Opinion Editorial | |
| Wednesday, June 2, 1999 | |
Justice for Pearl Harbor Commanders |
Last week, the Senate reopened a long closed page of American history. On May 25, it voted 52 to 47 in favor of legislation that would restore the ranks of Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and General Walter C. Short, the two commanders at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. After the war they had been demoted as punishment for failing to respond adequately to the Japanese air attack that crippled our Pacific fleet. Kimmel and Short, however, always maintained that they were scapegoats for those higher up the chain of command. The Senate vote belatedly acknowledges that they were right.
There is no question that the Army and Navy were unprepared on that day of infamy. Although Kimmel and Short knew that war with Japan was a growing possibility, they had no special reason to expect an air attack on the morning of December 7. If they had any such expectation, our ships would not have been anchored at harbor but sent to sea, and our fighter planes would not have been bunched together against sabotage but dispersed or in the air. The crux of the case against Kimmel and Short is that they should have known better.
The problem with the case against the commanders has always been that the U.S. had broken Japan's top secret diplomatic code, known as the Purple Code, in 1940. Eventually, U.S. codebreakers were actually able to build duplicate code machines, allowing them to decipher Japanese diplomatic messages almost as fast as Japan's embassies. Although eight of these machines were manufactured, none was ever sent to Pearl Harbor. Indeed, Kimmel and Short were in complete ignorance of the intelligence they provided until after the war.
It is clear from reading these decoded messages, which were known as Magic, that the imminence of attack was much greater than Kimmel and Short had been led to believe. In particular, a message intercepted on December 6 pointed to an attack at Pearl Harbor the next morning. When President Roosevelt saw the message he said, "This means war." Yet no warning was sent to Hawaii until about an hour before the first bombs fell. Moreover, for some inexplicable reason, General George Marshall, the Army chief of staff, sent this last warning by commercial telegraph, rather than phone or radio. As a result, the warning was not received until after the attack.
For many years, there has been speculation that Roosevelt deliberately denied Kimmel and Short adequate warnings in order to ensure a Japanese attack and America's entry into World War II, which had been raging in Europe since 1939. This was necessary to overcome the political resistance against American involvement. Supporting this view is the fact that Roosevelt had taken a number of actions to goad Japan into an attack, including embargoes on oil and steel scrap.
Only a few months before the attack, Roosevelt froze all Japanese assets in the U.S., which effectively cut off all trade. And just days before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt personally ordered three small Navy ships into the path of a Japanese naval task force in hopes of triggering an attack. Although this last effort failed, the leader of the mission, Admiral Kemp Tolley, had no doubt that his job was to provoke war.
One can perhaps defend Roosevelt's actions as required to get American into a necessary war that the people were too myopic to support. But there was no excuse for Roosevelt to deny his own responsibility and lay all the blame for Pearl Harbor on Kimmel and Short. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Senate was correct to right the injustice against them.
Source: Bruce Bartlett, senior fellow, National Center for Policy Analysis, June 2, 1999.
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