Closer Look at the Evidence
Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan
In our book A Matter of Justice: Pearl Harbor: Betrayal, Blame and a Family’s Quest for Justice (Harper, 2016) we layout new information relating to flaws in intelligence gathering and dissemination before the Pearl Harbor attack. Some relate directly to the shallow-water torpedo matter ably covered by Christopher O’Connor in “A Taranto–Pearl Harbor Connection?” (December, pp. 30–37).
Two important items should be added to the evidentiary record. First, O’Connor writes that the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in Washington received U.S. naval observer John Opie’s Taranto report on 9 January 1941. There it lay until 14 February, when it was summarized for distribution to numerous senior officers.
The summary’s author failed to note—or include—a chart that had accompanied Opie’s report. It pinpointed the locations where British torpedoes had been dropped at Taranto. As we reveal in our book, two of the torpedoes—marked on the chart at a point lining up with one of the Italian battleships that was torpedoed—were dropped at depths identified as only about four fathoms (24 feet). That’s much shallower than the water depth at Pearl Harbor. There is no evidence that this vital piece of intelligence reached either Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark or Pacific Fleet Commander-in-Chief Admiral Husband Kimmel.
Second, a further report by another U.S. naval observer serving with the British was received at ONI headquarters. Its first page, as O’Connor notes, contained a four-point summary of the report’s contents but did not mention a fifth and key point, on “Torpedo Dropping Depths.” Appearing on the report’s final page, the point explicitly stated that the British had a torpedo that could be dropped successfully in water “as shallow as four fathoms.”
O’Connor hypothesizes that the omission from the summary may have led recipients to miss the crucial information. That is possible, but the scenario asks us to believe that the information on torpedo depths was ignored by all of more than a dozen recipients named on the routing slip, including CNO Stark, Admiral Kimmel, fellow senior officers, and others.
There is another possibility. There is no evidence—or none that we have been able to locate—that this report was ever received by the more than a dozen personnel listed. Its very existence would have been potent fuel for criticism of Kimmel. Yet no Pearl Harbor investigation witnesses ever mentioned it. Nor did it appear in a detailed summary of the intelligence on the shallow-water torpedo issue compiled at Navy headquarters and submitted as evidence during investigations.
“The only explanation that satisfies me,” O’Connor told us, “is that it never got through to those that could have done something about it.” We agree. Tragically for the 2,403 Americans who were killed at Pearl Harbor, and for Admiral Kimmel’s reputation, such communication failures occurred only too often in the months before 7 December.
Pearl-Taranto Disconnection
Norman Polmar
There was no connection between—or lessons applied from—the British carrier attack on Taranto in November 1940 and the Japanese Pearl Harbor carrier attack in December 1941 (“A Japanese Connection?” December, p. 35).
Minoru Genda made this “disconnect” very clear. Genda, as a navy commander, was the air operations officer for the Japanese carrier task force that struck Pearl Harbor; earlier, in 1939–40, he served as the assistant Japanese naval attaché in London.
In correspondence and discussions with me, Genda made clear that the British and Japanese situations were too different to have any connection:
- At the time of the attacks Britain was at war with Italy, while Japan was at peace with the United States.
- The British attacked at night and the Japanese in daylight.
- The distances involved were very different.
- The British had one fleet carrier (21 attacking aircraft) and the Japanese had six (350 attacking aircraft).
- The British were able to carry out aerial surveillance of Taranto before the attack, while the Japanese could not overfly Pearl Harbor.
- There was no carrier threat to the British force’s movement, while the United States had three carriers in the Pacific.
Attacked Battleship’s Configuration
Tom Hone
The battleship in the painting on the cover of the December issue is not one of those attacked at Pearl Harbor. No Navy battleship in the harbor had that configuration. By contrast, the watercolor by Frank Och on page 4 is quite accurate. I wish it had been the cover illustration.
Early Days of the Angels
Barrett Tillman
I surely enjoyed Hill Goodspeed’s original treatment of the Blue Angels in combat (“Not Just for Show,” December, pp. 48–53), as I’ve known several alumni from Captain Butch Voris onward. Readers might like to know a bit more background on the team’s origins.
In the 1980s, I was publisher of Champlin Museum Press in Arizona when we released Captain Hugh Winters’ memoir, Skipper. He established VF-19 and became CAG-19 on board the Lexington (CV-16). After World War II he was, I believe, chief of staff at Jacksonville when the word came down to establish a flight demonstration team. Hugh selected Butch to form the team and choose the pilots. As “BA” fans know, the early team members often were alumni of VF-10, which had logged two combat cruises on board the Enterprise (CV-6).
But as Hill’s article notes, when the team went to war in Korea it joined VF-191, Hugh’s World War II squadron after redesignation as VF-19A and then 191. So the Blue Angels were, in a way, returning to their origins.