Pearl Harbor advance-knowledge conspiracy theory
Several writers, including journalist Robert Stinnett,[5] retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Robert Alfred Theobald,[6] and Harry Elmer Barnes,[7] have argued that various parties high in the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom knew of the attack in advance and may even have let it happen or encouraged it in order to ensure America’s entry into the European theater of World War II via a Japanese–American war started at "the back door", despite the fact Germany and Italy were not obliged to assist Japan in the event of aggression against another power.
[15][page needed] Investigators prior to Clausen did not have the security clearance necessary to receive the most sensitive information, as Brigadier General Henry D. Russell had been appointed guardian of the pre-war decrypts, and he alone held the combination to the storage safe.
[26]Another "eyewitness viewpoint" akin to Beatty's is provided by Roosevelt's administrative assistant at the time of Pearl Harbor, Jonathan Daniels; it was a comment about FDR's reaction to the attack – "The blow was heavier than he had hoped it would necessarily be.
"Ten days before the attack on Pearl Harbor", Henry L. Stimson, United States Secretary of War at the time, "entered in his diary the famous and much-argued statement – that he had met with President Roosevelt to discuss the evidence of impending hostilities with Japan, and the question was 'how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.
Given these two facts, both of which were stated without equivocation in the message of Nov. 27, the outpost commander should be on the alert to make his fight ... To cluster his airplanes in such groups and positions that in an emergency they could not take the air for several hours, and to keep his antiaircraft ammunition so stored that it could not be promptly and immediately available, and to use his best reconnaissance system, radar, only for a very small fraction of the day and night, in my opinion betrayed a misconception of his real duty which was almost beyond belief. ...
'[44] On October 7, 1940, Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum of the Office of Naval Intelligence submitted a memo to Navy Captains Walter S. Anderson and Dudley Knox, which details eight actions which might have the effect of provoking Japan into attacking the United States.
Sections 9 and 10 of the memo are said by Gore Vidal [citation needed] to be the "smoking gun" revealed in Stinnett's book, suggesting it was central to the high-level plan to lure the Japanese into an attack.
Evidence the memo or derivative works actually reached President Roosevelt, senior administration officials, or the highest levels of U.S. Navy command, is circumstantial, at best.
Thomas Fleming argued President Roosevelt wished for Germany or Japan to strike the first blow, but did not expect the United States to be hit as severely as it was in the attack on Pearl Harbor.
In 1929, the U.S. MI-8 cryptographic operation in New York City was shut down by Henry Stimson (Hoover's newly appointed Secretary of State), citing "ethical considerations",[51] which inspired its former director, Herbert Yardley, to write a 1931 book, The American Black Chamber, about its successes in breaking other nations' crypto traffic.
[citation needed] There were fears of compromise as a result of poor security after a memo dealing with Magic was found in the desk of Brigadier General Edwin M. (Pa) Watson, the President's military aide.
[61] Colonel Rufus S. Bratton, then serving as Chief of the Far Eastern Section of G-2 (intelligence), was responsible for receiving and distributing Magic intercepts to senior military and government officials.
[62] Others saw it differently: Roosevelt, upon reviewing just the first 13-parts (and without part 14 or the 1 p.m. delivery requirement) declared "this means war", and when Marshall was given the intercept on the morning of December 7, ordered a warning message sent to American bases in the area, including Hawaii.
The claims that no Purple traffic pointed to Pearl Harbor may also be true, as the Japanese Foreign Office was not well thought of by the military and during this period was routinely excluded from sensitive or secret material, including war planning.
Com 16's estimates were more reliable than Com 14's, not only because of better radio interception, but because Com 16 was currently reading messages in the Japanese Fleet Cryptographic System ("5-number code" or "JN25") and was exchanging technical information and Japanese-to-English translations[73] with the British unit (the Far East Combined Bureau) then at Singapore.
In the two years before the attack, the FBI had caught an effort to by Itaru Tachibana to send a ex sailor named Alva Blake to Pearl Harbor to gather information,[81] and they also had had their longer term agent Frederick Rutland spend two weeks looking around Hawaii.
For instance, the Matson liner SS Lurline, heading from San Francisco to Hawaii on its regular route, is said to have heard and plotted, via "relative bearings", unusual radio traffic in a telegraphic code very different from International Morse[86] which persisted for several days, and came from signal source(s) moving in an easterly direction, not from shore stations—possibly the approaching Japanese fleet.
This is how Lurline's radiomen, Leslie Grogan, a U.S. Navy reserve officer in naval communications, and with decades of maritime service in the Pacific[87] identified the mooted signal source as Japanese and not, say, Russian.
A re-discovered personal report written by Grogan after the radio log had been passed to the 13th Naval District, dated December 10, 1941, and titled "Record for Posterity", also does not support claims of Kido Butai broadcasting.
For two weeks before the attack, the ships of Kido Butai used flag and light signals (semaphore and blinker), which were sufficient since task force members remained in line of sight for the entire transit time.
Captain Sadatoshi Tomioka stated, "The main force in the Inland Sea and the land-based air units carried out deceptive communications to indicate the carriers were training in the Kyushu area."
Among much routine traffic was overheard a most peculiar discussion of flowers in a call to Tokyo (the significance of which is still publicly opaque and which was discounted in Hawaii at the time), but the Navy's tap was discovered and removed in the first week of December.
The Japanese focus on Southeast Asia was quite accurately reflected in U.S. intelligence assessments; there were warnings of attacks against Thailand (the Kra Peninsula), Malaya, French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies (Davao-Weigo Line), the Philippines, even Russia.
[118] These plans presumed there would be a large decisive battle between Japanese and U.S. battleships, but this would be fought near Japan, after the numerical superiority of the U.S. Pacific Fleet (assured by the Washington Naval Treaty, and still taken as given) was whittled down by primarily night attacks by light forces, such as destroyers and submarines.
[121] Yamamoto's decision to shift the focus of the confrontation with the U.S. as far east as Pearl Harbor, and to use his aircraft carriers to cripple the American battleships, was a radical enough departure from previous doctrine to leave analysts in the dark.
Several authors have controversially claimed that Winston Churchill had significant advance knowledge of the attack on Pearl Harbor but intentionally chose not to share this information with the Americans in order to secure their participation in the war.
[124][125][126] One story from author Constantine Fitzgibbon claimed that a letter received from Victor Cavendish-Bentinck stated that Britain's JIC met and discussed at length the impending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
On November 27 Washington sent a final alert to Pacific American military commanders, such as the message sent to Admiral Kimmel at Pearl Harbor, which read in part: "This dispatch is to be considered a war warning...an aggression move by Japan is expected within the next days.
One major point often omitted from the debate (though Costello covers it thoroughly)[135] is the Philippines, where MacArthur, unlike Kimmel or Short, had complete access to all decrypted Purple and JN-25 traffic CAST could provide (indeed, Stinnet quotes Whitlock to that effect),[136] and was nevertheless caught unprepared and with all planes on the ground, nine hours after the Pearl Harbor attack.
In fact, the two carriers then operating with the Pacific Fleet, Enterprise and Lexington, were on missions to deliver fighters to Wake and Midway Islands, which were intended in part to protect the route used by planes (including B-17s) bound for the Philippines (the third, Saratoga, was in routine refit in Puget Sound, at the Bremerton shipyard).
