1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls Read online

When the Black Chamber was abolished, code breaking by the Americans did not stop but was simply relocated to the U.S. Army Signal Corps where, presumably, it could be more properly controlled. The branch was called the Signal Intelligence Service and was staffed with a host of extremely talented personnel, including professional cryptanalysts, mathematicians, electromechanics, crossword puzzle nuts, statisticians, philologists, and people learned in Oriental and classical languages. It was headed by the aforementioned William Friedman, a Romanian-born Jew whose family had immigrated to the United States when he was a year old and who had subsequently aspired to become a plant geneticist. While working at a sort of commune of agricultural geneticists, Friedman became interested in unraveling the mysteries of alleged Shakespearean authorship by Francis Bacon, posed by an eccentric English teacher, and which evolved into reading cryptographs supposedly embedded in Shakespeare’s plays.

  From there Friedman, like Yardley, served with the U.S. Army in France as a cryptologist and upon his return remained with the Signal Corps. When the Black Chamber was disbanded, Friedman, at the age of thirty-nine, was made chief of the Signal Intelligence Service, where he would become the greatest code breaker of all time. As it became clear that Japan and the United States were on a collision course of some kind, the importance of successfully attacking the Japanese codes was obvious and in 1939 Friedman dropped everything else and went to work on the problem.

  By this time the Japanese had devised an electrical encoding machine of their own that improved vastly (they thought) on one they had purchased from the Germans. By using a system of rotors keyed to specific letters the PURPLE machine could generate a code with millions of possible solutions. And to make matters even more difficult, its language was, of course, Japanese, which with its ideographs is, in itself, one of the hardest to translate into English. Moreover, “telegraphic Japanese,” David Kahn in The Code Breakers tells us, is “virtually a language within a language.” ... These things come out in the form of syllables, and it is how you group your syllables that you make your words. There is no punctuation.” For instance, according to another senior cryptologist at the time, “[the syllable] ‘ba’ may mean horses or fields or old woman or my hand, all depending on the ideographs with which it is written.” To complicate things even further, there were only a handful of people in the United States with the ability to translate the Japanese code language precisely, since Japanese Americans were not considered to be trustworthy of this splendid secret.14

  Listen again to David Kahn, whose book on code breaking is a masterpiece of its kind: “A cryptanalyst, brooding sphinxlike over the cross-ruled paper on his desk, would glimpse the skeleton of a pattern in a few scattered letters; he tried fitting a fragment from another recovery into it; he tested the new values that resulted and found that they produced acceptable plaintext; he incorporated his essay into the over-all solution and pressed on. Experts in Japanese filled in missing letters; mathematicians tied in one cycle with another and both to the tables. Every weapon of cryptanalytic science—which in the stratospheric realm of this solution drew heavily upon mathematics, using group theory, congruences, Pois-son distributions—was thrown into the fray.”15

  Yet the Americans under Friedman’s supervision, and with his active assistance, did it. They cracked Japan’s diplomatic codes and built themselves their own PURPLE machine, cobbled together from spare parts and stuff purchased at local electronics shops. When they finally turned it on the thing sometimes hissed and shook and occasionally threw out a startling shower of sparks on its operator—but it worked. After eighteen solid months of toil and sweat and mental anguish the Americans began reading Japan’s most secret diplomatic communications, and the name they chose for what they had done was MAGIC. NO sooner was it working, and a handful of U.S. government officials became suddenly privy to the machinations of the empire of Japan,* than William Friedman (by then a colonel) had a nervous breakdown and was put into the psychiatric ward of Washington’s Walter Reed Hospital. It is a wonderful irony that one of those high government officials who was most grateful for the MAGIC code breaking was none other than the new secretary of war, Henry Stimson, who, as secretary of state, had disbanded the Black Chamber a decade earlier.16

  Meantime, the militarists in Tokyo frantically sought a way to solve their oil crisis. First they began to pressure and threaten the Dutch who, even though their home country had been overrun by Hitler, still controlled the oil-rich Dutch East Indies, including Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and countless thousands of islands in between. The Dutch, however, declined politely but firmly to meet Japan’s oil quotas, having experienced firsthand how Axis powers behaved. Japan, true to Axis form, then began planning an attack to seize the Dutch possessions, and threw in the British colonies as well, principally Malaya, with its immense rubber plantations and tin mines, and Burma, next-door neighbor to the jewel in England’s Crown, India.

  To facilitate this “southward movement,” as the Japanese military euphemistically phrased it, Japan needed to establish prepared bases thousands of miles farther south as jumping-off points for her attacks. Thus she cast an acquisitive eye on rice-rich French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), which had fallen from the legitimate government of France to the puppet Vichy French regime after the surrender of the French nation. It didn’t take long for the Germans to convince the craven Vichyists that it would be in their best interests to allow Japan to occupy that part of their Far Eastern empire.

  The Roosevelt administration responded furiously to this blatant and ominous aggression. On July 26, 1941, the day after Japanese troops marched into Saigon, America froze all Japanese assets in the United States, effectively and completely shutting Japan off not only from her major source of oil but from her cash as well, since much of it was stored in banks and Japanese-held companies in America. Both sides realized this was the last straw and would lead to trouble one way or the other. When Japan weighed her options, the way she saw it, it boiled down to this: unless she could persuade the United States to reinstate her shipments of oil and other vital military materials, the only choice was to attack and possess the resource-rich South Seas colonies of Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands. In other words, if Japan could not get what she wanted by negotiations, she would take it by force. Japan also knew that by doing so, she risked war with the United States, whose formidable Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, on Oahu, Hawaii, was the only possible obstacle standing in the way.

  Japan justified aggression upon its neighbors with the same rationale that Germany had been using in its wars since Frederick the Great—including the present one—which was the complaint of encirclement by her enemies. Unlike the Germans, Japan’s encirclement was mainly economic rather than geographical; nevertheless she felt just as strongly about it.

  For years, the Japanese had sent emissaries throughout East Asia preaching “Asia for the Asians.” For the most part the tactic was a success, and not without good reason. Carlos Romulo was a Philippine native and a young and prosperous editor/publisher of a chain of newspapers when, before the outbreak of war in 1941, he decided to travel throughout that part of the world to survey just how Asians felt vis-a-vis Japan and the Western colonial powers. His findings were both interesting and disturbing.

  In the prosperous Dutch colony of Java he met a “beautiful and cultured Indonesian girl, world traveled, a graduate of Barnard College, who would have graced any gathering in the world. I invited her to dine with me at the Hotel des Indes. I shall never forget her bitterness. ‘We are not welcome there!’ She was pro-Japanese. ‘Anything is better for us,’ she said, ‘than life under the Dutch.’” She introduced Romulo to an underground organization with identical leanings.* Romulo had similar experiences in the British colony of Burma where he was told by a group of newspaper editors, “Any situation is better than to be under the British.” He also noticed that many of the Buddhist monks in Burma were recently arrived Japanese and “the spearheads of Japanese pro
paganda.” Moving on to Thailand, Romulo was flabbergasted to find that the premier himself “was openly pro-Japanese.”

  Little did these people know. It was in the countries that were Japanese held—Indochina—or under Japanese attack—China—that Romulo got another eye opening, and here is where the “prejudice and persecution” part of the war equation comes into play, just as it had in the Rape of Nanking. In China he saw firsthand the sort of brutality the Japanese were capable of inflicting on the civilian population, and was warned by Chinese officials, “You had better prepare in the Philippines. You are going to be the next victims of Japan.”

  At Chungking, where the Chiang Kai-shek government had been driven, Romulo received a whiff of what the Japanese version of “the China incident” was actually like. In between the daily aerial bombings by Japanese planes he found time to interview a Chinese boy missing an arm and a leg. The Japanese had slaughtered the boy’s family on their farm, then chopped off his limbs with swords. Later, traveling to Saigon, Romulo got a good look at the so-called Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere in operation, noting that “the police records listed from fifty to one hundred and fifty cases a day of assault on women by Japanese soldiers.” Like the Germans in Europe, the Japanese considered themselves the Asian master race, and other Asians were treated accordingly—that is, with prejudice and persecution. Romulo’s dispatches were published in newspapers worldwide and for his efforts he received the 1942 Pulitzer Prize.17

  Meanwhile, in early August 1941, just a week after he had imposed the oil embargo on Japan, Roosevelt announced myteriously to the press that he was going “on a fishing trip” off the coast of New England. He even had the presidential yacht Potomac brought up from Washington for the occasion. In fact, he was doing no such thing. Soon as the Potomac got out of sight of land the cruiser U.S.S. Augusta showed up and transferred him and a number of top aides, including the U.S. army and navy commanders, aboard and set steam for remotest Newfoundland, where she dropped anchor in bleak Placentia Bay. Presently an even larger warship appeared, the new British battleship Prince of Wales, which had just taken part in the celebrated sinking of the German battleship Bismarck. This day she was carrying precious cargo: British prime minister Winston Churchill, come to meet President Roosevelt for the second time.*

  The two leaders enjoyed themselves immensely. They had been corresponding in secret for nearly two years and Churchill was especially delighted, since he hoped the meeting would draw Roosevelt and the Americans closer to declaring war on the Axis. It did not have the desired effect; Roosevelt was still concerned about isolationist feelings among the voters at home. However, it did produce one tangible result, the Atlantic Charter, which proclaimed, among other things, that the United States and Great Britain were pledged to defend “freedom of the seas.” It was also agreed secretly that in the event of the United States entering the war, a policy of “Germany first” would be adhered to; that if war broke out in the Pacific as well, it would be best to remain on the defensive there and put all available resources into defeating Hitler, after which Japan could be dealt with in detail.

  It was also revealed to the British at this time that America’s twenty-year-old strategy for the Pacific had been altered. The old War Plan 5, which assumed that the Philippines could not be held, had been scrapped. Months earlier Roosevelt had appointed General Douglas MacArthur as commander of U.S. forces in the Far East, and the planners in Washington were shipping him a vast fleet of the new B-17 strategic bombers; in addition, MacArthur was raising a powerful army of 200,000 Filipinos, which, he declared, by the following spring would be trained, equipped, and ready for anything the Japanese could throw at them. What MacArthur or anyone else did not know was that the sands of time were running out.

  For decades Japanese military strategists had been contemplating how best to deal with the Americans in the event of a Pacific war. The military consensus had been to create an “incident” that would lure the U.S. fleet across the Pacific where, cut off from its bases* and harassed for thousands of miles by Japanese submarines and warplanes based on mandated Pacific island possessions, it would finally be destroyed by the navy in Japanese home waters.† Into this now volatile state of mind, however, stepped a remarkable man, with a novel and daring approach.

  Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto at fifty-seven years old was commander in chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet. He was also dead set against any war with the United States. Having served as a naval attache in Washington and, later, attended Harvard University, Yamamoto correctly perceived the vast industrial power of the Americans. “Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas,” he cautioned Japanese hotheads, “knows that Japan lacks the national power for a naval race with America.”18 Not only that, Yamamoto went on record to the Japanese premier with an astonishing declaration: “If I am told to fight regardless of consequence, I shall run wild for the first six months or a year, but I have utterly no confidence for the second and third years.”19*

  This notwithstanding, Admiral Yamamoto was a realist and knew there was little he could do to prevent the army militarists from their so-called Southward Movement into the resource-rich countries on the China Sea and below the equator. And if that was to be, Yamamoto did not wish to leave on his flank and rear the powerful U.S. Pacific Fleet, recently moved to Pearl Harbor from the West Coast. From his time as attache in the Japanese embassy in Washington, Yamamoto had become well known to a good many U.S. Navy officers, who knew him as an excellent poker and bridge player as well as a master of chess. In short, he was a gambler and a calculator, and what he contemplated gambling on now was for the highest stakes imaginable—the fate of his nation and its empire.

  Yamamoto’s plan called for superseding the decades-old strategy of luring the American navy into Japanese waters and instead conceived its annihilation in one gigantic stroke: a surprise attack from Japanese carrier-based aircraft on Pearl Harbor while the U.S. Pacific Fleet lay at anchor. The diminutive (five-foot-three) admiral was well aware of the virtues of surprise attacks. As a young ensign during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 he had rejoiced at the Japanese sneak attack on Port Arthur—with no declaration of war—in which the Russian fleet was devastated and, as a further reminder, he had lost two fingers of his left hand the following year when the Japanese ambushed and destroyed the cream of the Russian navy at the Battle of the Tsushima Straits.20 Most recently, Yamamoto was made fully aware of the devastation wrought on the Italian fleet at Taranto, in November 1940, when carrier-based British airplanes had attacked it with aerial torpedoes as it lay at anchor.

  No one can say Yamamoto was not inventive—suicide, like assassination, was an old and honorable custom in Japan. Yamamoto’s original concept of the attack on Hawaii, believe it or not, was a one-way lightning strike in which his carriers would launch their torpedo- and dive-bombers about five hundred miles from Pearl Harbor, well out of range of American retaliation. The carriers would then immediately turn for home, leaving the pilots to crash into the ocean after the bombing, their fate sealed, since this distance would be twice beyond their airplanes’ fuel capacity to return to the ships. It was certainly an audacious and (except for the three hundred Japanese pilots) safe plan and, to Yamamoto’s mind, would have the additional value of convincing the Americans that it would be pointless to go to war against any nation that would resort to such a diabolical and fearless blow.21

  With all this in mind, Yamamoto gathered about him a handful of trusted officers and instructed them to draw up a plan in utmost secrecy. Many problems remained to be solved: what route should the Japanese armada take across the Pacific to avoid early detection; how must aerial torpedoes be altered to run in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor; what intelligence would be required to ensure that the American fleet would be at its anchorage when the attack commenced? All this they undertook while the civilian government tried frantically and with some earnestness to restore relations with the United Sta
tes and resume the vital flow of oil to Japan.

  For months the negotiations between Japan’s amiable ambassador Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura and U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, a brusque-spoken* Tennessean who had described Japan’s foreign minister as being “crooked as a bundle of fish hooks,” had floundered. Hull’s position was doubtless reinforced by his adviser on Far Eastern affairs Dr. Stanley Hornbeck, who counseled his boss that the Japanese were not to be trusted and that the only way to handle them was by the hardest line possible. At the same time, General George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army chief of staff, and Admiral Harold R. “Betty” Stark, chief of naval operations, were stewing themselves sick that some ill fluke of diplomacy would plunge America into a Pacific war when she was not yet prepared for it. The referee in this contest was, of course, President Franklin Roosevelt, who tended to side with the military men and “baby along” the Japanese for as many months as possible in order to strengthen U.S. positions in that vast part of the world.

  Japan’s position was pure and simple: she wanted a resumption of oil and petroleum trade from the United States, the freeing of her frozen assets, and the end of U.S. financial and military aid to China. The American position was pure and simple too: she wanted Japan out of China and Indochina and a promise to respect the rights of her neighbors, as well as for Japan to denounce the Axis pact with Germany and Italy. Put simply, both the United States and Japan were playing for time—the Americans for as long as they could to further strengthen their Pacific bases and the Japanese for as short a time as possible since every day their oil supply was dwindling and, most secretly of all, by early December 1941, the winter weather window for attacking Pearl Harbor would nearly be shut. The North Pacific in winter could be a very rough customer.

  In point of fact, American diplomats were negotiating with the Japanese with none of the gullibility of England’s Neville Chamberlain, who had actually believed Hitler at Munich. They suspected Japan of treachery, and not a few of their suspicions came directly from MAGIC intercepts of Tokyo’s instructions to its Washington embassy. Roosevelt, however, still held out the hope that Japan’s dire situation vis-a-vis its oil supply might just well persuade its government to concede the U.S. demands in order to restore their oil trade. This of course was unrealistic; Japanese pride, another of the bugaboos of war, would never have allowed them to pull out of Indochina, let alone China itself, after so many years of bitter fighting. It would also have meant an ignominious collapse of the much-vaunted Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, which the Japanese government and press had convinced the people was their national destiny.