Chapter 17: 17. The Public Had Questions How Much Damage Had the Japanese Inflicted on Pearl Harbor?

The people in this country were panic-stricken. Why had Japan attacked the U.S. Fleet while negotiations with the U.S. were still ongoing? How much damage had been inflicted? Would the Japanese land in Hawaii? Would they attack the west coast of the United States? Would they attack Panama?

Secretary of Navy Knox determined to investigate the situation in Hawaii himself. He called on President Roosevelt Monday morning to ask permission to fly to Pearl Harbor to inspect the carnage firsthand, to find out for himself how much damage had been done, and to determine the responsibility for our forces’ apparent lack of preparedness. Roosevelt agreed to his trip. Knox spent the day gathering background material to study on the flight. Hawaii was still a territory, not yet a state. Secretary of Navy would be traveling outside the country, so Under Secretary of Navy James W. Forrestal would take over as Acting Secretary. Forrestal had not previously been on the list of those few top military and political officials privy to the closely guarded MAGIC intercepts. However, as Acting Secretary he was entitled to see them, and he asked to be briefed. Navy courier Lieutenant Commander Kramer assembled for Forrestal a sizeable folder of the intercepts bearing on Pearl Harbor, took them to Forrestal’s office on December 10, and spent some time “going through [the folder] . . . giving [Forrestal] the general tenor of the way the things shaped up from this traffic.”^[1]

It was a long trip to Hawaii in 1941, more than two days each way. The flight began on December 9. Accompanying Knox were his aide, Captain Frank E. Beatty, Lieutenant Commander Edward A. Hayes, USNR, Joseph W. Powell, vice president of Bethlehem Shipbuilding Company and two Knox assistants, one a specialist in shipbuilding matters. The Knox party flew first to Memphis where the plane was gassed up, and then to El Paso where they overnighted because of bad weather. The next day was rough; the plane iced up heavily going over the mountains, but arrived safely at San Diego where a four-engined flying boat, heavily loaded with medical supplies badly needed in Hawaii, was waiting to take them on the 2,000+ mile overseas flight. They had trouble taking off but finally made it. They encountered such turbulence and icing conditions at 7,000 feet that everyone donned full cold-weather flying gear and wrapped themselves in blankets. The pilot brought the plane down to 1,000–1,200 feet where it was smooth but still intensely cold.

Not knowing what to expect in Hawaii, Knox and his party prepared for the worst. As they approached the islands, the plane’s machine guns were manned. Everyone donned life preservers and parachutes. To avoid being mistaken by some trigger-happy lookout for an enemy plane, the pilot followed his landing instructions precisely. They landed on Oahu on the morning of December 11.

Once on the ground, Knox and his companions saw wreckage everywhere. The air station at Kaneoho seemed to have been “completely devastated.” So far as they could see, “no planes remained in flying condition. The wreckage of Navy PBY seaplanes which had been shot to pieces or burned were visible on the ramps and in the water. The large hangars were burnt out.” Pearl Harbor presented a

tragic picture. . . . [A]ll of our modern battleships, save the Colorado, were there, damaged in various degrees. The Arizona, a shattered mass of wreckage with smoke still pouring from her debris. The Oklahoma capsized. The Maryland, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania bombed or torpedoed. The Nevada grounded near the hospital, bombed in her valiant effort to clear the harbor.^[2]

Admiral Kimmel met Knox and his companions at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, “grim and unlike the gay tourist hotel of peacetime days.”^[3] They met some of Kimmel’s staff at his quarters. Later General Short joined them.

Neither Kimmel nor Short attempted to justify their lack of readiness to oppose the attack. They readily acknowledged that

The Japanese air attack on the Island of Oahu on December 7th was a complete surprise to both the Army and the Navy. Its initial success . . . was due to a lack of a state of readiness against such an air attack. . . . While the likelihood of an attack without warning by Japan was in the minds of both General Short and Admiral Kimmel, both felt certain that such an attack would take place nearer Japan’s base of operations, that is, in the Far East.^[4]

An air attack had appeared

extremely unlikely because of the great distance which the Japs would have to travel to make the attack and the consequent exposure of such a task force to the superior gun power of the American fleet.^[5]

Moreover, they had not expected an attack by the Japanese while negotiations were still going on in Washington, as the Hawaiian press had reported.

Kimmel had received a “general warning” from the Navy Department on November 27. His chief fear had been of a submarine attack, and he had made “all necessary provisions to cope with such an attack.”^[6] As a matter of fact, the air attack was accompanied by a submarine attack. Two Japanese submarines were sunk, one ran ashore, and one small two-man submarine penetrated the harbor. According to Knox at the time of the attack

Neither Short nor Kimmel had any knowledge of the plain intimations of some surprise move, made clear in Washington through the interception of Japanese instructions to Nomura, in which a surprise move of some kind was clearly indicated by the insistence upon the precise time of Nomura’s reply to Hull, at 1:00 on Sunday.^[7]

In contrast to Kimmel, Short had considered sabotage “the most imminent danger to the Army . . . because of the known presence of large numbers of alien Japanese in Honolulu.” The Army’s sabotage alert “unfortunately” called for

bunching the planes on the various fields on the Island, close together, so that they might be carefully guarded against possible subversive action by Japanese agents. . . . This bunching of planes, of course, made the Japanese air attack more effective.^[8]

Short’s fear of a Japanese “fifth column” was by no means unjustified. Japanese agents had “provided the Japanese Navy with exact knowledge of all necessary details to plan the attack,” including

exact charts showing customary position of ships when in Pearl Harbor, exact location of all defenses, gun power and numerous other details. Papers captured from the Japanese submarine that ran ashore indicated that the exact position of nearly every ship in the harbor was known and charted.^[9]

It is acknowledged that “the best means of defense against air attack consists of fighter planes.” However, the number of such planes available to the Army for the defense of the Island was far from adequate. This, Knox remarked in his report, was “due to the diversion of this type [of plane] before the outbreak of the war, to the British, the Chinese, the Dutch and the Russians.”^[10] “The next best weapon against air attack is adequate and well-disposed anti-aircraft artillery.” The “dangerous shortage” of this type of gun, Knox reported, is “through no fault of the Army Commander who has pressed consistently for these guns.”^[11]

The Army carried out no morning patrol on December 7. The Navy sent out at dawn a ten-bomber air patrol, which searched the southern approach to the islands, considered the most likely direction from which an attack might be expected; they made no contacts with enemy craft. The Navy’s condition of readiness was

described as “Condition Three,” which meant that about one-half of the broadside and anti-aircraft guns were manned, and all of the anti-aircraft guns were supplied with ammunition and were in readiness.^[12]

The Japanese air force planes had swept over Pearl Harbor in three waves. “The torpedo planes, flying low, appeared first over the hills surrounding the harbor, and in probably not more than sixty seconds were in a position to discharge their torpedoes.” The first wave was “substantially,” but not completely, unopposed. “The first return fire from the guns of the fleet began, it is estimated, about four minutes after the first torpedo was fired, and this fire grew rapidly in intensity.” The second wave over the harbor “was resisted with far greater fire power and a number of enemy planes were shot down. The third attack over the harbor,” about an hour and 20 minutes after the first, “was met by so intensive a barrage from the ships that it was driven off without getting the attack home, no effective hits being made in the harbor by this last assault.”^[13]

Knox and his companions visited the Naval Hospital, where they saw hundreds of wounded, many suffering horribly from burns and shock. He was distressed by the huge numbers of dead and wounded: “The sight of those men made me as angry as I have ever been in my life. It made me realize what a big job lay ahead of us.”^[14] He was tremendously impressed also by the courage, daring, and heroism demonstrated by many servicemen and civilians in fighting back at the attackers and in rescuing men from burning ships and the harbor’s oil-covered flaming waters.

Friday, December 12, was taken up with interviews with Hawaii’s leading industrialists and senior Army officers. Knox, a veteran newspaperman, assembled the raw materials he would need for his report—information about damage to ships, possible sabotage, casualty lists, copies of Japanese charts, damage repairs, ship repair yards and many photographs.

Knox Writes His Report and Delivers it to FDR

Knox and his party took off Friday evening. Knox spent most of that night on the flight back to the mainland drafting his report. By morning it was pretty well finished in rough, handwritten form. The plane landed in San Diego at 10:30 a.m., and when it took off on the next leg of the journey, Knox had a borrowed portable typewriter, paper and carbon. By the time they landed in El Paso at 4:00 p.m., Lieutenant Commander Hayes, a former court stenographer, had it finished in typed form. They gassed up, but the weather closed in and they had to spend another night in Midland, Texas.

On Sunday evening they arrived in Washington, and Knox went directly to the White House to deliver his report to Roosevelt. The original copy bears a notation in FDR’s handwriting: “1941—given me by F.K. 10:00 p.m., Dec. 14, when he landed here from Hawaii. FDR.”^[15]

The next morning Knox returned to the White House. FDR had gone over Knox’s report and “written out in pencil a series of points concerning the Pearl Harbor attack which he told Secretary Knox to use at his press conference on the subject.” FDR’s notes, after deleting matters that an enemy should not be allowed to learn, contained “all the information that could then, with the security of the nation at stake, be released to the public.”^[16] The Army and Navy “were to assume equal responsibility and blame for the damage caused by the Japanese attack—and for the failure to be prepared for such an attack.”^[17]

Knox’s Press Conference

That afternoon 200 newspaper reporters filed into Knox’s office. With FDR’s “pencilled notes” as a guide, Knox issued a formal release and fielded the reporters’ questions.^[18] Except for his praise of the performances of U.S. servicemen during the attack, his release bore little resemblance to the report he had made to the president. It began:

My inspection trip to the island enables me to present the general facts covering the attack which hitherto have been unavailable:

1. The essential fact is that the Japanese purpose was to knock out the United States before the war began. This was made apparent by the deception practiced, by the preparations which had gone on for many weeks before the attack, and the attacks themselves, which were made simultaneously throughout the Pacific. In this purpose the Japanese failed.

2. The United States services were not on the alert against the surprise air attack on Hawaii. This fact calls for a formal investigation, which will be initiated immediately by the president. . . . We are all entitled to know it if (a) there was any error of judgment which contributed to the surprise, (b) if there was any dereliction of duty prior to the attack.^[19]

Knox went on to name some of the ships that were damaged. He admitted that Army losses were “severe,” and he cited the latest figures on Navy killed and wounded: “officers 91 dead and 20 wounded; enlisted men, 2,638 dead and 636 wounded.” He then described in detail some of the acts of heroism and valor on the part of Navy men in fighting the Japanese and told of remarkably heroic rescues of men from the water after their ships had gone down.

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The following important points in the report Knox turned in to the president were specifically omitted in his formal press release:

1. In spite of the information available in Washington, Kimmel and Short had received no warning from Washington since November 27. The army had then considered the most imminent threat to be from sabotage. And the navy, warned that southeast Asia was Japan’s likely target, was concerned with the possibility of a submarine attack on the fleet at Pearl Harbor. Most importantly, neither Kimmel nor Short had any “intimation of some surprise move, made clear in Washington, through the interception of Japanese instructions to Nomura . . . by the insistence upon the precise time of Nomura’s reply to Hull, at 1:00 on Sunday,” i.e., 7:30 a.m. in Hawaii.^[20] For security reasons, of course, the press couldn’t be told that the Japanese instructions had been intercepted and decoded in Washington. But Knox could have admitted, without revealing anything of significance to the Japanese, that it was not astonishing that the Hawaiian commanders had been caught by surprise.

2. The Army in Hawaii didn’t have enough fighter planes for the necessary reconnaissance because of “the diversion of this type [of plane] . . . to the British, the Chinese, the Dutch and the Russians.”^[21]

3. U.S. soldiers and sailors responded to the Japanese attack—within four minutes of the launching of the first Japanese torpedo—and the intensity of their firing increased to such an extent that the third and last wave of Japanese planes “was driven off without getting the attack home.” Although Knox praised the valor of U.S. personnel in fighting back when attacked, he didn’t mention the promptness with which they got into action, nor the fact that the intensity of their firing increased to such an extent that the third and last wave of Japanese planes, only an hour and 20 minutes after the first one,^[22] “was driven off without getting the attack home, no effective hits being made in the harbor.”

4. The unsuitability of Pearl Harbor as a site for a large concentration of naval vessels. In his report, Knox raised the question.

In view of the attack and the serious damage inflicted by it, the usefulness and availability of this Naval station must be studied. . . . Pending these studies and the addition of satisfactory safeguards, no large concentration of Naval vessels can be permitted at Pearl Harbor.

Knox recognized that Admiral Richardson had had reasonable grounds for the doubts he had raised with FDR concerning the advisability of holding the fleet at Pearl Harbor.^[23]

While for security reasons some of these points could not be revealed, it would have been possible to admit (1) surprise, (2) inadequate equipment, (3) prompt retaliation, and (4) previous errors in judgment, without giving aid or comfort to the enemy. However, such admissions might have led our own people to ask embarrassing questions. For instance, who was responsible for providing the commanders in the field with intelligence? Who had the responsibility for seeing that they were properly warned and adequately equipped and supplied? And why was the fleet headquartered at Pearl Harbor anyway?

Knox said the president would launch a formal investigation into the attack. In response, the two houses of Congress agreed to drop their proposals to conduct their own investigations.^[24]