Winston Churchill

More documents

Recommendations

Info

BETRAYAL AT PEARL HARBOR... The producers of "Betrayal" also interviewed Eric Nave, a British cryptologist who worked on the Japanese JN-25 naval code. Nave, with the late James Rusbridger, wrote Betrayal at Pearl Harbor, a book claiming Churchill hid what he knew about the attack from Roosevelt. The producers might have mentioned that Nave left Singapore in February 1940, had no further involvement with JN-25, and could not have known of the Japanese change to the JN-25B code in December 1940—and the resulting lack of anyone's ability to read the code after that date. There are a couple of scenes with Pacific Fleet cryptologist Joe Rochefort, the hero of Midway, who is said to have read JN-25B intercepts. But they fail to mention Rochefort's claims that he was reading only five to twenty percent of any message in JN-25B prior to Midway and could not have been reading more before then. The "Winds Code," which is supposed to have been an attack signal disguised in a Japanese weather report, surfaces again in the History Channel presentation. I have yet to hear an explanation of how the "Winds Code" told anybody anything about Pearl Harbor. Once again Ralph Briggs is dragged out as evidence that the Americans intercepted this message. How Briggs, in Cheltenham, Maryland, heard the coded weather report and no one else did has never been explained; it was supposed to be, after all, a regular mid-day, Japanese time, CB radio broadcast. Nor does the History Channel explain either why the Japanese sent it, since the failure in communications that would have necessitated the "Winds Code" did not occur. Tucked into the "Betrayal" piece is Mr. Joe Lieb's claim that Secretary of State Hull told him of the coming attack and named Pearl Harbor as the target. The trouble here is that Mr. Lieb and Mr. Hull were the only ones present at their alleged conversation, and Mr. Lieb did not see fit to tell anyone of this conversation until after Mr. Hull died. Thus there is no way independently to verify his claim. An even more preposterous notion presented by the film is that General Marshall (he of course was also in on the plot) went horseback riding on a Sunday morning in order to be "unavailable" for questioners concerned about Japan's next move, thus assuring the success of the Japanese air raid. Really! "Betrayal at Pearl Harbor's" case against General Marshall hinges on this, and the fact that he sent an alert warning to Pearl Harbor without sufficient priority. Surely it is easier to consider the latter act one of bureaucratic incompetence rather than a purposeful plot to delay an attack warning? If Pearl was being set up, why send a warning at all? To cover himself? But the warning was kept secret for fifty years! Geostrategy and codebreaking take up a great deal of the film, which major concern throughout. Indeed, while the West may have focused primarily on the Japanese during the Pacific war, the Japanese continued to focus more on China. Even at the war's end the Japanese had 1.9 million men and nearly 10,000 aircraft there. It made little sense to Japan to defeat the U. S. if that meant giving up China. "Betrayal at Pearl Harbor" is very wise after the fact. The imminence of war, it tells us, should have been clear to American planners. Japan's JN-25B code had been broken. The orders to sail the Japanese Fleet from the Kuriles to a "The reason why this kind of garbage passes for history is that standards for evidence have disappeared." uses them to document accusations of prior knowledge of the coming attack by American authorities. The producers begin by alleging that the United States knew the Japanese attack force was in the Kurile Islands. If it did, then the U. S. had to expect an attack either in Alaska, Hawaii, the west coast or Panama. Of these possible targets, the film says, the only one that made any sense was Hawaii. But the documentary oversimplifies: having its fleet in the Kuriles did not reduce Japan's choices of where to attack. Admiral Yamamoto needed to bring the fleet together for an attack in the most secure place possible, regardless of direction. The "southern strategy," which eventually won out, required the Japanese Navy to neutralize the Philippines (then a U. S. territory), which crossed its sea lanes. This required Yamamoto to go after the U. S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. That the Japanese had trouble making up their minds (Japanese Army-Navy politics was at work here too) served them, in the sense that it helped disguise their eventual choice. The "northern strategy" (attacking Alaska) was also seen as a distinct possibility to Westerners. As late as 15 October 1941 Roosevelt wrote Churchill, "I think they [the Japanese] are headed north." (See Kimball's Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence.) Clearly the Japanese had a variety of strategic choices in the months prior to Pearl Harbor. The key to their Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was China, and that was their rendezvous point in mid-Pacific were transmitted. The Dutch claimed to have intercepted them, so presumably the British and the Americans should have been able to do the same. Certainly the imminence of war in the Pacific was obvious to any reasonably intelligent person at the time, but the Pacific did not get the attention it deserved. To understand why, we must put ourselves in the shoes of leaders at that time—not laboratory analysts of the present. And at that time, the British were up to their eyeballs with Germans and the Americans were fighting an undeclared war with the German Navy in the North Atlantic. Hindsight, of course, is always 20-20. But on whatever the British and Americans "should have been able to do," let me quote a direct source. Duane Whitlock, unlike Mr. Nave, was there, on Corregidor, working on the Japanese codes. "I can attest from first-hand experience that as of 1 December 1941 the recovery of JN-25B had not progressed to the point that it was productive of any appreciable intelligence," stated Whitlock—"not even enough to be pieced together by traffic analysis....It simply was not within the realm of our combined cryptologic capability to produce a usable decrypt at that particular juncture." In the early 1990s the U. S. Navy transferred all its cryptologic archives from Crane, Indiana to the National Archives in Washington. This includes 26,581 JN-25 intercepts from 1 September to 7 December. All of these are available for public review. >» FINEST HOUR IOI/38
Frederick Parker, who studied 2,413 of these intercepts, argues in the film that had they been read at the time, they would have provided clear evidence of the impending attack on Pearl Harbor. Rusbridger and Nave, in their book, claim they were read, but offer no evidence. Well, here is the evidence: The 2,413 pre-Pearl Harbor intercepts had been decrypted by Navy cryptologists after the war while they were waiting to be mustered out of the service. While Parker makes a strong circumstantial case that the attack would have been discovered had these messages been read, cryptologists at that time would not have been looking just at the 2,413 intercepts; they would have been looking at all 26,581. Would they have been able to discern the relevant information from all that noise? I could go on: the "bomb plot," the Popov questionnaire, Hull's "ultimatum" to Japan, etc., all old news, misleadingly presented. Readers may recall that Nave and Rusbridger tried to turn all this around a few years back (just in time to cash in on the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, actually) by claiming it wasn't Roosevelt after all, it was Winston Churchill who hid the knowledge of the attack in order to draw the United States into the war. As Professor Kimball wrote: "It seems to me that to brand WSC and/or FDR as conspirators requires that they be seen as evil geniuses. But for them to allow the U.S. Fleet to be clobbered means they were stupid. That doesn't compute." Allow me to vent for a moment. The reason why this kind of garbage passes for history is that standards for evidence have virtually disappeared. Not all evidence is equal and there is an obligation to weigh evidence against some reasonable standard. The standard is not exactly rocket science; remnant evidence is better than tradition-creating evidence; corroborated testimony is better than uncorroborated testimony; forensic evidence is better than hearsay. Our inability to be skeptical, to think critically, to ask questions, to compare and contrast, leads to the perpetuation of one urban legend after another, be it Churchill and Coventry, Churchill and the Lusitania, Churchill (or Roosevelt) and Pearl Harbor, etc., etc., etc. Hard thinking, critical analysis, and skepticism are the only ways to challenge this rubbish. I sometimes despair. Vent off. How the Telegraph Put One Across Hitler Michael Smith Mr. Smith's new book, Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park (Channel 4 Books) is available for £14.99 post free in UK, from Telegraph Books Direct, 24 Seward St, London EC1V 3GB, tel. (0541) 557222 quoting ref PA557. The ability to solve The Daily Telegraph crossword in under 12 minutes was used as a recruitment test for wartime code-breakers. Good chess players and those skilled at crossword puzzles were viewed as having the potential to turn their abilities to cracking codes. The Daily Telegraph was asked to organise a crossword competition to help identify potential recruits. After the competition, each of the participants was contacted and asked to undertake "a particular type of work as a contribution to the war effort." Those who agreed found themselves sent to the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, the home of Britain's wartime code-breakers. Bletchley Park had employed several hundred eccentric academics to break the Nazi Enigma codes early in the war, but by the end of 1941 it was desperately trying to expand its operations. The need for fighting men was so great that no one in Whitehall was prepared to release people to work at an obscure Foreign Office department that could not tell anyone what it was doing. Four of the senior code-breakers, Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman, Stuart Milner-Barry and Hugh Alexander, wrote to Winston Churchill, who was obsessed with the code-breakers and had recently visited them, describing them as "the geese that laid the golden eggs but never cackled." The letter warned Churchill, "We despair of any early improvement without your intervention." No one seemed to understand "the importance of what is done here or the urgent necessity of dealing promptly with our requests." Churchill minuted to his chief of staff: "Make sure they have all they want extreme priority and report to me that this has been done," he wrote, scrawling across it the warning: "Action this day." Shortly afterwards, clever young men and women from the universities began arriving at Bletchley. But they were not enough and, spurred on by Churchill's minute, military intelligence chiefs looked for new ways of finding recruits. When the publication of the 5,000th Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle led to a spate of correspondence on the paper's letters pages, military intelligence spotted a useful source of talent. Stanley Sedgewick, a Telegraph crossword fan, entered a competition to solve the daily puzzle in less than 12 minutes. The first to complete the crossword was a Mr. Chance from Orpington, Kent, who handed it in after 6 minutes, 3.5 seconds, but unfortunately he had spelt a word wrong and was disqualified. Four other people completed the puzzle within 12 minutes, the fastest being F. H.W. Hawes of Dagenham, Essex (7:58). They included Vera Telfer of Maida Vale, north London (10:39). Sedgewick was one word short when the 12-minute bell rang, "which was disappointing as I had completed that day's puzzle in the train to Waterloo in under 12 minutes. "Imagine my surprise when several weeks later, I received a letter marked 'Confidential' inviting me to see Col. Nichols of the General Staff 'on a matter of national importance.'" (Nichols was the head of MI8, the military intelligence department concerned with Bletchley Park, which was referred to by those in the know as BP or Station X.) "I was told, though not so primitively, that chaps with twisted brains like mine might be suitable for a particular type of work as a contribution to the war effort." After passing the interview, Sedgewick was sent to Bletchley Park's training base in Bedford, known locally as "the Spy School," and then appointed "Temporary Junior Assistant" at the "Government Communications Centre." He worked in the Air Section, on German weather codes which were used to provide weather forecasts for Bomber Command. He was unaware until shortly after the end of the war that their most important use was as a means of breaking into the Enigma system used by the German Navy. The work made a crucial contribution to winning the Battle of the Atlantic and ensuring that vital sea lines with the U.S.A. were protected. Mi FINEST HOUR IOI / 39
Page 2 and 3: THE CHURCHILL CENTER THEINTERNATION
Page 4 and 5: DESPATCH BOX Number 101 • Winter
Page 6 and 7: DATELINES DDG-81 s Captain, Cdr. Mi
Page 8 and 9: We also hope the new managers get r
Page 10 and 11: LOCAL AND NATIONAL NEWS BRITISH COL
Page 12 and 13: PERSONALITY OF THE CENTURY... There
Page 14 and 15: Typically, Lady Soames has caught t
Page 16 and 17: FAR LEFT: Lisa, Gail and Churchill
Page 18 and 19: CHURCHILL LECTURE... another statue
Page 20 and 21: INTERNATIONAL CHURCHILL TOUR AND CO
Page 22 and 23: IO The First Time I WSC'J... Our me
Page 24 and 25: THE FIRST TIME I WSC'D... Andrew Ro
Page 26 and 27: Exploring Churchill s Canon Wkat to
Page 28 and 29: WHAT TO DO ABOUT IRAQJ... Mr. Sheph
Page 30 and 31: "Baldwin took the view that Germany
Page 32 and 33: Thanks! To all wno aided Tne Cnurcn
Page 34 and 35: 100-75-50-25 YEARS AGO ACTION THIS
Page 36 and 37: ZtooKS, ARTS & CURIOSITIES Explorin
Page 40 and 41: CHURCHILL ONLINE http://www.winston
Page 42 and 43: ABSTRACTS INSIDE THE JOURNALS John
Page 44 and 45: Churchill in Stamps: The World's Tr
Page 46 and 47: ABOUT BOOKS "Neither Fulsome Nor Fu
Page 48 and 49: ABOUT BOOKS Also of possible intere
Page 50 and 51: By Curt Zoller (Curt@fea.net) Test

Winston Churchill

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?