Day of Deceit:
The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor
by Robert Stinnett

On the morning of December 7, 1941, nearly 200 Japanese planes struck U.S. airfields on Oahu, crippling the island's air defenses before flying on to attack the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. The USS Arizona, hit in the forward powder magazine, erupted in a huge explosion which killed most of the crew outright. The USS Oklahoma was struck by two torpedoes and capsized in thirty minutes; the USS Utah met a similar fate. A second wave of 170 Japanese planes completed the destruction. The U.S. lost 180 planes. Five battleships were sunk, and another 16 warships suffered major damage. 2,400 soldiers, sailors, and marines were killed, another 1,100 wounded. Fifteen civilians in Honolulu died by friendly fire which missed the Japanese planes and fell on the city. December 7, declared President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was a day that would live in infamy.

Roosevelt established a commission to investigate the disaster at Pearl Harbor. The commission concluded that the U.S. had no advance warning of the Japanese attack, and blame fell on Hawaii commanders Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short for lack of preparedness. Over time, that summation fell into doubt. In 1999, the Senate voted to exonerate Kimmel and Short after the Pentagon declared that blame should be broadly shared. How broadly has long been a matter of dispute. Pearl Harbor, it was said, had been taken by surprise because the U.S. had not yet cracked the Japanese codes and because the advancing Japanese fleet maintained strict radio silence. Was either claim true?

Robert Stinnett served under Lieutenant George Bush in the Navy from 1942 through 1946. Stinnett earned ten battle stars and a Presidential Unit Citation. After leaving the Navy, Stinnett concentrated on photography and journalism. For the past sixteen years, he has been studying the Pearl Harbor disaster and using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to pry documents loose from the government. He has written a book on his research titled Day of Deceit: the Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor (The Free Press, New York, 2000), dedicated to the late U.S. Congressman John Moss, the author of the FOIA. Stinnett tracked down information on U.S. radio listening posts around the Pacific, the radiomen and cryptographers involved, and the distribution of intercepted Japanese transmissions. The secret of the codes tells the story of Pearl Harbor.

War Time Cryptography

For diplomatic communications, Japan employed the Purple code and the J codes. Kaigun Ango, a second encryption system, encompassed Japanese Navy codes used to contact warships, bases, merchant marine vessels and so on. The system was dubbed the 5-Num code because words or phrases were assigned five-digit sequences. The United States broke these diplomatic codes in the fall of 1940. At about the same time, the U.S. broke four key parts of the Kaigun Ango system. These gave the U.S. information on the Japanese merchant marine; radio call signs for individual units, officers, and every category of Japanese warships; and their movement reports. Roosevelt began receiving information from the code-breakers in January of 1941.

While the U.S. listened in on the Japanese, the Japanese spied on the U.S. Tadashi Morimura, attached to the Japanese Consulate in Hawaii, was a spy collecting information on military installations and targets in the harbor. The FBI tapped his phone and monitored his activities, but the Navy eventually took control of the investigation. For months, Morimura was allowed to operate without interference—while the U.S. intercepted nearly all of his messages. The Navy did not stop Morimura because arresting him might have alerted the Japanese that the J code was compromised.

Appendix A in Stinnett's book is a reproduction in full of an Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) action proposal dated October 7, 1940. Stinnett discovered it 55 years later in a box of Navy documents in Archives II at College Park, Maryland. Written by Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum, it is an estimate of the situation in the Pacific and recommendations for action by the United States.

In the ONI's analysis, the U.S. would eventually be at war with the Axis powers. For various reasons, it would be best if we went to war while England was undefeated. Part 6 of the proposal weighed Japan's assets and liabilities. Japan had a highly centralized and capable government, along with strong army and navy. On the other hand, Japan was already involved in an "exhausting" war with China. Japan lacked sources for raw materials and was dependent upon "distant overseas routes" for essential supplies. Lastly, Japan's cities and industrial centers were "extremely vulnerable to air attack." All in all, it appeared the U.S. had the upper hand in the Pacific. Part 9 addressed the primary obstacle to war, the domestic situation:

It is not believed that in the present state of political opinion the United States government is capable of declaring war against Japan without more ado...

There follows a short list of steps to generate more ado. They include agreements with Britain and Holland for the use of bases, resources, and cooperation with an embargo of all trade; movement of some long-range heavy cruisers and submarines "to the Orient, Philippines, or Singapore"; and maintenance of "the main strength of the U.S. fleet now in the Pacific in the vicinity of the Hawaiian islands". "If by these means," one of the proposals observes, "Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better."

The movement of cruisers and submarines very nearly brought war in July of 1941. With U.S. warships stationed near Japan, Roosevelt authorized what he called "pop-up" cruises—sporadic forays into Japanese territorial waters. The purpose was to draw fire and thus begin the war. Japan protested to U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew but fired no shots. It would take all eight of McCollum's proposals to force Japan's hand.

In the 14 months following McCollum's memorandum, the elements of his plan fell into place. The desired agreements were reached; the relocation of ships was achieved; the embargo was in place; and the main strength of the Pacific fleet was at Pearl Harbor.

On November 15, 1941, Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall held a secret conference. But he did not meet Lieutenant General Short, under Marshall's command, to inform Short of the U.S. policy of provoking an attack. No, Marshall talked to seven reporters from The New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press, and the International News Service. Marshall hinted at U.S. intelligence successes, indicating that the Japanese didn't know that we knew what they were going to do. War, he told the reporters, would break out in the first ten days of December. Why did Marshall hold that conference, and what was the responsibility of the news agencies involved?

Appendix D consists of various intelligence documents, including a November 25, 1941, intercept. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy, sent a message to Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, commander of the First Air Fleet, Japan's carrier force:

The task force, keeping its movements strictly secret and maintaining close guard against submarines and aircraft, shall advance into Hawaiian waters, and upon the very opening of hostilities shall attack the main force of the United States fleet in Hawaii and deal it a mortal blow. The first air raid is planned for the dawn of X-day (exact date to be given by later order).

That "later order" was intercepted on December 2. A still later message essentially specified the hour of the attack.

Appendix E is a list of the 36 Americans cleared to read Japanese diplomatic and military intercepts. It includes the President, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, General George Marshall, General Douglas MacArthur and other Admirals, Lieutenants, Generals and Colonels. It is very difficult to imagine how anyone on that list who read the November 25th attack order could have failed to grasp its meaning.

The Set-Up

Admiral Kimmel and Lieutenant General Short were cleared to read intercepts. Which ones they received was another matter. Their access was restricted at key points, and steps were taken to deny them information on the position of Japan's aircraft carriers. They knew that Japanese-U.S. negotiations were deteriorating and hostilities were imminent. For that very reason, Kimmel had planned an exercise—war games—to search the seas north of the islands. The U.S. Navy had long considered an approach from the north to be the most likely route for a carrier attack on Hawaii, and Kimmel went well-prepared for a possible genuine confrontation with the Japanese on the
high seas. The aircraft carrier Lexington, five battleships, and forty other warships and support vessels participated in the exercise.

The exercise originally included long-range reconnaissance flights which might have detected the advancing Japanese fleet. After an objection from Rear Admiral Walter Anderson, Kimmel eliminated the flights from the exercise. Then the entire exercise was cut short by fifteen hours when Kimmel was ordered to take no action which the Japanese might interpret as offensive. Thus, the sea was cleared for the approaching enemy. They struck from the north, from the very position Kimmel had staged his exercise.

Even if we hadn't broken Japan's codes, a surprise attack was still virtually impossible, because extracting information from Japan's messages entailed much more than simply trying to read them. With Radio Direction Finding (RDF), a signal's bearing from the intercepting station could be determined. For example, if a listening post in Alaska picked up transmissions from a vessel in the course of a couple of days, it would be possible to derive information on the ship's movement.

If two stations intercepted a transmission and obtained radio bearings, the signal's origin could be pinpointed and accurately tracked even if the signal's meaning was indecipherable. And there were still other ways of squeezing information from messages whether they could be read or not. That was why the "radio silence" story was necessary. To admit that the Japanese had broken radio silence was to admit that the U.S. knew the location of the First Air Fleet.

In reality, the First Air Fleet carriers and associated vessels broke radio silence at least 28 times on their way to Hawaii. An additional 100 Japanese messages related to the attack were intercepted in the 21 days leading up to December 7th.

Roosevelt's five-man board of inquiry was headed by United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Owen J. Roberts. Roosevelt described Roberts as "forthright," but that didn't mean the White House or the military was going to give up any secrets. The Navy intercept operators were not called to testify before the Roberts Commission or any of the subsequent investigations; no radio logs were examined. Unaware that they had been cut out of the intelligence network, Kimmel and Short could not raise the issue in their own defense.

Manufacturing Public Support

The Roberts Commission, like other federal investigative commissions, was not universally believed. Admiral James Richardson denounced the Roberts Commission's Report in strong terms:

It is the most unfair, unjust, and deceptively dishonest document ever printed by the Government Printing Office. I cannot conceive of honorable men serving on the commission without greatest regret and deepest feelings of shame.

Roosevelt faced, in Stinnett's words, "an agonizing dilemma...He was forced to find circuitous means to persuade an isolationist America to join in a fight for freedom." Stinnett reminds his readers that "it is easier to take a critical view of this policy half a century removed than to understand fully what went on in Roosevelt's mind in the year prior to Pearl Harbor." I suspect the public might have taken a critical view very quickly if they had known the circumstances behind the attack on Pearl Harbor. They might well have concluded they had been swindled. The United States would probably have gone on to victory in World War II, but I wonder if Roosevelt would have been re-elected in 1944. I wonder if faith in the national security apparatus would have run so high in the following years.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Roman Emperor Augustus, it has been said, managed to maintain the apparent form of the republic while transferring ever more power to the military. U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his farewell address, warned of the dangers posed by a permanent arms establishment—the very entity created by World War II. Day of Deceit speaks directly to the role of the military in our society. Stinnett reminds us of the power of disclosure to expand our understanding. That is precisely why, in the case of Pearl Harbor and other significant events, disclosure is so relentlessly resisted.

Reviewed by Jerrold Smith
04.09.01