“Jasper" Holmes graduated from the Naval Academy in 1922. After one year in the USS Nevada (BB-36), he proceeded to serve in submarines, including command of the USS S-30. In 1936, he was retired from active duty because of physical disability—arthritis of the spine. He soon embarked on a civilian career as instructor of engineering at the University of Hawaii and wrote naval fiction for The Saturday Evening Post under the pen name Alec Hudson. In June 1941, he was recalled to active duty as a lieutenant and assigned to the Fourteenth Naval District intelligence staff at Pearl Harbor, even though he had neither training nor experience in the intelligence field. Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he became involved in much more vital work than his prewar chore of keeping track of the positions of noncombatant ships at sea in the Eastern Pacific. Though he was never one of the Navy’s codebreakers, he certainly contributed to their success. His duties in the underground office where he worked were on behalf of the Communications Intelligence Unit headed by the brilliant Commander Joseph J. Rochefort, who is best known for his contribution to victory in the Battle of Midway. Rochefort’s subterranean group used the cover name of Combat Intelligence Unit, and Holmes became increasingly involved in its activities as the war progressed. His recollections of the war years are contained in a forthcoming Naval Institute Press book, Double-Edged Secrets, an excerpt from which is presented here.
December 7th 1941 was a watershed in the lives of nearly everyone in Hawaii. Monday dawned on a different world with different problems, different objectives, and different schedules, differently oriented than before Sunday's sunrise. The Combat Intelligence Unit was no exception to changes in a changing world.
Information on the positions of merchant vessels dried up as ships at sea clamped down a tight radio silence, so our efforts were more and more directed toward keeping track of Japanese submarines. However, we continued to plot the courses of ships we had been tracking until we were sure they had reached port. This proved well worth the effort.
A week before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the SS Steel Voyager set out from Panama for the long haul to Honolulu. When news of the attack shattered the peace of the Pacific, she was closer to Honolulu than to any other port of refuge. We guessed that she would keep quiet and keep plugging along to her destination. One night, radio direction finders fixed the position of a Japanese submarine on the great-circle track of the lone freighter and dead ahead of her estimated position. The port director sent out a blind broadcast message to the Voyager, directing her around the danger. Our estimate of her position proved correct. Her captain made a radical change of course to avoid the submarine. A few days later he safely made port, maintaining that he had been saved by the warning message.
Another incident involved the William Ward Burrows (AP-6), a naval transport under the command of Captain Ross A. Dierdorff, which had departed from Pearl Harbor before 7 December on a supply mission to Johnston Island, a small atoll seven hundred miles southwest of Oahu. On the night of 15 December, Johnston was shelled by a Japanese force thought to be a cruiser and a destroyer, but which was actually the two submarines 1-16 and 1-22. The Burrows had completed her mission and left Johnston a few hours before the bombardment. Dierdorff proposed to return to the island to render assistance, but the Commandant, Fourteenth Naval District, having received information that there were no casualties on the island, directed the ship to return to Pearl Harbor.
I remember that night very well. There was a voice tube between my plotting table and the district operations office two floors above, but over it had come few requests for information. Suddenly I received a peremptory demand for the position of the William Ward Burrows. It required only a minute to prick it off on the chart, and I answered “17-10 N, 168-40 W.”
A moment later the voice tube rumbled with the command, “Check that position.”
I recognized the irate voice of a captain who was noted for his antagonism to the whole Combat Intelligence Unit, so I carefully checked my data before confirming my first answer, and explained that my estimate was based on the assumption that the Burrows was carrying out her assigned schedule on time. In answer, the voice tube roared orders for me to report immediately to the operations office with my charts.
While collecting my charts and notes, I realized that if a mistake had been made my hide would be nailed to the wall, but as I started for the door I encountered a grim-faced Rochefort, adjusting his tie and straightening his hat, preparatory to leaving the basement. “I will answer that call,” he told me, and relieving me of the charts, he marched up the stairs to face the challenge.
Ten minutes later he returned, barely suppressing a grin. A green and flustered watch officer in the operations office had forgotten that the 180th meridian ran down between Johnston and Wake, dividing west longitude from east. He had plotted the position I gave in east longitude, putting the Burrows in a precarious spot between Wake and the Marshall Islands. Rochefort immediately spotted the error and delivered a cynical lecture on elementary geography to the red-faced operations watch.
Rochefort was amused, but I was not. I was impressed with his instant assumption of complete responsibility for his organization, and his readiness to stand between one of his junior officers and wrath from without. It was one example of the leadership that inspired into that outfit an ironclad morale that knit us forever into a unit.
From traffic intelligence we were able to determine the positions of Japanese submarines quickly and accurately, but there were few U. S. antisubmarine vessels available for inshore patrol. A Japanese submarine could bob up to the surface, send a quick radio message, and submerge again to safety before an antisubmarine patrol could be directed to the spot. Many depth charges were dropped on phantom targets, and there were many frustrations.
One night an Army observation post on Kahala beach, just east of Diamond Head, reported that a submarine was lying just outside the reef, charging her batteries. Less than a block from where I lived on Black Point, a battery of two coast-defense guns looked down on Kahala Reef. Maybe the submarine was close inshore to communicate with spies; but whatever her mission, the Black Point battery then had the opportunity to be the first coast-defense battery to fire at a real enemy target since the Civil War.
The battery had been there for many years. Its two 8-inch guns were ancient and short-ranged, but they were well placed to defend the beaches at Diamond Head and Kahala. During the years the guns had been there, Black Point had developed as a beach colony, occupied mainly by artists and submarine officers’ families. When word came down the line that night to “open fire on a surfaced submarine in grid position Helen seven five,” the battery was ready. The two big guns were swung around to the proper bearing, and the gunpointers found that they were looking right into the windows of the house we knew as “George Hunter’s old house,” not fifty yards away. Moreover, ranged down the slope to the water’s edge, under the muzzles of the guns, were twenty other houses where families were sleeping if blissful ignorance of what was happening on the other side of the chain-link fence that divided the Army from the civilian area.
Quite appropriately, Fort Ruger’s commanding officer decided that, submarine or no submarine, he had to evacuate the area before he could open fire. By the time that was done, the submarine had completed her business off Kahala beach and was long gone from there. The next morning the Army tore down “George Hunter’s old house,” but the other inhabitants slowly filtered back to their abandoned homes.
Considering the trauma of the sudden transition from peace and security to war and disaster, Hawaii's civilians and the equally green military and naval personnel cooperated very well. Two or three times a week air-raid alerts were conducted. When the siren sounded, my wife Isabelle would put on her steel helmet, snatch up her gas mask and her air-raid warden's flashlight, and dash off to "man" the Kahala civil-defense center. Most of the alerts were false alarms.
Early one morning, the most probable hour for an air-raid, while I was on my way to Pearl Harbor, the warning sounded. At the siren's scream, all cars except those heading for action stations were required to pull over to the side of the road and stop until the all-clear signal was given. Since I was en route to Combat Intelligence, I stepped on the accelerator, sped into the Navy Yard, and dashed down into the basement to arrive at the crux of the crisis.
Admiral Bloch was there, with steel helmet, gas mask, and pistol, conferring with Rochefort over the charts of Oahu.1 Combat reports were pouring in from the operations office above. A formation of three enemy cruisers was reported on the horizon off Oahu's northern shore. Shore defenses reported coming under fire, with heavy shells falling on the beaches. Shore batteries reported taking landing craft under fire. Fighter planes were locked in desperate battle over Ewa Plain, just west of Pearl Harbor.
Then suddenly it all died down. The enemy cruisers turned out to be three small converted seaplane tenders en route from California to the Naval Air Station at Pearl Harbor. Their attempts to identify themselves by signal searchlight had been mistaken for gun flashes from enemy ships. The defending shore batteries had opened up on phantom landing craft in the surf. Splashes from the shore batteries' short salvos explained the reports of heavy shells falling on the beach. Pilots of fighter planes, scrambling from both Army and Navy airfields, tested their guns by firing a few bursts as soon as they reached altitude, and the chatter of their machine guns had been reported as an air battle over Ewa Plain. Everybody felt silly after it was all over, but nobody had been hurt and everybody profited to some extent by the realistic battle practice.
The Naval Air Station had enjoyed a great deal of independence in scheduling its operations, and it had failed to report the anticipated arrival of its seaplane tenders to either the fleet operations office or to the Fourteenth Naval District’s Combat Intelligence Unit. The ships, approaching from the eastward, had inadvertently circumvented the short-legged air search in that sector and had rashly made landfall on Oahu at the most sensitive hour of dawn. After this experience, the Naval Air Station cooperated enthusiastically with Combat Intelligence.
When the joint Army-Navy Defense Center of the Hawaiian Sea Frontier was established in the tunnels under Red Hill, the plot moved up there, where it could be better coordinated with the air searches and with the port director’s plot of convoy routes. I stayed behind in the basement with William Dunbar, the yeoman who was my assistant. The Communications Intelligence Unit had suddenly developed an insatiable need for manpower. We were already working on its fringes and were irresistibly drawn into deeper and deeper involvement.
The reason for all this activity I did not know, or need to know, in order to be useful. There was a great deal of ordinary administrative work to be accomplished. No one, other than the regulars, was allowed behind the steel doors, so the organization had to be self-supporting. Chief Yeoman Durwood G. Rorie, an old-timer in communications intelligence, supervised the work assignments, security, janitorial service, and supplies. No one questioned his authority inside the basement, but we had to have a commissioned officer to work with the Navy Yard, the Submarine Force, CinCPac’s staff, and other outside agencies. Lieutenant Jack S. Holtwick, who already had charge of the mysterious machine room into which I never intruded, had handled this additional duty. As the volume of work increased, however, the entire attention of this wiry, quick, and energetic young officer was required to program and supervise the business machines and the very secret coding machine. The more routine chores fell on me. Also, as the organization grew, so grew the demands of the cryptanalysts for odd bits of information: place-names; charts and maps; positions of our own forces, especially submarines; news reports; and other information whose relevance I could only conjecture.
The demand for trained people greatly exceeded the supply. Admiral Bloch offered the band of the battleship California (BB-44) as trainees, and Rochefort promptly accepted. The California was resting on the bottom of Pearl Harbor, her main deck under water. Her band had survived, but their instruments had not, so they were among the technologically unemployed. Many of these musicians turned out to be such competent cryptanalysts after a short period of instruction that a theory was advanced that there must be a psychological connection between music and cryptanalysis.
Very early in December, a messenger from the District Intelligence Office had delivered to Rochefort a package of encrypted messages. Of course, I did not know about this until later, and I doubt that Rochefort knew then how the messages had been obtained. Captain Irving H. Mayfield, the District Intelligence Officer, had long been quietly trying to circumvent the Federal Communications Act of 1934 to get at the protected communications between the Japanese consul general in Hawaii and the Foreign Office in Tokyo.2 The previous summer, by trying to pick up ships’ weather reports at a commercial radio station, I had bulled into his delicate negotiations. Mayfield had tapped the Japanese consul’s telephone line, but that yielded no useful information. The encrypted messages filed with the local communications company remained sacred until some time in November, when David Sarnoff, president of Radio Corporation of America, visited Honolulu. Admiral Bloch persuaded Sarnoff to authorize the delivery of RCA file copies of Japanese messages to Captain Mayfield. The first batch came in less than a week before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
These messages were in diplomatic cipher. The Combat Intelligence Unit was assigned to work on naval codes and was not prepared to work on the consular messages. However, Farnsley C. Woodward, a chief radioman in the cipher section, had had experience with diplomatic messages. He recognized that the messages were in two different ciphers. One of them was too complicated for him to tackle alone, but the other one he would be able to break, given time and a sufficient number of messages. Woodward and Marine Corps Major Alva B. Lasswell worked night and day deciphering and translating the consular messages, but before the morning of 7 December they found only dull and useless ones about routine consular business.
After the Japanese attack, the Naval District Intelligence Office and the Honolulu police raided the Japanese consulate before all its files had been burned, and managed to seize some messages that yielded interesting information. Among them were those of Takeo Yoshikawa, who had made frequent reports on torpedo nets and the arrival, departure, and berthing assignments of ships at Pearl Harbor- One message reported on the harbor’s air defense and remarked on the absence of barrage balloons.
About 10 December the cryptanalysts discovered another interesting message. It had been sent by Consul General Nagao Kita on 6 December, but of course there was no way for the cryptanalysts to read it, or even identify it as important, until the code had been at least partially broken. This message revealed that Otto Kuehn, a German national who had been residing in Honolulu for several years, was a Japanese intelligence agent. Anticipating the loss of radio and cable communications between the consul general and Tokyo, Kuehn had devised a bizarre system of communication. He proposed to inform Japanese submarines off Hawaii of U. S. ship movements in and out of Pearl Harbor by arrangements of lights in windows at night, and of drying sheets on a clothesline near his house in Kailua by day. He planned to transmit other information to Japan or to Japanese ships at sea by coded paid advertisements in radio broadcasts. Kita had to transmit the proposed schedule to Tokyo in a vulnerable cipher because the more secure diplomatic code had already been burned.
I do not remember how or why I learned about this message, but I had met Kuehn, and his wife and daughter, on several occasions. Unfortunately for Kuehn, his avid interest in things naval and military and his unconcealed Nazi connections had attracted the FBI and both Navy and Army intelligence to him. He was picked up within hours of the attack. I doubt that his proposed means of communicating got through to the Japanese, although the submarine loitering off the beach at Kahala might have been at the wrong beach and looking for signal lights in windows.
Admiral Bloch showed the message to the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, who was then at Pearl Harbor. The secretary directed that it should be shown only to Mayfield and Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet. Communications Intelligence would far rather have a spy go free than reveal that we could read Japanese coded messages. Several times provost marshal agents came down to our basement to confer with Rochefort, but 1 have no idea how much he revealed to them. Kuehn was tried by a military court and sentenced to death, although no cryptographer testified at his trial.
This incident had an interesting sequel. Kuehn's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he was shipped off to the U. S. mainland for confinement. When the war ended, he was returned to Germany and released there. After he died, his widow came to the United States and petitioned to recover the value of the house they had bought in Kailua and which had been confiscated. Some twenty years after the war, I visited Japan and made the acquaintance of several Japanese ex-naval officers who had been engaged in planning and intelligence. Captain Toshikazu Ohmae remarked to me one day that he was on the last voyage of a Japanese merchant ship to Honolulu just before the war broke out. His mission was the delivery of twenty-five thousand dollars to Kuehn to pay for the Kailua house. I asked him if Japan had ever received anything for the money and he ruefully admitted that it had not. If Mrs. Kuehn ever received compensation for the Kailua house, she should reimburse the Japanese government. It was their money.
In the meantime, Hawaii and the Pacific Fleet were settling down for a long war. Despite our confusion, frustration, and shortage of antisubmarine vessels, the Japanese submarines swarming around Hawaii accomplished relatively little. The Japanese awarded high posthumous honors to the crews of the five two-man submarines, all of which were sunk or captured on the first day of the war without having inflicted any significant damage. The twenty-five large submarines involved in the Hawaii operation did little better. They sank the Cynthia Olsen and the Lahaina, both small freighters, about midway between Honolulu and the mainland and, in the first month of the war, sank two other freighters closer to Honolulu. An observation plane from the 1-7 successfully reconnoitered Pearl Harbor on 17 December and furnished Tokyo with accurate information on the results of the Japanese air attack. The 1-70 was sunk north of Oahu by planes from the Enterprise (CV-6), and the other blockading submarines were so frequently bombed and harassed that they were unable to torpedo any combat ships. For this happy immunity Communications Intelligence deserved some of the credit.
The Pacific Fleet staff had difficulty pulling itself together. In prewar planning, Admiral Kimmel had anticipated that a Japanese attack on Wake Island might present an opportunity for naval action. On 16 December, after many delays, a complicated operation involving three separate carrier task forces got under way to relieve Wake. The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt removed Kimmel from all duty, more than a week before Admiral Chester W. Nimitz arrived to take over. Thus, the expedition to relieve Wake, already handicapped by inadequate logistic support and poor leadership afloat, was further burdened by lack of decisive direction from the interim Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, and his staff at Pearl Harbor. The opportunity to attack the Japanese invasion forces was lost. Wake Island surrendered to the Japanese on 23 December. That date, rather than 7 December, was the nadir of morale for the Pacific Fleet. It was a high price to pay to provide a scapegoat for the Pearl Harbor disaster.
There were many inconsequential omissions in the defenses of Pearl Harbor, but in more than thirty years of postmortems no one has proposed a course of action Kimmel could have taken that would have greatly changed the situation for the better. At the beginning of a war, all leaders are untested and, if one is knocked out of the box in the first inning, it may be good policy to try another. A decision to relieve a defeated commander is not a question of justice. There is no justice in a war that sends one man to safe duty in a basement while thousands of his comrades are dying in desperate battle within a mile of where he sits. Kimmel should have been relieved, but not in disgrace; and the decision to relieve him at that particularly critical moment was an error in judgment greater than any Kimmel ever committed. That Nimitz was the one chosen to replace him was the great good fortune of the United States.
It was a miserable Christmas. Luckier than most of my fellows, I had a few hours to spend with my family before I had to be back on duty at sunset. I spent most of my time blacking out my tiny study by sealing its windows with heavy building paper so there would be one place in the house where we could have a light at night. Nervous patrols were apt to shoot at any light that showed after dark. Many of our friends were at sea, in submarines and in the task forces, and their families expected to be evacuated momentarily to the mainland. For some of the latter, our house on Black Point was a comfortable refuge. Izzy and my son Eric were permanent residents of Hawaii and not on the evacuation list. I dreaded having to make the decision if an opportunity should come for them to leave. Izzy would have refused to go if she had an option, but it would be selfish of me to let her stay.
There were many indications that life in Hawaii would be harsh for everybody. Japanese submarines had begun shelling the beaches in surprise night attacks. So far they had not shelled Oahu, and none of their bombardments had caused much damage. Japanese submarine commanders apparently liked to expend their deck-gun ammunition before leaving their area at the end of a patrol, and this habit helped us anticipate when an area would be clear of submarines. But a hit from a wild shell fired at random was just as deadly as any other, and Black Point was backed up against a myriad of legitimate military targets. On the other hand, evacuation to the mainland meant a long slow voyage in a convoy through seas infested with hostile submarines. There was little peace on earth or good will to men that Christmas.
Light was just around the corner. Nimitz arrived on Christmas Day to take over command of the Pacific Fleet. I met him one morning in the corridor at CinCPac headquarters, which was then on the second floor of the submarine base's supply building. He greeted me by name, and evidently knew that I had been retired for physical disability and recalled to active duty. He had little reason to remember me. had been engineering officer of the Barracuda when he was Commander of Submarine Division 20. The only other occasion I could remember when I had talked to him was when Izzy and I made our white-gloved social call on the division commander and Mrs. Nimitz in Coronado eleven years before. Just seeing him at Pearl Harbor gave me the feeling that we had turned the corner.
The aura of calm confidence that radiated from Admiral Nimitz renewed everyone's morale, but it must have been a heavy burden for him to maintain. Many years after the war, when Izzy and I visited Admiral and Mrs. Nimitz at Berkeley, California, he told me what his arrival at Pearl Harbor was like. Two years before that he had commanded a division of battleships in traditional spit, polish, and punctilio. That Christmas morning the motor whaleboat that transported him across the harbor afforded him a depressing view of five battered, capsized, and sunken battleships, still unable to move from where they had been blasted. As he passed an inlet crowded with ships' boats, a staff officer explained that those boats were loaded with dead sailors. When Admiral William S. Pye, who had commanded the Battle Force, succeeded to interim command of the fleet, he brought with him many of his Battle Force staff, without relieving Kimmel's old CinCPac staff. The result was confusion superimposed upon disaster. Admiral Nimitz told me that the fleet surgeon was dosing many of the staff with whatever they used for tranquilizers in those days. Kimmel was still in Honolulu, appearing before the Roberts Commission, which was there to investigate the defeat at Pearl Harbor. Who could have foreseen that, within six months, the black despair of disaster and defeat would be dispelled by a brilliant victory?
One afternoon in the last few days of 1941, three members of the Roberts Committee, Admiral William H. Standley, Admiral Joseph M. Reeves, and Justice Owen J. Roberts, came down into the basement. The two admirals engaged Rochefort in a close conference, but Justice Roberts asked to see the charts and logs we had kept during the attack. The Roberts Commission had been instructed to avoid talking to people about communications intelligence, and Roberts probably disassociated himself from the two admirals in meticulous observance of the limits of his jurisdiction. I was unaware of all this, so while I was showing him the charts, I mentioned some of the relevant information we had gained since the attack by decrypting Japanese consular messages.
Had we intercepted the Japanese consul general’s communications earlier, we might have deduced that Pearl Harbor would be one of the first Japanese air targets and been forewarned. Like nearly everyone else, including the Roberts Commission, I then believed that only two Japanese aircraft carriers had taken part in the Pearl Harbor strike and, had we not been surprised, we might have defeated the attack. This hypothesis was disproved by information we acquired later, but I believed it then, and lamented our timidity in respecting the sanctions of the Communications Act of 1934 that protected the Japanese consul general’s communications.
Justice Roberts remarked that if naval officers in their zeal to defend the United States could disregard its laws, we would already have lost much of the liberty we were trying to defend. I was deeply impressed by the magnanimity of his arguments, which I interpreted to mean that those who made the laws that had handicapped Pearl Harbor’s defenders shared with them the responsibility for the disaster. Years later, when I read the complete Roberts Report, I realized that I had misconstrued his meaning.
In Justice Roberts’ authoritative opinion, nearly all communications intelligence activity was illegal, and presumably should have been stopped when the Communications Act became law. Had that happened, surely Midway would have been a Japanese victory, and Hawaii probably would have been invaded by the Japanese in the fall of 1942. The maintenance of a balance between privacy and freedom on one hand and safety and survival on the other has been a difficult problem throughout all our history.
When the Roberts Commission departed, we could put the past behind us and face a difficult future. The new year began with Nimitz firmly in the saddle. Rochefort summed it up when he exclaimed, “Forget Pearl Harbor and get on with the war!”
Captain Holmes’s writing career began with “Foundation of Naval Policy,” which was the Naval Institute Prize Essay of 1934. He has contributed several other articles to the Proceedings and is also the author of Undersea Victory, published by Doubleday in 1966. His academic career resumed in 1946, when he retired from active naval duty for the second time, following the awarding of a Distinguished Service Medal for his World War II service. He returned to the University of Hawaii as Dean of the College of Applied Science, then Vice President, then Dean of Engineering until he retired in 1965. Holmes Hall at the university is named for him. His first wife, Isabelle, died in 1972, and he was married to Elizabeth B. Carr in 1976. The two live in Honolulu, where both are at work on writing projects. The son mentioned in this article, Dr. John Eric Holmes, is now on the faculty of the University of Southern California.
1 Rear Admiral Claude C. Bloch was Commandant of the Fourteenth Naval District at the time. He had been a four-star admiral as Commander in Chief, U. S. Fleet (CINCUS), then reverted to two-star rank when relieved of that billet in 1940.
2 The act forbade commercial communications companies from disclosing to anyone, other than addressees, the contents of messages filed with the companies for transmission.