Pearl Harbor Betrayed (18 page)

Four more “incidents” quickly followed. On 5 September, a U.S. freighter,
Steel Seafarer,
was sunk by a German bomber 220 miles south of Suez, with no loss of life. On 19 October another U.S. freighter,
Lehigh,
steaming in ballast off West Africa, was sunk in daylight by
U-126
(Kptlt. Ernst Bauer). The vessel had large American flags painted on each side of the hull. Her crew was rescued. American protests to Berlin were ignored. On 30 October, while accompanying westbound convoy ON 28, the armed 8,000-ton U.S. Navy fleet oiler USS
Salinas
(AO-19) absorbed two torpedoes from the surfaced
U-106
(Kptlt. Hermann Rasch). Navy gunners raked the water where the U-boat submerged, but with no effect. Rasch signaled Admiral Dönitz that he had sunk the tanker, but
Salinas
reached port safely in St. Johns, Newfoundland.

The primary incident in that undeclared war between the United States and Germany in the North Atlantic occurred the next day when the old (1920) “four-piper” destroyer USS
Reuben James
(DD-245) was attacked while escorting fast convoy HX 156 about six hundred miles west of Ireland. The warhead of a torpedo launched by
U-552
(Kptlt. Erich Topp) exploded on the port side near the No. 1 stack, and, seconds afterward, another, more destructive explosion, probably from ignition of the forward magazine, blew off the entire bow section, flooding the ship. Then, as the stern sank beneath the surface, several depth charges mounted there detonated when they reached their prescribed depths, causing death to a number of bluejackets in the water. Of the 160-man crew nearby destroyers picked up only forty-five survivors, and no officers.
Reuben James
was the first U.S. Navy ship to be sunk in World War II. Her loss caused hardly a ripple of attention on the surface of the American public, who considered that those sailors knew the risks they were taking when they enlisted; the public's interest was more fixed, anyway, on the upcoming Army-Navy football game.
26
CNO Stark was one of the few to express alarm: he wrote Kimmel, “Believe it or not, the REUBEN JAMES set recruiting back about 15%.”
27

On the good news front, Stark was pleased to inform Kimmel that the government was apportioning men to the Navy Department from Selective Service, as the draft was known. That meant a bonanza of 533,000 men for the Navy and 105,000 for the Marines. Kimmel welcomed the promise of draftees. “We should lose no time in getting our ships filled up,” he responded on 12 August. “This Fleet can use 20,000 additional men today.” His four-page letter was unique in that it revealed Kimmel at his most optimistic. Never before or since was he so sanguine about the condition of his fleet as he was in the narrow window of mid-August. “I feel that gunnery in the Fleet is better than we have any right to expect,” he wrote, “considering the enormous changes in personnel and the lack of permanency of the officers.… The morale of the officers and men of the Fleet is very satisfactory, and everyone is working to the limit of his capacity.… Bloch is doing a great job.… The Honolulu people have been very fine in their continued efforts to entertain the officers and men of the Fleet in their homes and on their plantations.” Kimmel described the good effect that had been achieved by “Health Cruises” to the West Coast that enabled one-fourth of the fleet personnel at a time to enjoy leave with their wives and/or families. (Stark had readily approved the West Coast visits earlier in the summer.) And Kimmel bragged of his new recreational facilities at Pearl, which included baseball, softball, and football fields that were in daily use; a swimming pool that was filled to capacity at all times; a stadium seating 6,000 men that was suitable for boxing and wrestling matches, ships' entertainments, and movies; and a Fleet Recreation Center that featured ten bowling alleys, eleven pool tables, and a reading and writing room, as well as a large soft drink and sandwich stand, and “an enormous bar where beer is served.” Clearly, the CINCPAC was on an unaccustomed trajectory. God's in his Heaven, and all's well with the fleet. He concluded jauntily, “Keep cheerful. We are ready to do our damnest.”
28

Then, just as dramatically, ten days later, Kimmel was back to his usual role of carper. He had on hand, he complained to Stark, only thirty-five in-commission F4F-3 and F4F-3A modern carrier fighters and seventeen obsolescent carrier aircraft, when his operating allowance for three carriers and two Marine fighter squadrons was ninety. “I think you should take some drastic action to remedy this deplorable condition,” he scolded Stark; whose reply in its entirety read: “Dear Mustapha [Stark's private nickname for Kimmel]: See our serial 0136723 of 12 Sept. Best we can do. Keep cheerful. Betty.”
29
But Kimmel had other categories of shortage: modern carrier torpedo planes to replace obsolescent types; modern cruiser (catapult) planes to replace obsolescent types; patrol planes, including the new Martin PBM-1 Mariner, of which there were none in the Hawaii area; spare parts for the PBY; special radio equipment for patrol planes; aircraft torpedoes; armor-piercing bombs; aircraft machine-gun ammunition; and, finally, pilots and aviation ratings. It was in trained manpower where the fleet was particularly hurting, and increases from the draft would be of little help in the near term. Regular and experienced officers had been detached at an alarming rate. Some 3,000 sailors, more than half of them rated, had been taken from the fleet to man new construction. Of those remaining, 68 percent did not intend to reenlist; wages offered in the Pearl Harbor area, not to mention the West Coast, were too attractive to skilled men. Greater permanence of personnel was required to achieve that ship, unit, and fleet efficiency essential to maintain readiness to fight. The Pacific Fleet, Kimmel argued to Stark on 15 November, “must not be considered a training fleet for support of the Atlantic Fleet and the shore establishment.”
30

Kimmel's attention to his carrier needs highlights a quality of his naval leadership that has been overlooked in the historical literature. At a time when most naval authorities in the United States and Japan, indeed worldwide, counted the battleship as a navy's indispensable weapon, when strategists eagerly envisioned decisive main-battery salvos in blue-water engagements like the Battle of Jutland, and, accordingly, when most fleet commanders planned operations around the use of the great-hulled, strutting brutes that were the battle line of the fleets, Kimmel, like his Japanese opposite number, Yamamoto Isoruku, believed that the opening stages of the Pacific war would be, and should be, a
carrier
war and not a clash of battleships or heavy cruisers. On 22 October he wrote Stark: “
The type of operations we have planned in the early stages of the war puts a premium on aircraft operations from carriers
[emphasis added].”
31

Elsewhere, Kimmel had developed his strategy, which emphasized
light
forces, particularly air power:

In the Pacific our potential enemy is far away and hard to get at. He has no exposed
vital
interests within reach of Pearl Harbor, and has a system of defense in the Mandates, Marianas and Bonins that requires landing operations, supported by sea forces, against organized land positions supported by land-based air. This is the hardest kind of opposition to overcome and requires detailed preparation and rehearsal. It also requires a preponderance of light forces and carrier strength, in which we are woefully deficient in the Pacific. Our present strength is in battleships—which come into play only after we have reduced the intervening organized positions. They [battleships] will have to be used to “cover” the intervening operations and prevent interference therewith, but their real value can not be realized until the intervening opposition has been overcome and a position obtained from which solid strength can be brought to bear. The Japanese are not going to expose their main fleet until they are … forced to do so by our obtaining a position close enough to threaten their vital interests.
32

What was gall and wormwood to Kimmel's warrior soul was that his fleet was so reduced in light force and carrier strength that its offensive capabilities were severely crippled. Moreover, the Pacific Fleet was lacking in auxiliary vessels—tankers, cargo ships, transports—to the degree that he could not mount an overseas expedition, “even on a small scale,” for many months. A reconnaissance and raid in force on the Marshalls, mandated in WPL-46, he could carry out on schedule, as he could also “
prepare
to capture and establish control over the Caroline and Marshall Island area [emphasis added],” but actual occupation of the Marshalls and the Carolines and an advance westward across the Pacific could not be attempted before he was given thirty or forty troop transports—he currently had
one
in commission—an equal number of supply ships, seventy-five tankers,
and
a 30 to 50 percent increase in the fighting strength of the fleet.
33
The earliest date of a small-scale voyage westward Kimmel put at February 1942.
34
(This was, in fact, the month when Kimmel's relief, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, employed the fleet in their first offensive operations in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands.) And the earliest date when the fleet could operate in Philippine or Japanese home waters was midsummer 1942. Stark sought to cool Kimmel's offensive ardor, writing him on 25 November that, as for cruising in Japanese home waters, “neither ABC-1 or [
sic
] Rainbow 5 contemplate [
sic
] this as a general policy.… Opportunity for raids in Japanese waters may present themselves, but this will be the exception rather than the rule.”
35
(This was the same CNO, of course, who earlier, on 25 February, had urged Kimmel, in his planning for offensive raids to take place after hostilities began, to consider carrier bombing attacks on the “inflammable Japanese cities.”)

The import of all this—the deficiency in auxiliaries, the reduced fighting strength of the fleet, the midsummer 1942 date when Kimmel could first operate in the western Pacific—will not be lost on the reader who remembers that one of Japanese Admiral Yamamoto's expressed reasons for destroying or crippling the Pacific Fleet at its anchorage was to prevent that fleet from menacing the left flank of Japan's southward movement of conquest through the China Sea. As Navy Minister Admiral Shimada Shigetaro expressed it to Rear Admiral Fukudome, Yamamoto's chief of staff, “There would be little chance to exploit a conquest of Southeast Asia if our long Southern Operation line, stretching far below the equator, was flanked by a dominant U.S. fleet, prepared to strike at the best time and in a manner of its own choosing.”
36
With the Southern Operation long completed by the time Kimmel's fleet could appear on the horizon, Yamamoto and his navy had nothing to fear from the U.S. warships berthed at Pearl Harbor. It were better that Japanese spies in the hills overlooking Pearl counted auxiliaries instead of warships; or, if they did, that Navy strategists in Tokyo did not discount them. It were better, too, that certain critics of Kimmel had paid more attention to auxiliaries than they did, so as not to exaggerate, as some have, what Kimmel intended to achieve with his battle line. Ironically, the evidence was clear to any knowledgeable eye that an attack on Pearl Harbor was not even necessary for Japan's immediate purposes of conquest.
37

It is true that Kimmel and his chief planner, “Soc” McMorris, had developed an offensive plan of action for execution by the fleet at some date after the opening of hostilities. Drafted in March and finalized in July, Plan Optional Dash One, or Plan 0–1 (or WPUSF-44), was a contingency plan for thrusting the Pacific Fleet into blue-water battle with the Japanese Fleet in the Central Pacific, probably along the 1,028-nautical-mile Wake-Midway line.
38
Typical of thirty-four years of Orange Plan scenarios, it presupposed the availability of material resources, including auxiliaries, that were in fact lacking. The plan plainly represented the aggressive instincts of “the two foremost thrusters of the fleet,” Kimmel and McMorris, but by November–December it hardly represented any current reality, much less intent. Failure to consider a fleet's auxiliary train, because of an obsession with that fleet's eight battleships, can lead to a skewed assessment of what a fleet is capable of achieving. And, it must be said, an obsession with Kimmel's background as a battleship gunner—“Although a battleship orientation was not uncommon in the navy of 1941,” one recent author writes, “Kimmel's case was extreme”—can lead to a skewed depiction of Kimmel as some kind of naval Luddite in the matter of carriers and light forces, as in this portrayal from the same author:

Kimmel's appreciation of air power, except for reconnaissance, was rather primitive. He thought of carriers as auxiliaries: They could sally forth on raids, but their place in a fleet engagement was with the battle line. The CINCPAC didn't understand, and sometimes irritated, his aviators. “Fly-boys,” he called them.
39

That same canard was being advanced as late as 2001, when an Army colonel, writing in
MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History,
argued that “Admiral Kimmel, for example, having spent his career in a navy built around the battleship … simply could not conceive of carriers operating apart from battleships.” By telling coincidence, the editor of
MHQ,
in a prefatory “Note to Our Readers” in the same issue, wrote: “A history is only as good as its sources.”
40

In both instances the view taken of Kimmel is not supported by the pertinent original documents, as cited here. Furthermore, such a gratuitous position would have a hard time reconciling itself to Kimmel's operational doctrine as applied by his subordinate commander Vice Admiral Halsey, on 28 November, when Halsey's Task Force 8 sortied “under war conditions” to ferry Marine F4F fighters aboard the USS
Enterprise
(CV-6) to Wake Island. It did so accompanied by his trudging battleships, as though heading for a typical exercise in the operating area; but, once at sea, Halsey sloughed off his three battleships, which busied themselves for a time in exercises, and then returned to Pearl. Similarly, when Admiral Newton's Task Force 12, built around USS
Lexington
(CV-2), left Pearl for Midway on 5 December to fly off air reinforcements to that island, it consisted, besides the carrier, of three heavy cruisers and five destroyers—
no
battleships. (A third task force, TF-3, under Vice Admiral Wilson Brown, consisting of the heavy cruiser USS
Indianapolis
(CA-35) and five destroyers, departed Pearl on the same 5 December to conduct landing exercises on Johnston Island.) Like Yamamoto Isoruku, Husband E. Kimmel was a farsighted pioneer in his keen understanding of the carrier war to come. Both men understood that the battleship was too slow, and its reach too short, to keep pace with that war.