Posted on 12/07/2006 5:45:29 PM PST by loreldan
Around this time every year, Joe Fenton’s mind wanders back to the preview he had of the destruction that would be unleashed on Pearl Harbor.
Just 17 years old and six months removed from boot camp, Fenton was an oiler on the USS Boise as it escorted five merchant ships carrying air base construction materials across the Pacific to the Philippines. After midnight on the morning of Nov. 28, 1941, the light cruiser’s loudspeakers blared with orders for crew members to man their battle stations.
Fenton scrambled to the deck and saw two dozen ships of unknown origin about 3 miles away on the horizon, heading east. They were
silhouetted by moonlight that would have blinded the fleet to the Boise’s presence.
Greatly outnumbered and under orders to maintain radio silence, the Boise did not fire and did not alert anyone for days to what it had seen.
When the Boise reached Manila, officers alerted members of Gen. Douglas Mac-Arthur’s staff of their find, Fenton said. Their reaction, as he recalled, was: “They’ve got as much right to be in the water as we do.”
It was only when word came down Dec. 7 about the Pearl Harbor attack that Fenton and his shipmates realized they had seen the fleet that brought America into World War II. While the Boise hid by a remote Pacific island after the attack and awaited orders, talk buzzed about what its crew could have done.
That conversation has dimmed today; most crew members have passed away. But Fenton, a retired Colorado Springs plumbing company owner, replays the talk to himself.
“I always think that perhaps we could have prevented the whole thing . . . if we had got the alarm off,” the 82-year-old said last week in his kitchen. “I always think: ‘Maybe I could have prevented this.’ I get real sad about it.”
But he said that thought is followed quickly by the realization that if the Boise had made any move that could have alerted the Japanese it had seen them, the fleet would bombarded it into the pages of history.
“I think the whole picture of World War II would have changed if we had just gotten a radio off,” he added. “But it would have cost my life.”
Memorial events across the country will mark the 65th anniversary today of the early morning raid that killed about 2,500 Americans. Some people will head to Hawaii to honor the occasion; others will gather at local monuments.
Fenton will be in Colorado Springs, surrounded by newspaper clips and medals that mark his Navy service and, later, the Army. His thoughts, though, will be on what he saw in the middle of the ocean.
No one present forgot that moment, which has been little recorded in history. Melvin Howard, a former crewman and current Philadelphia resident who once chaired reunions for the Boise, remembered that everyone on the ship was ready to fire if ordered.
“We never got the word to fire,” Howard said. “And it’s a good thing we didn’t, because they would have blown us out of the water.”
Once America entered the war, the Boise made 14 landings in the Pacific and in Europe, fought in the Battle of Guadalcanal and served as a scout vessel before the famed Doolittle Raid on Tokyo.
The Boise earned its greatest accolades by sinking six Japanese ships in 27 minutes off Cape Esperance in 1942. Despite a shell crashing through a part of the ship in which he was working, Fenton, who fed oil into boilers and later was a ship engineer, remembers staying calm.
His mother, who raised him in Denver, saved newspaper articles about the ship and gave them to him in a scrapbook when he returned. Fenton also kept a diary during his service, and he typed it up in recent years to preserve it.
“Did not know what was going on, we were not at war, the ships all stopped and our gun turrets all trained to our port side,” he wrote of the November 1941 sighting. “That makes you wish you had gone to the bathroom a little earlier.”
After being transferred to the Army and serving a short stint in Asia during the Korean War, Fenton started a business in Colorado Springs. He ran Fenton Plumbing and Heating until retirement in 1982, when he passed the company on to his son.
He stops there for coffee every once in a while, and he carves wood figures for his family and friends. Twice widowed, the decorated veteran spends every Friday night dining and dancing at the Veterans of Foreign Wars post with his girlfriend.
Late 1941 is not that far away, though. Any mention of Pearl Harbor sparks thoughts of that day, and any thought about what he saw leads him to think even more about what could have occurred.
“They made no hostile moves to us,” Fenton said. “It was like two strangers passing in the night. We weren’t going to initiate the firing. There was no way we could have survived that.”
Signals Intelligence and Pearl Harbor: The State of the Question found in the August 2006 issue of "Intelligence and National Security" by Professor Brian Loring and Dr. Timothy Wilford, pages 520-556.
Your direct "calibrate me" question is addressed in the last paragraph of page 540.
It takes a fair amount of time to round up all the loose ends of an entire fleet,..especially to make the 7-pronged attack the Japanese made in Dec'41 which spanned control on over half the Earth's surface. Pearl Harbor was only a small, but highly publicized portion of those surprise attacks.
They might not of had much effect on Pearl Harbor, but Singapore might have been better buffered. IMHO, even at the intel gathering mechanisms of the PacFlt or the MacArthur staff, such reports would have been like reporting one stick in a bridge in observing things to come.
Whatever this guy claims to have seen... I don't believe it was the Pearl Harbor strike-force.
Acts included the freezing of Japanese assets, non-renewal of trade agreements, and with the British and Dutch, the implementation of a world-wide oil embargo, and aggressively supplied the Chinese with military and economic aid ... ,etc. There also were "acts of war" being conducted by the US Navy in the Atlantic.
In the case of the oil embargo, FDR committed to the armed support of British and Dutch territory should the Japanese move against them. That bell was rung on Decemeber 5, 1941. Oh, Congress found this out only after the war ...
Japan, knowing it was committing national suicide - decided to fight, and knowing full well by August 1940 that the British would not sustain a presence in the Far East, and that Admiral Hart had a nominal fleet, Japan had a priori to deal with PH. [And yes, they missed the oil storage depots ... and very importantly the two Pacific Fleet oil tankers at PH at the time of the attack.]
The US, by its actions on November 26, 1941, the timing never truly explained, resulted in the fuse being lite ...
Actually, the Navy was concerned about having "lost" the Japanese fleet in the days before Pearl Harbor. The Japanese had placed the Morse operators from the fleet on islands in the South China Sea and had them sending dummy traffic to satisfy the Navy's "Huff-Duff" (High Frequency Direction Finding) Chain stretching from the Aleutians to the Philippines, while the fleet steamed in radio silence. (The Huff-Duff operators could recognize a particular Morse operator's "fist", so the same individuals had to send the dummy traffic.)
Although they had radio fixes, they would have liked to have had some visual sitings. Given the diplomatic climate between the U.S. and Japan at that time, this sighting would have been tantamount to act of war on the part of the Japanese. At the least the commanders at Pearl Harbor would have launched vigorous sea plane surveillance of the northwestern approaches. (Again, given the diplomatic climate and uncertainty about the location of the Japanese Fleet, something they should have been doing routinely, in any event.)
Had the Boise waited until she had steamed out of sight of the Japanese Fleet and sent the message they would have surely have been safe. The Japanese could not have tolerated the delay required to go after them, and the secrecy of the operation was blown in any case. Without complete surprise, the Pearl Harbor raid would have been nearly suicidal (not that that ever stopped the Japanese.) Without the huge tactical and strategic advantages from the Pearl Harbor raid, it is unlikely the Japanese would have instigated a war with the U.S.
In any event, the failure to immediately grasp the significance of the intelligence provided by the Boise when she docked in the Philippines is inexcusable. MacArthur clearly was hoping to avoid a war with the Japanese, but this information should have been passed up the line as expeditiously as possible.
Thanks for the reference...
Of course, like our enemies of today, the Japanese covered their plans for a surprise attack with negotitations with Washington.
Sounds like history will repeat itself.
East wind, rain.
Rusbridger and Nave Betrayal at Pearl Harbor ... Acknowledgments (page 14) ... visit to Briggs
SRH-051 ... Interview with Briggs
Admiral King's Endorsement of NCI ... Stark's office got message
... there are others.
You might also note that the majority of objective Pearl Harbor scholarship is now being done outside of the United States. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are obvious; that on-going in the former USSR is not so apparent ... particularly that on naval traffic.
Please see Note #45.
On those radio operators ... See Layton, page 317 ... something about a "... ham-fisted operator ..." That is, he ain't in the Inland Sea, he is north of Pearl Harbor ...
That the operators were left in Japanese home waters or that the transmitters were replaces are myths.
Recommend Pearl Harbor Redefined: USN Radio Intelligence in 1941 by Wilford, circa 2001. This is from his MA thesis in History at University of Ottawa.
You forgot something... Japan allied with the axis powers knowing full well a War in Europe would strain the U.S. to its limits (or so thought).. and without most of its Navy(Pearl Harbor) would founder.. i.e. it would take two navies to fight two Wars.. (or so thought)
AND...... they(Japanese) were very nearly correct.. We won WWII with incredible luck and fortune.. Hitler was a Moonbat with a Napoleonic complex.. Else he (and the Japanese) would have won.. We squeaked by on that one..
Allowing communism to be legal(by Truman and the democrats) is where we made our greatest mistake.. For it was and is the leaven thats leavened to whole lump in the U.S... Communism is a dread social disease and America is dieing, and will die because of it.. At least the America in the U.S. Constitution..
It was the FDR administration and not Truman's which recognized the Soviet Union. And that "social disease" likely got its start with FDR's "New Deal" programs. And, as we are now aware, via the Venona Project, the FDR administration was riddled with communists.
Prior to Pearl Harbor American industrial was shifting to war production, the upper limit was not even imagined. That war production fed the Lend-Lease program, first legally as "cash-and-carry" and then illegally, as the US was a non-belligent. Note, for example, that hundreds of PBYs (patrol aircraft) went to Britain and USSR ... while the allocation to Pearl Harbor was woeful, even though Kimmel was screaming for them.
Prior to Pearl Harbor, Germany was stalled before Moscow and winter was setting in, Japan still had China to deal with, and Italy had its hands full. The French fleet was largely sunk, the Battle of Britain was won, and British sea lanes with US Navy support (acts of war) were becoming less dangerous.
On the US Consitution, recall that recently a certain impeached person was via a US Senate vote allowed to remain in office, and also the document says that the US Congress has the sole responsibility to declare war. Realities versus appearances ... Or politics trump principle?
The situation in Europe and Asia was known in 1940. Why did not FDR simply ask/demand Congress for a declaration of war? Answer: He would not get it, and he clearly would not have been re-elected.
A dilemma indeed.
So was Truman's.. and every President's since.. Venona was the tip of the iceberg.. America is becoming more socialist not less every day.. The cold war was LOST not won.. The socialism of capitalism is well advanced.. (SSA) Social Security is PURE socialism.. Americans have become socialists.. Communism is not like socialism, communism "IS" socialism..
Remember Lend-Lease?
In the Spring of 1943, under Lend-Lease, the US sent to the USSR tens of tons of nuclear materials - including enriched uranium. Director of Lead-Lease at the time ... one Harry "The Hop" Hopkins. The US Trinity Shot was over a year away ...
"The Hop" was known as FDR's alter ego ... he also was, via Venona, Soviet "Agent No. 19" ...
And, then, there was Tehran, then there was Yalta ...
On order from Amazon, thanks!
Mr. Wilford is now Dr. Wilford, having successfully completed his studies in History at the University of Ottawa.
His 2005 PhD dissertation, "Canada and the Far East Crisis in 1941: Intelligence, Strategy, and the Coming of the Pacific War" will soon appear in book form.
Yeah, I clicked his name on Amazon, that's his one and only for now. I was hoping to see more my him, sounds very interesting.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.