Fighting to Lose (38 page)

November 28
: MAGIC decrypts disclosed Tokyo’s reaction to Hull’s “humiliating” proposals. Japan’s ambassadors in Washington were told that relations between the two countries were now “de facto ruptured” but that they were to pretend that the talks were still continuing.28

Still that same day, Admiral Stark issued another war warning, which said that the Japanese still might continue negotiations but hostile action was possible. Pacific stations were directed to undertake such reconnaissance “as you deem necessary, but these measures should not be carried out so as to alarm the civilian population or disclose intent.” Admiral Kimmel maintained the usual level of reconnaissance.

December 1:
The director of naval communications in Washington sent an urgent message to Admiral Hart in the Philippines, with a copy going to Admiral Kimmel, that the Japanese were planning a landing at Kota Bharu on the Malaya Peninsula. That meant the Japanese intended to attack Singapore, reinforcing Kimmel’s impression that the British were the target, not the Americans.29

Also, the Americans read a message from Tokyo stressing that the appearance of continued negotiations had to be maintained in order “to prevent the United States from becoming unduly suspicious.”

December 2
: Churchill received and read a super-secret Tokyo to Berlin decrypt in which the ambassador was told to advise Hitler that a breakdown in talks between Japan and the United States was inevitable and that an “armed collision” leading to “a state of war” with the British and Americans “may happen sooner than expected.”30

December 3
: Army codebreakers released a message of the day before from Tojo, the Japanese prime minister, to the Washington embassy, ordering that its cipher machine and all codes and ciphers save the “PA” and the “LA” codes be destroyed.31 The destruction by a diplomatic post of its codes and ciphers is universally recognized as a prelude to war.

Canadian aviation pioneer William Seymour met with an official of Canada’s Defence Department in the Château Laurier hotel in Ottawa. Seymour had been covertly recruiting American flyers for the air war in England, but now he was told things were about to change:

Mr. Apedaile informed me that British Military Intelligence had informed Ottawa that it was expected that the Japanese would make a surprise air attack on Pearl Harbor on December 8th, 1941…. Mr. Apedaile then explained to me that if the attack did take place it obviously meant that the United States immediately would be involved in War with Japan, would probably become involved in the War with Germany and Italy, and, therefore, require all the pilots they could train….32

In Honolulu, Captain Irving Mayfield, the navy’s 14th District intelligence officer, and Lieutenant Colonel George Bicknell of Hawaii Army Intelligence learned from the local navy cryptographic agency, Station HYPO, that Washington had sent Admiral Kimmel an advisory to the effect that Japanese embassies and diplomatic posts in London, Washington, Hong Kong, Singapore, Batavia, and Manila had been ordered to destroy their codes and secret papers. The Honolulu consulate was not included, so Mayfield asked the local FBI’s Robert Shivers if they were burning papers there. The FBI had a telephone tap on the consulate. Shivers informed Mayfield they were.33

Admiral Kimmel was told, but he did not see it as any different from what was happening elsewhere.

December 4
: Lieutenant John Burns, head of the Espionage Bureau of the Honolulu police, was called to the office of FBI agent Shivers, a small man who prided himself on being “deadpan.” He was almost in tears. “I’m not telling my men but I’m telling you this. We’re going to be attacked before the week is out.” Pearl Harbor is going to be hit, he said.34

December 5
: In England, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, chairing a subcommittee of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee, was surprised when told that a Japanese fleet was headed to Hawaii. “Have we informed our transatlantic brethren?” he asked. Yes, he was assured. William Casey, then on Colonel Donovan’s staff, confirmed it: “The British had sent word that a Japanese fleet was steaming east toward Hawaii,” he remembered.35

Still in England, the lead cryptographer for Japanese traffic at the Government Code & Cipher School, confided in his diary, “The All Highest [Churchill] all over himself at the moment for the latest indications re Japan’s intentions and rings up at all hours of the day and night….”36

December 7–10
: In the early hours of the morning of December 7, as the six great Japanese aircraft carriers turned into the wind in the predawn darkness, and as exhaust flames flickered from the engines of the “Kate” torpedo bombers lined up on their decks, General Marshall and Admiral Stark fussed over how they should get word to Hawaii that the latest intelligence indicated Pearl Harbor might be attacked in a couple of hours. Radio? Teletype? Both men turned down picking up the phone.

At 7:55 a.m., Admiral Kimmel was just up for the day when he heard the sound of distant explosions. The navy had been his life for forty-one years. He had begun as a cadet, then served as a gunnery and turret officer, and had sailed around the world during President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1907 “white fleet” show of American power. He had spent the First World War on battleships and had witnessed the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet at Rosyth in 1918. An orderly series of commands followed: a squadron of destroyers; the battleship
New York
; a division of heavy cruisers in the Pacific Fleet; and, finally, command of the Pacific Fleet itself. His Hawaii residence was on a hill overlooking the anchorage, and when he stepped outside, he looked down a long green lawn to see black blossoms springing up around, and among, and on, his precious battleships.

Canada was first to declare war on Japan, doing so that very evening. The United States and Britain declared war the following day, on December 8, and Hitler against the United States on December 11.

The Japanese launched coordinated attacks against Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies, and then the Philippines, just as the Pujol questionnaire had anticipated. On December 8, the Japanese landed virtually unopposed at Kota Bharu, Malaysia, to begin their march down the Kra Peninsula to Singapore. On December 10, the
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse
were sunk on the open sea by Japanese bombers. The Canadians in Hong Kong held out until Christmas Day, Singapore until mid-February, and the Americans in the Philippines until May.