Maggie's Farm

The scene of the sailors standing to attention as bombs begin falling appears in the movie Tora, Tora, Tora.

A minor, technical point, USS Arizona was not the sister ship of USS Nevada.

Another minor point, the other famous flag associated with the Japanese surrender is the flag flown by Commodore Perry in 1854 (the Perry Expedition) when the Japanese signed a treaty with the US. The Perry flag was onboard USS Missouri for the surrender in '45.

USS Nevada was the first of the "Standard Type" BBs.

I think just as impressive is how battleships like Nevada were extensively refitted during their service lives. In 1916 she had the distinctive look of WW1 USN battleships, with the towering "birdcage" masts, after her 1942 modernization she had the more compact profile of a WW2 BB.

We should also remember that within hours of the PH raid, attacks were made throughout the Pacific, in the Philippines, Wake Island, Guam, Malaya, Thailand, Shanghai and Midway, and that by the end of the year Hong Kong would surrender and, like Uncle W in the Philippines, most of SE Asia/SW Pacific was living on borrowed time.

Stinnett's assertions about the alleged known location of the Japanese fleet near Hawaii have not been taken seriously because of the lack of any primary documentation. The blogspot itself does not give references.

I've read his book, and if I recall, he claims that a freighter at sea overheard IJN radio chatter ... but the radio logs are conveniently missing.

I'd like to see any primary sources that say radio direction finders had located the PH attack force. Other fleets were known to be moving south, and were presumed to be part of the invasion of allied territories in SE asia and western pacific.

this isn't to say that the USN and FDR weren't capable of misleading the congressional investigations, but they were covering up negligence and incompetence in intelligence gathering and distribution (Hawaii was denied intelligence summaries such as the "bomb plot" intercept that were forwarded to the Philippine commanders).

in the mid-1980s, the government declassified a mass of documents called the pre-Pearl Harbor intercepts. These were signals encrypted in the still-unreadable JN-25b cypher, and were given low priority after the cypher was broken in '42.

doing the monday morning quarterbacking routine, if there had been perfect insight, perfect distribution of the broken diplomatic signals traffic and assuming that the naval codes had been readable and distributed, PH looks very much a likely target.

in the late 1990s, the senate held hearings on the cashiering of Adml. Kimmel (Pac. Fleet commander) and Gen. Short (HA Dept and responsible for fleet security), receiving the testimony of modern historians. at least one drew attention to still-classified British intelligence summaries provided to Churchill from the end of November- early December 1941; there is speculation that their content concerns PH. in particular, that British and Dutch cryptographers had broken the JN-25b cypher but had not fully shared information with FDR. these hearings are available online.

to be clear on a few points appearing above. allied code breakers had penetrated the high level administrative "admirals" code but that was a misplaced effort, as it was not an operations code.

the diplomatic "purple" code had been broken, but it did not include military traffic.

the famous "winds alert" (east wind, rain) message was not transmitted until after the attack had gone in. this was a diplomatic message to Japanese embassies to destroy papers and coding machines and was regarded as a kind of war warning.

US codebreakers (google Stations HYPO and CAST) had not penetrated naval code JN-25b, the operations code in use at the time of the attack and successor to the partially readable JN-25a, and so far as we know, neither had the Dutch or British. regardless, all surviving evidence shows that the attack plans were written and distributed by hand and radios disabled once the PH attack force was at sea. none of the original attack plans exist.

lastly there is a common conclusion among the conspiracy buffs that because ship movement reports were readable in Dec. '41 then the at-sea location of the ships themselves must have been known. this is yet another example of extrapolating too much from too little. these are low grade harbormaster codes, reporting ship departures. that the IJN carriers were missing from their home ports in early Dec. '41 was no surprise, their location, regrettably, was.

signals intelligence wasn't in its infancy in '41 but it wasn't nearly as important as it is today. there were in-service rivalries that cause bottlenecks of intelligence distribution, false assumptions of the USN over what the IJN would "really" do, errors in choosing what code breaking efforts were worth pursuing, possibly perfidious allies.

there was only a handful of Japanese language officers, something that I was surprised to learn, and they were chronically understaffed and it takes a lot of time and effort to build a "book" on a code and all that effort can be negated when the cipher is altered ("additives", see below). so the intercept stations might copy only a fraction of the total number of messages sent, and of that fraction, only a small part of any message could be read.

read here for more difficulties, from the NSA
http://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/center_crypt_history/pearl_harbor_review/jn25.shtml

the IJN could take a radio operator, whose "fist" was known to the listening stations, and whose job was on a carrier, put him on a destroyer headed in a different direction, and have him duplicate radio traffic from the carrier, now keeping radio silence.

Midway is an example of how fortune follows from preparedness. Signals intelligence provided the USN with a chance, and on a day when most actions went wrong, suddenly everything went right.