My date and time of birth are quite significant when they are considered in conjunction with the then prevailing international politico-economic situation. In point of fact, as will be seen from the factual disclosures below which I have carefully researched over a long period, I was born at the exact moment that Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, Chief of Japanese Naval Operations in the Pacific, received and acted upon orders from Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Chief of Naval Operations in the Japanese High Command, to commence the attack on Pearl Harbour and other nations in South-East Asia; and President Franklin D Roosevelt, President of the United States, made the decision that no useful purpose would be served by further diplomatic initiatives with Japan and that the United States had to accept the reality that war with Japan was inevitable.
Of course, while he may have made that decision at that particular moment in time, he did not know when or where the hostile activities
would take place.
These three events conjuncted simultaneously at 10.15 pm December 6, 1941, Eastern Australian Standard Time, although the actual physical times at the various locations of the participants will different due to the various timezones in which they were situated.
The point that is significant here however is that the three events actually took place at the same time, plus or minus about ten minutes. Put another way, the events that are outlined below are narrated in real time.
The Birth
My mother Anne packed her small suitcase in the early afternoon of 6 December 1941 in response to the first pangs of anxiety signifying the onset of labour for her first child. As she journeyed to the Sydney War Memorial Hospital, little did she realise the cataclysmic events that were commencing to unfold around her at this very same time. The cataclysmic events that were about to unfold had been irrevocably put in train some four days earlier when on December 2 Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Chief of Naval Operations in the Japanese High Command had sent a coded instruction to Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, Chief of Naval Operations in the Pacific, that said quite simply “Niitaka yama nobore 1208â€. In code this message literally said “climb Mount Niitaka: the 8th of the 12thâ€, which by pre-arrangement meant that an attack on Pearl Harbour was to commence no later than the 8th December.
Admiral Yamamoto’s instruction was not entirely unexpected, although the timing was. The possibility of war in the Pacific had been brewing for some time. Japan was already bogged down in a military adventure in China and had extended its’ resources and supply lines to the point where it desperately needed the oil, rubber and other strategic resources of South East Asia. Consequently, in June 1941 Japan exercised the military option to obtain the strategic resources it needed. In July it took the first decisive step by seizing French Indo-China.
In response, the President of the United States, President Franklin D Roosevelt, who had long been suspicious of Japan’s aggressive and imperialistic ambitions in the Far East, froze Japanese assets and tightened trade embargoes that were already in place as a consequence of the earlier attacks on China. In Japan this American action simply provided the catalyst for the Military High Command to take control of the Japanese Government, a process that led inevitably to the decision that Japan would respond to the implied American threat through war.
As my mother left the house for her short journey to the War Memorial Hospital, the senior Japanese spy in Honolulu, Takeo Yoshikawa, hidden in a sugar cane farm opposite Pearl Harbour, was again observing the American Fleet and compiling probably the most important report of his clandestine career.
In his report to be shortly transmitted to Admiral Yamamoto he observed that already moored in harbour in the afternoon of 6 December were nine battleships, three B-Class cruisers, three seaplane tenders, and 17 destroyers, and that at that time a further four B-class cruisers and three destroyers were entering harbour. Yoshikawa-san noted with some displeasure that all the American aircraft carriers and heavy cruisers had departed from Pearl Harbour. His displeasure however was muted by his observance that the Americans had parked their 250 aircraft in formation on the runways close to the harbour. They were sitting ducks!
Yoshikawa-san was good at his job. Over a period of time he had studied the pattern of the American fleet’s operations. The pattern, he noted, had been for the fleet to go out on manoeuvres on weekdays and return like clockwork for two days of shore leave. It was on that important piece of knowledge that Admiral Yamamoto obtained High Command agreement to the nomination of December 7, a Sunday, as Attack Day against the United States Pacific fleet, and the other nations of South-East Asia. Yoshikawa-san’s intelligence reports had significant influence on the battle plans. Invariably, he told Tokyo, the American battleships moored in pairs. This meant that the inboard ships were invulnerable to aerial torpedoes. So the Japanese war planners changed their attack strategy and directed that their attack planes be armed with armour-piercing shells fitted with aerodynamic fins for dive-bombing.
However there was a serious problem. Yoshikawa-san had reported that it took only 40 feet of fishing line to reach the bottom of the harbour and that meant that that Japan’s aerial torpedoes, which dived to 75 feet after hitting the water in attack mode, would run aground and explode harmlessly in the mud. Responding to Yoshikawa-san’s information, Japanese military scientists quickly added specially designed wooden fins to the torpedoes to make them level off higher. Japanese pilots then flew simulations of the proposed attack virtually every day from April to November 1941. By December 2, the air strike force was highly trained and motivated for battle.
Takeo Yoshikawa’s intelligence report of December 6 was received by Admiral Yamamoto early in the evening.
As Admiral Yamamoto mused over Takeo Yoshikawa’s information, my mother entered the labour ward with some feelings of imminent urgency, little realising in the context of the conjunction of international events that were unfolding around her, the irony of delivering a child in a hospital that had been dedicated to the remembrance of the fallen in the earlier Great War; a war that had started inconsequentially and ended without any great achievement or lasting benefit for the world at large.
Admiral Yamamoto considered Yoshikawa-san’s intelligence report carefully. He ruminated that it was bad luck that the American aircraft carriers were at sea. On the other hand he sensed the good luck of the American aircraft being lined up in open formation. He knew Japan’s attack force was ready and awaiting his order: six aircraft carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, three submarines, nine destroyers, eight tankers and 423 aircraft of which 353 were committed to the assault on Pearl Harbour. It was on his orders that the Japanese fleet had been covertly repositioning itself closer to the Hawaiian Islands. He quietly composed a comprehensive message to give Vice Admiral Nagumo the important information he would need for the imminent operations. The message was encrypted and transmitted. The message to Vice Admiral Nagumo was clear. The time had come for action!
Vice Admiral Nagumo received Admiral Yamamoto’s orders to commence the attack on Pearl Harbour and the other Southeast asian targets at 10.15 pm December 6.
Coincidently, events unfolding in the War Memorial Hospital had also reached a critical point. The infant who was to become known as Graham, with a little help from his mother, forced his way into an uncertain, insecure and unpredictable world at 10.15 pm, the same time that Vice Admiral Nagumo received his formal orders to commence the attack on Pearl Harbour.
Shortly before Graham arrived at the War Memorial Hospital, President Roosevelt and his National Security Adviser Harry Hopkins had commenced reading the latest decoded secret messages between the Japanese High Command and the Japanese Embassy in Washington. Some weeks before, American cryptographers had cracked Japan’s diplomatic code and provided intelligence codenamed ‘magic’ that included the correspondence between the spy Takeo Yoshikawa and the Japanese High Command. What the President had before him therefore was an important despatch from the Japanese High Command to Ambassador Nomura, Japan’s Emissary in the United States. The despatch instructed Ambassador Nomura to immediately break off diplomatic relations with the United States.
At 10.15 pm, the moment of the birth of Graham half a world away in Sydney, and unaware of the orders that coincidentally had just been received by Vice Admiral Nagumo to commence the attack on Pearl Harbour, President Roosevelt has been recorded by historians as stating: “This means war!â€
With that statement the President made the decision to abrogate further diplomatic contact with Japan and advised his senior military commanders that war with Japan was now inevitable.
But this 10.15 pm Presidential realisation was not acted upon with the alacrity demanded by hindsight.
The Background
National Security Adviser Hopkins agreed with the President that war was now inevitable. But how? When? Where? The President went to bed that night a very worried man. He had reason to be worried. He had had a politically painful defence policy controversy earlier in 1941 when in February Admiral J O Richardson, Commander of the Pacific Fleet had warned that the Pacific Fleet was vulnerable to attack in Hawaii. A consequence of the sensitivities arising from that controversy was that President Roosevelt had sacked Admiral Richardson and replaced him with Admiral Husband Kimmel, a friend of the President from his earlier work in the Navy Department.
In the period since then, President Roosevelt’s attention had been predominantly focused on the momentous events across the Atlantic, where Britain was under siege by a confident Germany, and the Soviet Union was reeling under a savage German onslaught. In fact, President Roosevelt was already engaged in an undeclared covert war with the German U-Boats that were ripping the heart out of convoys carrying supplies to Britain. President Roosevelt wished to enter the conflict against Germany, but internally in America, isolationist sentiment remained strong. Despite numerous provocations, Hitler refused to provide an incident that would unite the Americans in war.
When the American cryptographers cracked Japan’s diplomatic code and gained access to intelligence that included the correspondence between the spy Takeo Yoshikawa and the Japanese High Command, no one told Admiral Kimmel! In fact, Admiral Kimmel did not even know of this capability. Consequently, the only advance warning of Japanese intentions sent to the Pacific Fleet had said, “Japanese negotiations have come to a practical stalemate. Hostilities may ensue. Subversive activities may be expected.†In response, the only action taken by the Air Force Commander at Pearl Harbour, General Walter Short, was to protect his aircraft against sabotage. He lined up his planes on runways, wingtip to wingtip, where they could be watched. He drained their fuel and stowed their munitions. Historians say the brief messages that did go to the Pacific Fleet implied that sabotage was the worst that could be expected. Consequently, Admiral Kimmel placed no extra guard on the fleet. He approved weekend liberty (leave) for his officers and men, ordering only a limited alert. After all, there was nothing in the intelligence reports to justify placing the Fleet on full alert.
Research has uncovered that Japan’s original strategy was for an attack on the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia, a rich source of oil and other strategic materials), with a possible strike at American bases in the Philippines to protect their flank. Once they had consolidated their conquests, the Japanese proposed to confront the advancing Americans in a climactic sea battle in the central Pacific. But Admiral Yamamoto conceived of a much more daring plan. Having seen America’s industrial might as a naval attache in Washington, he convinced the High command that Japan had no hope of winning a war with the United States unless the US Pacific Fleet in Hawaii could be destroyed. Given the go-ahead early in 1941, Admiral Yamamoto began planning a surprise air strike against Pearl Harbour.
In April 1941, therefore, two conceptions occurred. Anne and Arthur Segal conceived their first child and Admiral Yamamoto, having completed his preliminary planning, formally initiated Plan Z (as the operation was to become known), by assigning the Navy’s most experienced pilots and aircrews to training for the attack on Pearl Harbour. Concurrently, military scientists and technicians began work developing the armour-piercing bombs and torpedoes that would run true in Pearl Harbour’s relatively shallow waters.
The Attack
At the time that Vice Admiral Nagumo received Admiral Yamamoto’s battle orders, the attack force was positioned 490 miles due north of Hawaii. Vice Admiral Nagumo immediately ordered his attack force to steam south under complete blackout conditions. Back in Sydney, Anne went to sleep well pleased with her efforts in producing a healthy boy of 6½ lbs.
By 6 am December 7 the fleet was quietly anchored 275 miles north of Pearl Harbour in battle formation. At 6.30 am, Vice Admiral Nagumo summoned Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, the officer who was to lead the air attack. In later interviews with Japanese publications and the Los Angeles Times Commander Fuchida speaks of the solemn moment when he told Vice Admiral Nagumo that his squadrons were fully alert and operationally ready. “Chief Nagumo held my hand tightly, half rising from his chair. ‘Tanomu,’ he replied. ‘It’s all yours’ “.
On the flight deck, Commander Fuchida later reminisced, he accepted a special headband from his crew chief. Sailors shouted and waved as he climbed into his bomber, a Mitsubishi 97, and at 7 am Commander Fuchida led the first wave of 183 aircraft into the air and south to the island of Oahu and Pearl Harbour. The die was cast.
Approaching Oahu, Commander Fuchida told his pilots to keep a sharp eye for American planes. There were none. There was no ground fire. Nothing disturbed the progress of Commander Fuchida’s squadrons. Through his binoculars, Commander Fuchida saw the American ships moored all in a row, just as Takeo Yoshikawa said they would be. He would report later that the sight had moved him to tears of joy. In Washington, Ambassador Nomura was announcing the end of diplomatic relations with the United States. In Sydney Anne and her baby Graham slept peacefully.
So to did Admiral Kimmel and General Short. They had gone to bed that Saturday night not expecting any serious trouble, let alone an attack of magnitude. The latest intelligence advice they had received was that negotiations with Japan had broken down and an attack was expected on the Philippines, Malaya, Thailand or Borneo within the next few days. Although both commanders were ordered to execute “appropriate defensive deployment†they had no reason to believe that Pearl Harbour itself was a target, let alone that an attack was imminent. As stated earlier, General Short massed his aircraft to prevent sabotage while Admiral Kimmel ordered a partial alert but did not see the need to establish sustained round-the-clock, round-the-compass aerial patrols.
To be fair, Admiral Kimmel did consider putting the Fleet to sea but decided against it because the two carriers required to provide air cover protection had been detached to deliver planes to the Marine garrisons on Midway and Wake Islands. Moreover, torpedo nets designed to protect the ships at anchor were unavailable because the Navy Department was convinced that torpedoes would be ineffective in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbour.
When Commander Fuchida was authorised to commence his attack, he was not the only commander to receive such instructions. Vice Admiral Nagumo co-ordinated a seven-point assault by attacking Malaya, Hawaii, Thailand, the Philippines, Guam Island, Hong Kong and Wake Island, all within 14 hours. Although these attacks were co-ordinated with the major attack on Pearl Harbour, the vagaries of time threw up some interesting landmarks. Contrary to popular opinion, the first offensive of the war in the Pacific was not the attack on Pearl Harbour. One hour and ninety-five minutes prior to the commencement of hostilities at Pearl Harbour, the Japanese Imperial Army landed on the beach of Kampung Pulau Pak Amat in Khota Baharu, Malaya. That force met little resistance and quickly sped south to take Singapore, but that is another story.
The Battle
Pearl Harbour had a radar warning system that had only been installed a matter of weeks earlier. It operated only part time and was used primarily for training. In the early morning shift of December 7, the radar station was operated by two privates who had orders to shut it down at 7 am when the lieutenant in charge back at the base Command Centre would stand down after completing his shift. The two privates however decided to keep the station running for practice. At 7.02 am, one of them, Private George Elliott, noticed a blip on the screen. Private Elliott later told Newsweek that he traced the blip to within 15 miles of Pearl Harbour. The blip then split up and disappeared.
Commander Fuchida had arrived!
In a furious attack Commander Fuchida’s strike force inflicted savage destruction. As he circled above directing his pilots discharge of their deadly cargo of armour-piercing bombs and torpedoes, and their departure to the safety of their carriers, he co-ordinated the second wave of the air attack. Commander Fuchida was later to report that during the second wave attack, American anti-aircraft fire was â€intenseâ€. By 10 am the last of the Japanese aircraft had departed. Most of the killing and destruction had been done in the first wave. Although the second wave added to the ruin and the carnage, it had erred in concentrating, like the first wave, on the fleet itself. As a result, the Pearl Harbour dockyards, an exposed fuel farm and the submarine flotilla were left untouched.
Nonetheless, with a loss of only 55 men, 29 aircraft, five midget submarines and one large submarine, the Japanese had sunk or badly damaged nineteen vessels, including the entire battle line of the Pacific Fleet, in the worst disaster in United States’ military history. 2,403 American sailors, soldiers and marines were killed, nearly half in the explosion of the Battleship Arizona. 1,178 others were wounded and over 250 aircraft were destroyed.
The Japanese dropped only one bomb on Honolulu itself. There was however considerable damage to Honolulu caused by anti-aircraft shells from the guns on the American ships. Improperly fused, the shells fell by the score into the palm-shaded streets and exploded, killing more than 50 civilians.
Back in the War Memorial Hospital in Sydney, Anne awoke to the dramatic news: ‘Pearl Harbour Bombed’. Realising the implications for her and Arthur’s future with a young family in a country already fighting in the European War, and now to be challenged by a war much closer to home, she worried what that future would hold.
Graham was only worried about his next feed.
The Aftermath
Smoke was still rising from the battered ships lying in the mud of Pearl Harbour when the search for scapegoats began. Admiral Kimmel and General Short were relieved of their commands, yet in stark contrast, General Douglas MacArthur escaped censure even though his forces were caught by surprise nine hours after the attack on Pearl Harbour. Clearly, the Pearl Harbour commanders were singled out as convenient scapegoats to cover inexcusable errors of both commission and omission at almost every level of government.
There was, after all, plenty of blame to go round. In fact, a whole cottage industry grew up around attempts to prove that President Roosevelt had forewarning of the Japanese attack and deliberately sacrificed the Pacific Fleet to bring the United States into the war against Germany through the back door. Conspiracy theorists charged that the ‘master plotter’ in the white House ignored clear signals of an impending attack on Hawaii to unite the American people behind him and then had the files ‘sanitised’ to remove all traces of the conspiracy!
Pearl Harbour certainly rescued President Roosevelt from an impossible dilemma, yet it is hardly likely that he would have offered up almost the entire Pacific Fleet as a sacrifice, when those same ships would be needed to win the war. Moreover, from President Roosevelt’s point of view, a war in the Pacific was the wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong ocean. His policy was to keep Britain afloat, and a war with Japan would drain off valuable men and materials from operations against Germany, which he saw as the main enemy.
The Hindsight
The lack of timely advice and information to Admiral Kimmel and General Short is such an important feature of the Pearl Harbour debacle that it deserves close examination. A major hazard in intelligence work is the tendency to rely too heavily on a single source. President Roosevelt and his close advisers believed that ‘magic’ provided them with an infallible key to the maze of Japanese intentions. As a result, other sources were downgraded or ignored. This put ‘magic’ in the role of a double-edged sword. It gave American policymakers inside knowledge of Japanese intentions, but at the same time, it created overconfidence. ‘Magic’ however was limited to only the President, the Secretaries of State, War, Navy, and a few top military officers. This fetish for security was self-defeating, as history now shows. Neither Admiral Kimmel nor General Short were privy to ‘magic’, which would have allowed them to monitor the progress of the Japanese-American negotiations then underway in Washington, and take remedial or timely action as diplomatic events unfolded.
Messages in J-19, another Japanese naval code that had been cracked, had indicated an abnormal interest on the part of the Japanese Consulate in Honolulu in both Pearl Harbour and the movements of the Pacific Fleet, the results primarily of the work of the spy Takeo Yoshikawa. But in the latter part of 1941, the Americans were too involved with the shipping war in the Atlantic, and relied too heavily on ‘magic’ as the predominant source of Japanese interests and activities, to take proper notice of intelligence related to the Pacific.
Having failed to provide Admiral Kimmel and General Short with access to ‘magic’, Washington compounded the fault by not keeping them informed of the changing conditions. High-level intelligence and naval officers in key posts in mainland military headquarters further blundered by not making certain that the military commanders in Hawaii were on the alert, even when it became obvious to the military commanders that war was imminent. Sound military doctrine holds that a field commander should be given all pertinent information upon which to base decisions concerning the safety of his forces. Failing that, the field commander should be given explicit orders that reflect the most up-to-date intelligence information available. Admiral Kimmel and General Short received neither.
The heart of the Pearl Harbour disaster was the misuse of ‘magic’. There was no ‘clearing house’ where all the raw information on Japanese intentions could be assembled, analysed and assessed in totality. Each message represented only a single frame in a lengthy motion picture, and no one saw the entire film. Only rarely was information from one source weighed against material from another. Had there been a centralised system for evaluating the intelligence pouring in to President Roosevelt and his inner circle, the danger signals might have been separated from the surrounding noise.
The fact was that there were danger signals that were known, but they were embedded in a mass of information where the volume was so overwhelming that the crypto-analysts and intelligence officers were unable to immediately determine the significant from the irrelevant.
For example, not long after Admiral Yamamoto put Plan Z into operation, Ambassador Joseph Glew, US Ambassador to Japan, notified Washington that the Peruvian Ambassador had learned “from many sources, including a Japanese source, that in the event of war breaking out between the United States and Japan, the Japanese intended to make a surprise attack against Pearl Harbourâ€. The information was passed to Admiral Kimmel with an assessment that read: “Naval intelligence places no credence in these rumours.â€
This flawed approach was both encouraged and compounded through American complacency, racism, a lack of foresight and a reluctance to learn the lessons of history. In the first place, the then prevailing American view was that Japan lacked the capacity to mount an attack. At that point in American history, Americans regarded Japanese as bucktoothed, bespectacled little men, always photographing things with their ever-present cameras so they could copy them. Japanese planes and ships were said to be inferior copies of American models, myopic Japanese pilots would be unable to hit their targets and Japan’s teahouse economy would quickly collapse under wartime strain. At the time, the New York tabloid PM ran an article on “How We Can Lick Japan In 60 Daysâ€.
In fact, the reality was that there were plenty of reasons to fear a surprise attack. After all, the Americans should have been aware that the importance of the surprise attack as a battle tactic has been taught to every Japanese soldier from time immemorial. To see that one only has to read such famous novels as Shogun and The 15 Ronan. History shows, for example, that during the Russo-Japanese War (which was mediated by President Theodore Roosevelt only 36 years before Pearl Harbour), Admiral Heihachiro Togo delivered a stunning blow to the Russian Pacific fleet in a surprise attack along the Asian coast. More recently, the Americans were aware that the military intervention against China that so concerned President Roosevelt had also commenced with a pre-emptive Japanese surprise attack. The Americans therefore should have been well-prepared for the possibility that Admiral Yamamoto, like Admiral Togo before him, might consider doing the unexpected - this time against the American fleet in Hawaii. After all, Admiral Yamamoto was on record as saying that such an attack might not cripple the United States, but it would buy time while Hitler beat the Americans and British into submission in Europe. Then Japan could complete its conquest of China with impunity.
The Japanese also looked at Pearl harbour with hindsight. Admiral Minoru Genda, an important member of the Japanese High Command who had given substantial support to Admiral Yamamoto in the development of the battle plans given to Vice Admiral Nagumo, is on record as saying: â€The mistake we made was in not occupying Hawaii with the Army. If we had, and then gone on to make a surprise attack on the west coast of the United States, we might have wonâ€.
It is perhaps trite to point out that the war that commenced coincidently with the birth of Graham in the War Memorial Hospital was the direct result of miscalculations by both Japan and the United States of each others’ intentions. Both wanted peace, but they had different concepts of what constituted peace. To the Americans it meant a cessation of Japanese aggression in China and elsewhere; to the Japanese it meant an East Asia dominated by Japan that could provide an unfettered lifeline of strategic resources that were essential for Japan’s economic development.
… end
