It
is widely believed that Admiral Kimmel, the commander-in-chief of the U.S.
Pacific Fleet, and Lieutenant General Walter Short, the commanding general at
Hawaii, were responsible for the attack on Pearl Harbor—or at least for the magnitude
of the damage incurred. When Kimmel
passed away in 1968, he may have been the most despised man in America: many
have listed him alongside Benedict Arnold and John Wilkes Booth. They should have been prepared, said the
executive and the media; the often-repeated and rather crude indictment is that
they were “caught with their pants down”—that they didn’t do all they could
have to avert the attack. These
accusations ignore the fact that, though Kimmel and Short were given very
little accurate information and plenty of misinformation, they recognized the
danger and held the navy base at Pearl Harbor on its toes. They were as ready as they
could be to respond to whatever might occur.
The
embargo of oil and other materials was reported in the media, so Kimmel and
Short knew that FDR was squeezing the Japanese—they could only guess at his
reasons. According to Layton,
twenty-five percent of the fleet’s strength was transferred to the Atlantic in
May (p. 115). On June 9, Kimmel met personally with FDR to
express his concerns: he knew an attack was imminent, and he had too few planes
and anti-aircraft guns to protect either the widely-scattered fleet or the under-equipped
and under-manned base at Pearl Harbor. In
typical fashion, FDR did nothing to remedy the problem (Layton, p.115).
More
detrimental even than this vulnerability was the sheer lack of information
shared with Kimmel and Short. The
federal government possessed the capability to decrypt Japanese intercepts, but James Perloff explains that “the Hawaiian commanders were at the mercy of Washington
for feedback. A request for their own
decoding machine was rebuffed on the grounds that diplomatic traffic was of
insufficient interest to soldiers.” As early as December of 1940, FDR, Army Chief
of Staff George Marshall, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and Chief of Naval
Operations Harold Stark had access to decrypted “Purple” messages depicting
Japanese operations and intentions. None
were shared with Pearl Harbor.
From
all accounts, it appears that someone in the U.S. Government was playing the
boy who cried wolf. On November 27th,
1941, the famous “War Warning” was issued to Pearl Harbor. As quoted in John Toland’s book, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath, the warning read in part,
This dispatch is to be considered a war warning. …an aggressive move by Japan is expected in the next few days. The number and equipment of Japanese troops and the organization of naval task forces indicates an amphibious expedition against either the Philippines, Thai or Kra Peninsula, or possibly Borneo.”
(Toland, p.7)
What
many Americans don’t know is that this was only the latest in a long string of
similar warnings. In his autobiography,
Kimmel lists the multitude of messages he received in 1941: January 21,
February 3, April 3, May 14, June 17, two separate messages on July 3, July 24,
July 25, July 31, August 21, August 28, September 23, and November 24 (p.32-39). Kimmel expresses his frustration over the
confusion: “In the dispatches I received on and after October 16, 1941, I was
not given available information as to the actual status of…Japanese military
plans; nor was I given orders for alert against an attack on Hawaii. These messages had the same tenor as the
warnings which had previously been sent” (p.39). Hawaii was not named even as a suspected
target; only the Far East is mentioned—Thailand, the Kra Peninsula (part of Malaysia),
the Philippines, and possibly Borneo. It was also unclear as to whether they should be prepared for an air attack, naval attack, or some sort of espionage or sabotage. No other warning was sent to Pearl after
November 27th, so Kimmel and
Short had no reason to believe that the November 27th message was
the “real thing.”
The
odds were against the commanders at Pearl Harbor: they were pulled in multiple
directions and their force was diminished. FDR had ordered that the ships be kept inside the harbor, so they were sitting ducks, trapped within the bottleneck. Many would have given up when faced with this
dilemma, but Kimmel did his best to cope.
His standing orders required that ammunition be kept ready, that at
least one-fourth of the guns be prepared to fire at all times, and that enough
men be onboard the ships to man all the guns at a moment’s notice (Kimmel, p.18). Investigators later learned from eyewitnesses
that all the guns in the fleet were firing within seven minutes of the initial
attack, a feat usually possible only on a base in an extremely high state of
readiness (Kimmel p.18);
for a base on modified alert, it was incredible. The only reason the Japanese were able to
inflict as much damage as they did was because FDR had left the base with too
few planes and antiaircraft guns, and had refused to provide Kimmel with adequate
intelligence prior to the attack.
The author does not claim the rights to any of the images in this post.
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