h8k2_3-022515
\n\u201cI have often said that an intelligence officer has one task, one job, one mission. This is to tell his commander, his superior, today, what the [enemies] are going to do tomorrow. This is his job. If he doesn\u2019t do this, then he\u2019s failed.\u201d
\n\u2013 Captain Joseph J. Rochefort, USN<\/p>\n
I was having one of Willow\u2019s specials off the Lunch Counter menu- the turkey matzo ball stew- and talking to Brian about growing up in Honolulu. He brought a couple ancient yellowed articles with him, papers his Dad The Chief had saved to recall the events of people he knew during the war.<\/p>\n
One of them was about the second attack on Pearl Harbor, the one that was a military secret at the time, and was largely lost to history for years. I understand the reasons at the time. No point in getting everyone worked up again, and from a military perspective, once they figured it out, the staging base for the seaplanes at French Frigate Shoals was patrolled and denied to the Japanese. That also might have contributed to the lack of long-range patrol aircraft to look for the American fleet before the battle of Midway.<\/p>\n
I dealt with all sorts of secrets in my Navy years- some large and some small. Some came with a fifty-year seal on them, and my pal The Good Doctor put his history of the program in the safe with a sigh, knowing no one would ever see the stories contained within.
\nThere are still some things about Pearl Harbor that are under seal- and one can only wonder what will pop out when the 75-year window of secrecy expires in 2020.<\/p>\n
We looked at the yellowing article in the Honolulu Advertiser. I remember the first time I heard of the second attack like it was yesterday.<\/p>\n
Mac was 91 that year. He drove over to the Willow in the champagne-colored jaguar sedan from his residence at the Madison across the street and got his million-dollar parking space out front. I looked over at him in his aloha shirt. \u201cSo tell me how it all went down, Sir, just for the record. You have told the story a thousand times, but I want to bounce it off what Jasper and Eddie wrote about it later, and the oral history Joe Rochefort did in 1969. You are the only one who can put it all in context now.\u201d<\/p>\n
I was feeling expansive, pleasantly lit up with Willow\u2019s current vintage of an insouciantly dry Spanish white that Big Jim the bartender would top off periodically. I felt that we had beaten the year of 1942 about to death. We had talked about Midway, and the growing intelligence organization, and the treachery of Wenger and the Redmans, and I was eager to get on to the Spring of 1943, since I was getting desperate to kill Admiral Yamamoto again.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know I went down to Honolulu on Christmas Day of 1942 and went through the barbed wire for a swim from the beach,\u201d said Mac absently. \u201cThen I wrote to the folks back in Iowa and told them about it. They would have been freezing then.\u201d
\nAmerican kids were dying in the jungles of the Solomon Islands. Hundreds of other kids had been blown to bits or drowned in The Slot in the see-saw battle for Guadalcanal as the Japanese ran the Tokyo Express in at night to bring reinforcements to the islands, and the Americans flew from Henderson Field by day. Back in Pearl, and Melbourne, Australia, the code-breakers labored eighteen and twenty hours a day to recover the values of the new five-group system imposed by the IJN.<\/p>\n
The Admiral took a sip of his Virgin Mary and waved a colossal olive on the end of a toothpick at me. \u201cThey don\u2019t talk about the second attack much, do they?\u201d<\/p>\n
I sighed. This interview was not going the way I had hoped. \u201cWhat second attack? I know the Japs had used balloons to send incendiary devices to the Pacific Northwest to start forest fires, and they had submarine-carried seaplanes to attack the Panama Canal, but that didn\u2019t happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, the second attack on Pearl Harbor did. It was on the 4th of March, 1942. Eddie Layton did some research after the war and discovered what had gone down, and it might have been Jasper\u2019s fault.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat on earth do you mean,\u201d I asked. \u201cHow could Jasper have helped the Japanese?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell,\u201d said Mac. \u201cYou know that Jasper was a pretty successful author. He wrote under the pen-name Alec Hudson.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, I know. I ordered a copy of \u201cUp Periscope\u201d the other day, and just started it. He writes well.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI have that one and his \u201cDoubled-edged Secrets, both autographed,\u201d said Mac. He smiled and reached down to his briefcase and produced a book with a black cover, the title superimposed in lines of gray. \u201cThis is the one I gave to my mother, and I got it back after she passed.\u201d He opened it and showed me the inscription:
\n\u201cTo Hattie Showers
\nWhose son had a very
\nimportant part in these
\nevents. With the compliments
\nof the author
\nW. J. Holmes\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo what about the second attack,\u201d I said after looking at the words. \u201cI have never heard about that and I lived and worked in Pearl and thought I knew everything about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mac smiled. \u201cIt was two months after I arrived in the basement of Building One. Joe Rochefort was anxious about the possibility that the Japs might come back, and he was right. There was an article about it in Proceedings a few years ago, based on some research that Eddie Layton did in the 1950s, and a series of interviews that Joe Rochefort did in 1969. It was embarrassing, and that might be the reason people don\u2019t talk about it much.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat happened?\u201d I said, mystified.<\/p>\n
kawanishi-h8k2-emily-flying-boat-022515
\n(Kawanishi H8K \u201cEmily\u201d class flying boat takes off. US Navy Photo)<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Japanese decided to mount a follow-on attack against the shipyard at Pearl to destroy the big Ten-Ten Dry-dock. That would delay the repairs to the battleships, and increase the paranoia on the island. They envisioned an attack by five big Kawanishi H8K \u201cEmily\u201d class flying boats.<\/p>\n
\u201cJesus,\u201d I said. \u201cAnd they pulled it off? Why isn\u2019t that part of the big history?\u201d
\n\u201cWell, that is the interesting part. Eddie located the Japanese OpOrders and the pilot reports of the mission after the war. As it turned out, only two seaplanes departed the Marshalls, and they did refuel from a submarine milk cow in the vicinity of French Frigate Shoals. They then launched for Oahu, to bomb and conduct what Joe Rochefort described as an \u2018armed reconnaissance\u2019 mission.\u201d
\n\u201cAnd there was no response, only four months after the biggest disaster in American military history? No warning?\u201d
\n\u201cOh, there was warning all right. We had penetrated JN-25 enough at that point to know that something was up, but there was heavy overcast the night of the 4th of March and the Japanese got lost. The two Japanese planes wandered around over the island but the blackout was effective, and one of the planes dropped bombs on Tantulus, which produced a couple large craters and broke some windows at Roosevelt High School. Eddie thought the other plane must have dropped its bombs over the ocean.\u201d
\n\u201cThat was it?\u201d I asked. My wineglass stood empty next to the notepad. My pen was making exclamation points next to the words \u201cSecond Attack on Pearl: no response!!!!!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe submarine I-23, the weather reporting unit, disappeared while on patrol and never arrived on station. So the weather was bad, the planes never found Pearl Harbor, and there were two explosions in the night that the next day the Navy and the Army blamed on each other for dumping ordnance irresponsibly.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cGood God, that would have been hugely embarrassing if word got out that the Japanese came back and were not intercepted.\u201d
\n\u201cJoe Rochefort said it this way,\u201d Mac said, pulling a folded article out of the back of his copy of Double Edged Secrets. He unfolded it and peered over his glasses. \u201cHe had passed a warning to the 14th Naval District, the Hawaiian Sea Frontier Commander, and to CinCPac. This is from the interview he did with Commander Ette-Belle Kitchen in 1969.\u201d<\/p>\n
He began to read in a voice just loud enough to be heard over the din in the Willow bar:
\n\u201cI was told later by informed people that the attack was made, as I say, more or less unmolested, because the Navy had no airplanes at that time capable of repelling this attack or destroying the incoming aircraft. The Army said that they only had one-place fighters, and who could expect a fighter pilot to not only fly the plane in darkness but also to approach and make an attack on any enemy plane. Therefore, nothing had been done about it, and no action was taken.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMy God.\u201d Mac smiled at me and handed the paper over. I looked at the rest of what Joe Rochefort felt then:
\n\u201cI just threw up my hands and said it might be a good idea to remind everybody concerned that this nation was at war\u2026.It\u2019s not a very glorious incident. You won\u2019t find very many references to this anywhere along the line.\u201d<\/p>\n
I re-folded the article and slipped it back in the book.
\n\u201cThat certainly beats me,\u201d I said. \u201cSo that was the end of it?\u201d
\n\u201cNo,\u201d said Mac. \u201cThey planned on trying it again before Midway, but Admiral Nimitz dispatched a couple seaplane tenders to French Frigate Shoals, and the Japanese wouldn\u2019t risk it. That meant they lost a chance to see what we were doing before the Midway battle in June.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAmazing,\u201d I said. \u201cThat is just one of the reasons I enjoy talking to you so much.\u201d
\nrendezvous-022515<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a sort of gallows humor about it on the CinCPac staff,\u201d said Mac. \u201cYou will see that one of Jasper\u2019s stories in \u201cUp Periscope\u201d is called \u201cRendezvous.\u201d It was originally in the Saturday Evening Post just before the war. It outlines a plan by which submarines would refuel long-distance seaplanes for a sneak attack. There was quite a laugh about it on the staff, at least those that were cleared. Eddie Layton suggested that Jasper had planned the attack for the Japs, but it was not completely in jest. There was an investigation, and Jasper was exonerated.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat must have been sort of strange between pals,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey weren\u2019t,\u201d said Mac. \u201cJoe Rochefort and Eddie were very close. But Eddie couldn\u2019t stand Jasper. I was one of his kids in the Estimates Section, and he was delighted when he finally got enough of us Lieutenants to stand up a real 24 hour watch. And he made Commander.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI imagine that would pick up anyone\u2019s spirits,\u201d I said. \u201cit certainly did for me.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter I volunteered to go forward to Guam in \u201845, Jasper came out to make a visit. I told Eddie I was going to go out to the airfield and pick him up in my jeep. Eddie wanted to know why I was going to bother.\u201d<\/p>\n
I shook my head in wonder at the memory of a rendezvous so long ago and far away, vivid as if it were just yesterday.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
\nwww.vicsocotra.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
h8k2_3-022515 \u201cI have often said that an intelligence officer has one task, one job, one mission. This is to tell his commander, his superior, today, what the [enemies] are going to do tomorrow. This is his job. If he doesn\u2019t do this, then he\u2019s failed.\u201d \u2013 Captain Joseph J. Rochefort, USN I was having one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-socotra"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19232"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19234,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19232\/revisions\/19234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}