Conclusions

After reading some but not all the millions of words alluded to at the beginning of this brochure to what conclusion haveI arrived? I will be brief.

First, I must confess, I think that Kimmel and Short were not as culpable as I first thought they were back in 1941-1942, despite all the "warnings" sent them. The Washington authorities were culpable, too--maybe a lot more culpable than were these two officers. Both the Majority and the Minority Reports make good sense. The Report of the Majority contained some very pertinent recommendations--but nobody seems to be doing very much about implementing the second and perhaps the most important of these recommendations; nor has much, if anything, been done about following up on the Conclusions of the minority, Senators Ferguson and Brewster. In 1946 I thought the latter two senators were "hitting below the belt", but today, in 1957, I think they hit closer to the truth than the Majority. I think Mr. Keefe's "additional views" on the Majority Report make good sense--Kimmel and Short, he said, were not the sole culprits. I think that the Intelligence Services came off rather easily--too easily in the fixing of responsibility and pointing out derelictions. I think the intelligence staffs might have used more imagination, but this was not because they were staffed with obtuse officers or persons of low-grade intelligence. As a matter of cold fact, I think, they were badly understaffed, because in both the Army and the Navy "intelligence" didn't count--for much at any rate, then. This raises the question: does it

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count for much more today in the Armed Services? I think that Kimmel and Short should have been sent more information--even in if they were sent only "gists" of MAGIC--to let them evaluate for themselves the significance of what the Japanese were saying. General miles says that the warning messages sent them were of far more importance than anything they could have got from MAGIC. I don't agree. They might have had more time to ruminate; they might even have guessed--as Admiral Kimmel hints--what the Japanese were planning; our commands might therefore have been much more prepared than they were to meet the attack. This, one must admit, could have been done even without their having a PURPLE machine or a cryptanalytic staff to solve and translate messages in that or in the other Japanese diplomatic systems.

I think that Admiral Stark was wrong in waiting for General Marshall to be found before sending off a message to Kimmel and Short--and to the other overseas commanders--as soon as the last part of the 14-part Tokyo to Washington message became available--especially when he knew from MAGIC that Kurusu and Nomura were told exactly to the minute when to present the whole message to Secretary Hull. (That we knew the contents of the last part of that message ("deliver this whole message exactly at 1:00 p.m.") before the Japanese Embassy code clerks had them is a credit to the efficiency of Army and Navy cryptanalytic staffs.)

I think that Colonel Edward French, Chief of the Signal Corps Message Center, used very poor judgment when he sent Marshall's message via commercial radio. He could have used Navy radio or FBI radio--but I am sure he thought it was infra dig to ask a "sister" government radio

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services (especially the Navy) to do (at a critical moment) something that Army radio couldn't do. Or maybe Colonel French didn't realize the gravity of the situation, or was not told so in impressive enough language.

The Ferguson-Brewster Minority Report does not point the finger at all the high ranking officials who should share the responsibility but it doe say (p. 573) "Both in Washington and in Hawaii there were numerous and serious failures of men in the lower civil and military echelons to perform their duties and discharge their responsibilities. These are too numerous to be treated in detail and individually named." I would have liked them to have named the Directors of Intelligence in the Army and in the Navy, specifically, because I think poor intelligence work played such a large part in the debacle.

And, of course, although it is clear that MAGIC was withheld from Kimmel and Short after the summer of 1941, I do not think (and of this I am quite sure) that it was deliberately withheld for the specific purpose of bringing on the attack at Pearl! Except for the most rabid of the revisionists this is too fantastic a thesis; but there is a stronger argument against such a thesis: it is not supported by the facts.

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Transcribed and formatted by Patrick Clancey