Pearl Harbor Betrayed (17 page)

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From August to November the United States Army and Navy accelerated their preparedness for war. General Marshall stated that his forces in the Philippines would not be ready for combat until 5–10 December. Stark stated that his fleets would not be ready for offensive action until January or February 1942.
13
Both service chiefs urged the President to buy time by “stringing out the negotiations,” though not at the cost of American principles and obligations. Repeatedly, they urged “That no ultimatum be delivered to Japan.”
14
Marshall explained in 1944: “Our state of mind at that period—I am referring now to both Stark and myself—was to do all in our power here at home, with the State Department or otherwise, to try to delay this break to the last moment, because of our state of unpreparedness and because of our involvements in other parts of the world.”
15

From August through November the Army exhibited a sharp change of mind with respect to the Philippines. On 14 August the chief of Army strategic plans, Brigadier General Leonard T. Gerow, advised Marshall that “the ability of the Philippine Islands to withstand a determined attack with present means is doubtful.”
16
Marshall had to make a decision. He knew that if Japan made a military strike south against Malaya and/or the NEI, she could not allow U.S. air bases in the Philippines, which lay along the China Sea sealanes between Japan and those British and Dutch possessions, to interdict Japanese naval and commercial shipping. If Japan moved south, she would have to seize and hold those islands. But were the islands defensible? Should the Army yield them as sacrificial pawns and save the American troops, munitions, and aircraft there for other battles to come? Or should the Army make a good faith effort to strengthen the defenses so that the Philippines had a realistic chance to defend themselves against assault? Marshall chose the latter course. He was encouraged to do so by two developments. The first was the contagious optimism of General Douglas MacArthur, recalled to active duty on 26 July as commanding general, United States Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE). One of the Army's celebrated veterans of World War I and a former chief of staff, he had served six years as military adviser to the Philippines Commonwealth Army. In July 1941, when that army was federalized, MacArthur expected that he could increase its numbers to 120,000 regulars and reserves by mid-December. He also assumed command of some 22,000 U.S. Army regulars and Philippine Scouts, who had been well trained by outgoing Philippine Department commander Major General George Grunert. With those forces and a little help from the Army Air Corps, MacArthur thought that he could ride out a Japanese assault, and so persuaded Marshall. More than just a “citadel” at Manila Bay, he would defend the entire archipelago, a claim, as Marshall would learn later, that was oversanguine to a fault.
17

The second factor was an equally optimistic chief of the Army Air Corps, Lieutenant General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, who was touting the virtues of the Boeing Company's new B-17D model of the Flying Fortress four-engine heavy bomber. Accompanied by Secretary Stimson and Arnold, Marshall flew out to the Boeing plant at Seattle to see for himself. There the Boeing people put the B-17D through a number of impressive bombing runs and antifighter machine-gun displays that proved convincing in theory. (In actual combat, including the Battle of Midway [4–6 June 1942], the aircraft's bombing accuracy against ships at sea proved notoriously lacking.) Marshall and Stimson bought the theory and decided that the presence of such technologically advanced weapons, as they assumed the Fortresses to be, on Philippine bases would not only materially assist MacArthur in defending the islands but likely would deter a Japanese invasion fleet from proceeding south through the China Sea along MacArthur's flank. To that end, on 26 August, Marshall ordered a first squadron of nine B-17s from Hickam Field on Oahu to be ferried to the main island of Luzon. Taking off on 5 September, the squadron was staged through Midway, Wake, then southwest at night over the Japanese mandates to Port Moresby, New Guinea, and Darwin, Australia; arriving at Clark Field north of Manila on 12 September. The historic first flight of land-based bombers from Hawaii to Clark, which was serviced by primitive maintenance, refueling, and navigational and weather information stations, proved that the Philippines could be reinforced by air.
18
Thereafter on 30 September, Marshall staged two more squadrons (twenty-six Fortresses) from San Francisco through Hawaii to Clark, gave orders to send thirty-five Fortresses to Clark in December (these landed at Hickam for refueling in the middle of the Japanese raid), and discussed sending out six to nine of the new four-engine Consolidated B-24 heavy bombers, soon to be named the Liberator but known to Marshall as the “super Flying Fortress.” Thinking offensively, Marshall advised Stark that the operating radius of the B-24 allowed it to bomb the Japanese cities of Osaka and Tokyo with full and partial bomb loads, respectively.
19
He did not say from what base.

What had happened was that the War Department, relying on what turned out to be inflated estimates of both what MacArthur could accomplish with the ground forces at hand and what heavy bomber aircraft could achieve in repelling invasion forces sent either south to British and Dutch possessions or to the Philippines themselves, shifted the American defensive effort 4,700 nautical miles west of Hawaii. Not only were no additional B-17s to be sent to reinforce Hawaii, but Hickam Field would be all but denuded of its own B-17s in order to supply the Philippines. By 7 December, when the Philippines boasted thirty-five of those craft, the largest concentration of B-17s in existence anywhere, Hickham, which in June had twenty-one, could count only six in operating condition, and they were not being used for practice search or attack missions over Hawaiian waters but to train crews for the Philippine Air Force. General Marshall testified about the projection of bomber strength westward before the JCC on 7 December 1945:

We turned from the meeting of the demands in Hawaii and not fulfilling the Martin-Bellinger request for 180 B-17s of which in all we possessed all over the world 148 at that particular time.… We did our utmost one way or another to provide the things that the Navy thought were needed and the Army commander in Hawaii thought were needed.… From the latter part of August, having given Hawaii all we could afford to give them up to that time … we turned and tried to do something for General MacArthur, and most of that went through the Hawaiian Islands, incidentally, by Navy or by air.
20

The projection westward was an understandable strategic decision, one with which Admiral Stark fully agreed, as he wrote to Savvy Cooke: “We are delighted with the Army move putting the Filipinos in harness; we recommended this. Also it is being supplemented by a considerable number of planes, fighters and bombers.”
21
It was also a decision with which Admiral Kimmel agreed, having written Stark on the preceding 26 May: “It is easily conceivable that 50,000 troops and 400 airplanes on Luzon might prove a sufficient deterrent to Japan to prevent direct action.”
22
But one might pardon Admiral Kimmel and General Short a certain amount of envy as they watched those majestic flocks of bombers passing through Hawaii on their migration to distant danger sites. Kimmel could have used the B-17s both for distant aerial reconnaissance and for attacking a Japanese surface fleet if one appeared in Hawaiian waters. That he himself had urged the transfer of long-range bombers to Luzon might have weakened his case later when he argued that he did not have sufficient aircraft to mount a 360-degree distant search of the ocean approaches to Oahu; but his critics never mentioned the fact.

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Four times Kimmel had asked Stark to be kept informed of all secret information about Asian and European developments that might affect his fleet's security and mission. In February he had written Stark about his concern that “information of a secret nature” was not arriving in any significant amount. His concern was well placed, because, though he did not know it, Admiral Hart and later General MacArthur received Magic-generated intelligence from Washington even though they were equipped with Purple decryption machinery themselves. Kimmel wondered if the paucity of intelligence sent his way was owed to a “misunderstanding” between Naval Operations and the Office of Naval Intelligence as to which office was responsible for keeping him informed. On 22 March Stark answered that “ONI is fully aware of its responsibility in keeping you adequately informed.” Yet by the end of May, when Kimmel made a personal visit to Washington, he was persuaded (correctly) that much was being held back, and he handed Stark a written restatement of what he regarded to be a “cardinal principle”:

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. This lack of information is disturbing and tends to create uncertainty, a condition that directly contravenes that singleness of purpose and confidence in one's own course of action so necessary to the conduct of military operations.

It would seem that this was the propitious moment for Stark, among other replies he might make, to ask Kimmel if he was receiving Magic. But he did not. Kimmel went on to discuss a conflict that would bear heavily on him and his staff after 27 November, as will be shown:

This is particularly applicable to the current Pacific situation, where the necessities for intensive training of a partially trained fleet must be carefully balanced against the desirability of interruption of this training by strategic dispositions, or otherwise, to meet impending eventualities.… It is suggested that it be made a cardinal principle that the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet be immediately informed of all important developments as they occur and by the quickest secure means available.

Much of the news conveyed by Stark was not by “quickest secure means,” i.e., naval radio communications, but by personal letters that, having traveled overland to California, thence by China Clipper flying boat, took up to a week in arriving. So Kimmel made the same appeal for a third time, on 26 July, to which Stark made the perfunctory reply: “If you do not get as much information as you think you should get, the answer probably is that the particular situation which is uppermost in your mind has just not jelled sufficiently for us to give you anything authoritative.” Armed with copies of Admiral King's “shoot on sight” operation orders given after the 4 September
Greer
event, Kimmel approached Stark again, on 12 September, with a fourth appeal for information—“But what about the Pacific?” Stark's reply, dated 23 September, was made a subject of his interrogation during the Naval Court of Inquiry (NCI), in 1944:

Q. You [Stark] intended … to indicate to Admiral Kimmel that you would keep him fully and promptly informed as to all diplomatic developments which you learned, at least from the Secretary of State?

A. That's right.
23

Thus, Stark told Kimmel both that ONI would keep him informed and that he personally would keep him informed. But in the event neither kept him informed, particularly after July.

During October a minimum of “secret” information (and no raw Magic) was arriving at Pearl Harbor, and it was not much more specific in content, distinguishable in tone, timely in arrival, or enlightening in foresight than what appeared in the Associated Press dispatches in the daily Honolulu
Advertiser
. What had to be particularly maddening to Kimmel was Stark's penchant for nixing or fudging what little intelligence the department did send. On the day after the 16 October warning, Stark wrote in a personal letter: “Personally I do not believe the Japs are going to sail into us and the message I sent you merely stated the ‘possibility,' in fact I tempered the message handed to me [by War Plans?] considerably.” Again, in the same letter, like a Broadway Hamlet, Stark stated, “You will also recall in an earlier letter when War Plans [Turner] was forecasting a Japanese attack on Siberia in August, I said my own judgment was that they would make no move in that direction until the Russian situation showed a definite trend.”
24
Stark's confused signals may have reminded Kimmel of Lord Raglan's order, later called “fatally lacking in precision,” to Lord Lucan at Balaclava, which led to the ruin of the Light Brigade.
25

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Meanwhile, during the same four-month period (August–November), things heated up in the North Atlantic, where the first American blood was shed on the night of 16–17 October. An eastbound British slow convoy, SC 48, composed of forty-nine loaded merchant ships in eleven columns, protected by only one destroyer and four corvettes, had been attacked the night before by a patrol line of U-boats, resulting in the loss of four freighters. Five U.S. Navy destroyers, including the now-famous
Greer,
proceeded to the assistance of SC 48. A second night attack by the U-boats found the barely year-old USS
Kearny
(DD-432) silhouetted against a burning freighter in the bridge optics of the surfaced
U-568
(Kptlt. Joachim Preuss). Thinking the destroyer to be British, as he subsequently signaled Admiral Dönitz, Preuss launched a torpedo into
Kearny
's starboard side. The damaged but tough
Gleaves
-class destroyer survived the attack, and, escorted by
Greer,
managed to make the Atlantic Fleet anchorage of Hvalfjordhur at Iceland; but there she delivered eleven American seamen dead and twenty-four wounded.