November, 1941. The Sum Total of All Fears. Chapter Two: Ed Tells Harry What's Going On in Japan. And It's Bad.
Ed Prichard, Harry's "Japan Man," told Harry of his dire and dreadful conviction of the Japanese intention. It was to do the one thing no one would suspect. Attack Pearl Harbor soon on a Sunday.
This Episode: Japan’s First Air Fleet was constrained by Tojo’s belief in land wars above all and sustained by Yamamoto’s belief that if his nation were to begin a war with America that it could not win, it’s chances for success would be improved, if only slightly, by destroying America’s Pacific fleet in a surprise attack. Ed Prichard, Harry’s Japan man, came to him with an opinion that Japan would open war on America at dawn on a Sunday in early December. In England, conditions beyond his control brought on a kind of ominous stasis overlain with famine that infuriated Churchill. Harry’s brother Lew, a doctor, told him that the transfusions that were making him feel better might work if they didn’t kill him with either “hemosiderosis or an extracorporeal apheresis.” The Japanese pilots of the First Air Fleet were so thrilled with the importance of their mission that they saw glory in making suicide of it. Yamamoto disabused them of that notion, saying they must survive to continue the war.
This Chapter: Roosevelt set Harry with an office by his bed, a car at his disposal for coming to the White House, and Ed Prichard as his driver. Prichard had read all the documents — reports, analyses, and intercepts — and came to the conclusion that an attack on Pearl Harbor was imminent on some Sunday soon at dawn.
Contents of “November, 1941. The Sum Total of All Fears.”
Japan’s First Air Fleet Makes Ready
Ed Tells Harry What’s Going On in Japan. And It’s Bad
A Deadly Calm Settles Above All the Battlefields
Harry Getting Better; Japan Getting Ready
Chapter Two: Ed Tells Harry What’s Going On in Japan. And It’s Bad
Reading time: Eleven minutes
“So, best I can tell, the boss told Grace to tell Mr. Stettinius to set me up with a car and chauffeur responsibilities,” said Ed Prichard to Harry Hopkins on Friday, the 7th of November, in Harry’s room at the Naval Hospital just seven blocks west of the White House. “And she told RuthJean to get you a desk and a phone and all this stuff, so now you can work here, or at the White House. You look pretty damn good for a hospital patient, like you been layin’ up on a beach.”
“That’s the transfusion. You don’t look much like a chauffeur. Don’t they come with caps and a lot of bowing and scraping?”
“The Senate passed the amendment to the Neutrality Law this afternoon. Fifty to thirty-seven. House votes next week.”
“I heard. RuthJean called.”
“She sent this radio,” Prichard said, waving a small one. “You’ve got carte blanche to come and go as you please. Just call me and I’ll come running. Driving. Park anywhere I want. Bulletproof in that car.”
“Tell me what you know that I don’t.”
“We know a lot of stuff. We’ve got intercepts and analyses and interpretations, but we don’t have a process for distilling it into moonshine. So we know almost everything, except we don’t know what what we know means, so we lack conviction and the result is paralysis.”
“Why is that?”
“Mostly it’s because our leaders are blinded by the war in Europe, in Russia.”
“You mean the boss?”
“I don’t know about that, and I don’t want to besmirch the man I revere. I think it may mostly be Secretary Hull, nose-to-nose with Nomura. He wants peace so badly that he’s willing to listen to Japanese baloney ’til the cows come home. As long as he’s talking, to Stimson and Knox and Stark and maybe Marshall, and maybe you, it sort of justifies all of you believing that everything’s gonna be okay over there. But it’s not and the Japs know we’ve fallen for their baloney. They know we intercept everything so they send out ten times everything, flooding the zone with confusion buried in intricate codes. They’ve figured out how to keep us busy and ignorant.
“Here’s an example. There’s a Naval Commander in Honolulu, a James Rochefort in the Combat Intelligence Unit at Pearl Harbor, who is keeping track of their carriers, spotting them by radio signals, counting them. His team is able to identify a carrier by the radio guy’s keystroking, like signatures. He’s got them with six heavy carriers and six smaller ones. They’re the key to any attack and they’re easy to track because when they leave port they open radio contact, whereas when they’re in port they go quiet. But recently he’s noticed they’re reversing that, making a lot of pointless noise in port and then going quiet until they reappear in another port and start talking again. Or at least some of them are. It’s like they’re on to Rochefort, to us.”
“How do they get from one port to another in radio silence? Isn’t there traffic?”
“Got to be, so they’re doing it with flag signals and blinking lights. Rochefort suspects it’s training for a secret mission.”
“How do you know this? Of him?”
“He sends reports. They land on a pile of other reports. I read them. One arrived a few days ago that shows no evidence of importance, but I wonder. General Short and Admiral Kimmel made a deal. Kimmel would take all the PBYs into his fleet and assume responsibility for long-range scouting, which is pretty much what the PBYs do. In exchange, Short agreed to assume military control of the other seven islands surrounding Oahu, which he will do with his fleet of land-based planes. Old ones and slower, I think. Maybe troops transferred to Maui and Molokai and the one they call the Big Island. And the others. I don’t know. I guess Short wants all the dirt and Kimmel wants all the water and that’s what it’s all about. Who knows?
“Our ambassador in Tokyo, Grew, sent a report that said …” He riffled the papers of his briefcase and found one and took it out and read from it. “… says ‘Japan may adopt an all out, do or die attempt to render themselves impervious to foreign embargoes, even risking national hara-kiri rather than cede to foreign pressure. My staff and I believe that such a contingency is not only possible but probable.’ That’s Grew talking about his staff, not me talking about mine because …”
“Because you don’t have a staff.”
“Right. Grew says, ‘Japanese sanity cannot be measured by our own standards of logic. Japan’s resort to measures which might make war with the United States inevitable may come with dramatic and dangerous suddenness.’
“A Naval Intelligence guy …” He riffled more papers, found one. “His name is Ellis Zacharias and he’s the Captain of the cruiser Salt Lake City says they’re withdrawing all their commercial shipping, their merchant ships, from our west coast and this is a sure sign of imminent hostilities.”
Harry said, “A Naval Intelligence guy is captain of a heavy cruiser? Which one’s his day job?”
“I wondered about that but decided he wasn’t making it up.”
“Okay. It’s plausible.”
“I’m getting all the reports, not just the ones that get sent to the president. Let me ask you a couple of questions.”
Harry got comfortable. Prichard said, “They need oil. There’s a lot of it in the Dutch East Indies, which is actually west of here. Way west. They can’t get to it without going past the Philippines. You agree with that?”
“Not exactly. They could launch a southern attack on Singapore and the East Indies from Indochina, which they’ve been occupying for many months now from the north across land they captured from China long ago. They have ships there, too.”
“Oh. There goes my theory.”
“Stay with it. It isn’t likely they have all the ships and planes and troops in Indochina that they would need for the full invasion.”
Prichard said, “You’ve been thinking about this, too.”
“They don’t show movies here.”
“My theory is that the Philippines are inevitably vulnerable.”
Harry said, “Agreed, but they may not be part of the initial attack. If the Japs attack only Singapore the president doesn’t think the American people would be willing to join the war over it. But if the Japs think we would, then they would be likely to execute a preëmptive strike on the Philippines by coming down from Formosa with carriers in the dark of night and taking out a lot of our aircraft.”
“And the president would consider that an act of war?”
“Yes, he would, but he’s not certain the Congress would back him. It’ll be interesting to see how the House votes on the Neutrality amendment.”
Prichard said, “It would be really embarrassing to call for a declaration of war and not get it.”
“Or get it, but not by much. In 1917, Wilson’s call for war got fifty votes against in Congress. He should have remembered that when he got bullish about the League of Nations. The boss remembers. It’s not embarrassment that bothers him. That would just piss him off. It’s that it would be ineffectual. He wants to ask for it when the people are mad enough to show up at the enlistment offices the next day, and all the isolationists in Congress would damn well know it.”
“Does he — and do you — think an attack on Hawaii would be enough?”
“Estimating the mood of the people is conjecture, but I think so. And I think he does too. The boss considers this ambiguity about our commitment to Singapore and Congress’s commitment to the Philippines a real weakness of our foreign policy.”
“So it’s up to the Japs. If they believed we would defend Singapore and the Dutch oil with troops and planes from the Philippines, they would believe we would also surely send our fleet from Pearl Harbor to help out. So nothing would better guarantee their success with the oil than to take out the American fleet in Pearl Harbor. Right?”
Harry nodded. Prichard said, “It would have to be done before an attack opened on the Philippines, or it would be a hell of a lot harder. Right?”
Harry nodded. Prichard said, “So that’s what’s going to happen as the first act of war. An attack on Pearl Harbor. And it’s going to happen very soon.”
“Have we come to the Prichard Opinion?”
“Not quite, but close. I’m convinced it’s going to happen, but you want me to predict when and I’m not there yet.”
“Have you any idea when it’s not going to happen?”
“Yes. It’s not going to happen any day other than a Sunday. Or maybe a Saturday, but I ninety percent doubt Saturday. No chance during the week. Do you know Norman Littell, the Assistant Attorney General?”
“No, but I know there is a man with that name in that office.”
“He’s just returned from Hawaii and wrote a letter to Marvin McIntyre …” McIntyre was Secretary to the Cabinet. “… that ripped the brass of the army in Hawaii from top to bottom. Old. Tired. Bored. Go to bed as early as possible. Littell says all the generals believe there will be no Pacific war because we’re doing so little to strengthen Kimmel’s fleet.”
Harry said, “Marshall and Stark put a memo on the president’s desk yesterday that said our Pacific fleet is inferior to the Japanese fleet and cannot undertake an unlimited strategic offensive in the western Pacific.”
“How do you know that? Here in the hospital?”
“RuthJean dropped it off this morning on her way to work. I read it a little while ago with my Jell-O. Their opinion is that the Japanese are poised to occupy islands throughout the Pacific that will have to be contested one-by-one in an offensive advance. And that there is nothing harder in warfare than uprooting a dug-in enemy that cannot be driven backwards because, for example, they’re on an island. We don’t have the necessary manpower nor the appropriate equipment for the job. The boss has called a Cabinet meeting for today to discuss it. And to hear from Hull about how the jawboning with Nomura and the new guy Kurusu is going.”
Prichard said, “Littell said all of the old generals play golf on Sunday morning. Every Sunday morning. Have tee-times chiseled in stone. I bet all their caddies are Japanese spies. What I think is we should scout north of Oahu every Friday and Saturday afternoon. If we see trouble coming, disperse the fleet during the night, and be on full alert at dawn.”
“Friday and Saturday?”
“Just in case I’m wrong, but they won’t come during the week.”
“Why north?”
“They’re not going to come in the front door. They may be suicidal, but they’re not stupid.”
“And if we don’t see anything coming?”
“I would disperse the fleet on a schedule that kept them at sea at dawn on the weekends. Return to harbor about lunchtime if nothing happens.”
“Wouldn’t the Japanese caddies who are actually spies snitch it off?”
“Gee, Harry, I don’t know, but right or wrong it would put our defense in the game instead of on the golf course.”
“You don’t think they’d turn around and go home if we saw them?”
“Would you? They didn’t come all this way to have tea at a peace conference. They’d start shooting on sight. They wouldn’t go back home.”
“What if we didn’t see them because they stayed too far away? Do you think Kimmel would disperse his fleet and General Short would go on full alert for fear of an enemy they hadn’t seen coming?”
“No, I don’t think they would and now you’re getting to my darkest fear, which is that Pearl Harbor is indefensible because there are so many possibilities the thing that will result is to do nothing. And wake up some Sunday morning being bombed by an enemy with huge balls and a lot of aircraft carriers. Do you want to go to the White House?”
“Sure. It’ll give me a chance to check out your driving.”
“Bulletproof. Have you been to Hawaii?”
“No. Have you?”
“No, but I’ve found a half dozen people who have, and they all say Honolulu is one lively joint. Especially on weekends when the fleet’s in and American uniforms roam the streets. Do you think it’s possible that having a good time on Saturday night in Honolulu is an unofficial agreement for the benefit of our soldiers and sailors over there? A deal made from top to bottom?”