[Jimmy Valentine's brother]

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.

[Southack]

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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More of this Feature • Part 1: The Gathering Storm. • Part 2: At Dawn We Slept.  Join the Discussion "If Pearl Harbor hadn't been bombed what would it have taken for the United States to officially enter WWII? " Submitted by DAE12   Related Resources • The Pearl Harbor Attack Hearings • The Search for the Japanese Minisub. • The Pacific Theater.  • Intelligence and Espionage in World War II.   From Other Guides • The Pearl Harbor Resource Page • Franklin D. Roosevelt Page • Japanese-American Internment  Elsewhere on the Web • Imperial Japanese Navy Page • Pacific Strategic Map.   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.