jos. Reeves on the other, with whom Standley had had a contretemps years before when Standley, as CNO, had passed over Reeves for a second tour as CINCPAC. Concerning the Roberts-led hanging party, Standley was so put out by their open display of prejudice toward Kimmel, who was grilled and reamed for lack of organization and not allowed assistance or counsel, notwithstanding that most of his staff was at sea already, that Standley warned Navy Secretary Frank Knox that if Kimmel were ever court-martialed, Standley would take Kimmel's case and guaranteed his acquittal. But Knox worked on Standley and manipulated him into not submitting a minority report, "lest it divide the country and harm the war effort" (thus Toland, Infamy) -- where have we heard that argument before?!

In the end, Standley signed the Roberts Commission report reluctantly, but wrote about it later, "it did not present the whole, true picture. The findings as to sins of commission presented true enough statements, but the many sins of omission in the picture were omitted from our findings, because the President in his executive order setting up the Commission had specifically limited its jurisdiction." [Emphasis added.] Funny how that happened. Red flag number six, size enormous.

Of Roberts's performance in particular, Standley later said that it had been "as crooked as a snake", a comment which promptly got Standley appointed Ambassador to Moscow. And at this point, who's counting red flags any more? If this were DIRTXPOTUS we were talking about, would there be any doubt in this forum that there was a fresh corpse buried somewhere close by and stinking everything up?

And as for the armada of B-17s you refer to.....they were all fed through to the Philippines, where Franklin Roosevelt wanted them. They were given to MacArthur, to menace the Home Islands of Japan in a "forward strategy" that Roosevelt himself had pushed (hence the retirement of Kimmel's immediate predecessor over the movement of the Fleet from San Diego to Pearl) on both the Army and the Navy.

That's why the B-17s you refer to were not in Hawaii, and why the B-17s en route from California were not to be based in Hawaii. They were all in transit.

....but Kimmel and Short got everything that was coming to them.

Bull Halsey didn't think so. He thought Kimmel got shafted and hung out to dry.

Oh, I have no doubt that he got hung out to dry, but, according to some researchers (and the Ollie North show on Fox on Sunday about the midget subs), Kimmel, a surface-line officer, had two prospective attacks to defend against: a surface/sub-surface attack and an air attack. He chose to defend against the surface/sub-surface attack and made the appropriate moves in that regard.

He chose unwisely. Admiral Byng lost his head because of it in the 1700's. Others pay for it with their lives. He was right when he said that he would have been better off had the bullet that passed through his window, narrowly missing him, during the attack had hit him instead.

By all means, Admiral Halsey thought that Kimmel had been given a raw deal. However, Nimitz did not. Spruance did not. Fletcher did not. War heroes all ... each is entitled to their own opinion.

The book I refer to is the latest (to my knowledge) on the Pearl Harbor issue, is "Day of Deceit" (I cannot recall the author at this remove). This book is based upon classified files released via the FOIA. The author demonstrates that the issues surrounding Pearl Harbor were a lot more convoluted than the current history suggests.

What cemented the matter for me vis a vis Roosevelt is the fact that in spite of everything, Kimmel had the fleet out, and was sent back to Pearl.

My theory is that Roosevelt wanted to provoke the attack so that we could get into the war, but underestimated the ability of yhe Japanese fleet. This may be why Stark was sent to England as liason after the attack (in exile) for the balance of the war.

Regards,

So you say then, but the footnotes and other sources as well as the photographic exhibits say different.

....."Day of Deceit" (I cannot recall the author at this remove).

The author is Robert B. Stinnett.

Here's an essay by him published on the anniversary of PH from two years ago.

I'm amazed that some still refuse to accept the truth.

"So you say then, but the footnotes and other sources as well as the photographic exhibits say different."

Yes, so say I ... that is simply my opinion. Other references have since disputed and raised questions about the research and the "footnotes" and "photographs" in DAY OF DECEIT. So, it just depends on who you care to believe.

It should be noted that "ARMING AMERICA: The Origins of a National Gun Culture" by Michael A. Bellesiles was also heavily footnoted and allegedly painstakingly researched, yet most of it was shown to be, at best, largely "creative writing".

Other references have since disputed and raised questions about the research and the "footnotes" and "photographs" in DAY OF DECEIT. So, it just depends on who you care to believe.

I'm very interested in Pearl Harbor and always willing to change my opinion in face of overwhelming facts.

Specifically, what are some these post-Day of Deceit sources you mention? I'd like to read them.