Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Piercing the Fog
information and the clues it provided. As an astonishing example, the chief of
the Intelligence Branch of MID, responsible for intelligence estimates for the
G-2 and the Chief of Staff, did not have access to Japanese intercepts.’
Reflecting both the excessive security surrounding signals intelligence and
the perceived value of intelligence was the decision to withhold such informa-
tion from senior commanders in Hawaii. Whether any of them would have acted
differently is open to debate. The Commander, Pacific Fleet, Admiral Husband
Kimmel, did get the gist of critical information in long, personal letters from the
Chief of Naval Operations, while Lt. Gen. Walter C. Short, Commanding
General of the Army’s Hawaiian Department, demonstrated a general apathy
toward intelligence. His narrowly focused interpretation of the war-warning
message he received on November 27 as referring strictly to sabotage suggests
that direct access would not have had any significant effect. The failure to
implement a secure means of passing appropriate information to commanders
likely to be in the line of fire was both an organizational failure and a reflection
of the lack of appreciation of the potential role of intelligence in the preparation
and conduct of military operations.
Even without SIGINT, it did not take much imagination to recognize the
general deterioration of Japanese-American relations. Daily receipt of decrypted
messages in Honolulu could have provided no stronger warning than the War
Department’s message of November 27: “Negotiations with Japan appear to be
terminated to all practical purposes. . . . Japanese future action unpredictable but
hostile action possible at any moment.” The Navy message sent the same day
was even more explicit: “This dispatch is to be considered a war ~arning.”~
After the event, individuals would point to qualifiers in these messages to
explain why neither the Pacific Fleet nor the Hawaiian Department was
prepared for the attack that occurred ten days later. The very fact that so much
attention was paid to the supposed qualifiers highlights the fundamental failure
of the commanders at Oahu: they simply did not believe an attack would happen
there.4 During one of the Army’s investigations, Brig. Gen. Sherman Miles,
WDGS G-2 in December 1941, stated, “The primary responsibility of military
intelligence [is] . . . to advise the Command what the enemy may do and
possibly do or more probably It was in the execution of this responsibility
that the collective American intelligence community most signally let down.
The fundamental intelligence failures leading to Pearl Harbor lay neither in
process nor organization; they lay in attitudes and outlooks.
Not only did the intelligence agencies not question the implicit assumption
that a serious attack on Hawaii was not a possibility, they contributed to its
happening. Colonel Kroner, Chief of the Intelligence Branch of MID, testified
he did not recall any MID estimates prepared for the G-2 and the Chief of Staff
that addressed this as a probability.6 Asked why the final estimate preceding the
attack had focused solely on Europe, General Miles explained he had wanted
to counter the “defeatist attitude” about Nazi Germany he saw within the
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