(West Coast Guy, the Lovely Bea, and the indomitable Admiral Mac.)
“I have to drink the wine when I am out because I have to drive home,” I said. The bar was raucous for a change, people seeming to have come past the first holiday of the new year with minimal damage. The usual suspects were there, the good, the bad and, well Old Jim and I were there too.
“Any trips from here out further away from The Madison than the Willow will feature a wheelchair. Then I can drink because I won’t have to walk!” He was in a festive mood, and dressed to the nines in a suit, nice dress shirt and a boldly patterned cravat.
“I hate to plow this ground again, but until they release your oral history I have to keep trying to get it straight. What was it like when you guys got back from Guam? You had plenty of points to qualify to go back to CONUS?”
“Sure. I had been ‘forward’ since early 1942. The problem was that everyone was promised their old jobs back after demobilization.”
“That was a good thing. People would like that right now.”
“Sure they would. But remember, I went into the Service after graduating from Iowa- so I had no job to go back to. I went back to being Eddie Layton’s deputy on the PacFlt Staff.”
“It must have been surreal, that transition from total war to abrupt peace. What was it like?” I asked.
“We didn’t do much intelligence stuff, that is for sure. Mostly it was cleaning stuff up, like Wendy Furnas cleaning out the captured swords and guns and binoculars from the trophy room at JICPOA. Plus, there was complete turmoil with the personnel turnover with the career guys. I didn’t know I was one then.”
“So, as a Lieutenant you were the acting Fleet Intelligence Officer?”
“Yes I was. CAPT Layton- later Rear Admiral Layton- was called back to Washington to testify at the Congressional hearings about the Pearl Harbor attack, and how to apportion blame for the disaster.”
“I thought the Navy and the Army already had their Boards of Inquiry right after the attack. Admiral Kimmel was relieved just before you got to Pearl in February of 1942.”
“Yes, and he never accepted the blame that they shoved on him. In fact, neither has his son, who is still fighting a rear-guard action to exonerate his father. I am in touch with him periodically.”
“I published some of his stuff in the Quarterly,” I said, taking a healthy swallow of happy hour white and adjusting the napkin on which I was writing. “There is new stuff out there even after all these years. Did you know that FDR had a recording device in the Oval Office?”
“No, but we all knew that those things existed long before Nixon and LBJ.”
“There is a new book out by Joe Persico. He says that the recordings were lost until 1978. There is supposed to be a wire recording from a few month before the attack in which the President discusses a letter to him from the Japanese, via a third party. The letter stated that if the U.S. Navy was pulled out of Wake, Midway and Pearl, the Japanese would consider that as a confidence-building gesture that FDR would not screw with them in the Western Pacific.”
Mac pursed his lips. “That sounds like the misunderstanding about America’s sphere of influence in the Far East that did not include Korea. If Persico is right, the Japs were drawing a line around the limits of their ambition.” He took a sip of red wine and smiled.
“The presence of the Fleet at Pearl- remember, the battleships were moved to Hawaii from California in order to send a message to Tokyo- were to withdraw its naval forces from Wake, Midway and Pearl Harbor, the government of Japan would consider such a move a signal that the U.S. would not contest Japanese ambitions in the Pacific.”
“Kimmel was not informed about the letter, or the Bomb Plot messages that were tracking the exact moorings of the ships in the harbor.”
Mac nodded. “If those stray bits of intelligence had been available, it would very likely have changed what Joe Rochefort thought.”
“What do you mean, Sir?”
“Well, I wasn’t there, but one of the reasons that Joe worked so hard was that he felt he should have done better on predicting the attack at Pearl. That is why the second attack on Pearl was so astonishing.”
“That was the night attack by the two Japanese flying boats that damaged a high school in 1942. You told me about that and it blew my mind. You said Joe was upset about it, and they tried to blame Jasper Holmes for writing a story about just that prior to the War in the Saturday Evening Post.”
“There were some interesting moments,” said Mac, looking off into space, or at the Lovely Miss Bea, I couldn’t tell.
“Elliot Carlson talks about Joe and the hour-and-a-half meeting he had with Kimmel before the attack, down in the dungeon where you worked at the Shipyard.”
“I have talked to Elliott dozens of times. I think he might be a little harsh on Joe. His guys at that time had not broken any of the Jap naval code. They were basing their analysis of IJN Fleet movements on traffic analysis alone, since they could not recover the text of the messages, only information from the headers.”
“I would like to talk about that in more detail,” I said, putting down my pen and reaching for my wallet.
“It is all conjecture, since neither Elliott or me were there. But I do know that if all the intelligence had been passed to Joe at Pearl, there is no question that Kimmel would have been more ready than he was.”
“Wish we could ask the questions,” I said, a bit wistfully, looking at graceful Liz-with-an-S as she walked down the bar with another Bud long-neck for Old Jim.
“That is why oral history is so important. It is a shame mine is classified, and I recorded 28 hours of it. Maybe they will release it while I am still alive.” He slid to his feet from his chair at the bar. “I will talk to you tomorrow.”
“I am looking forward to it, Sir.”
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotracom
Note: some of the revelations above come from “Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage” by Joseph E. Persico, and a recent article in Proceedings by Elliott Carlson.