Senate vote, Pearl Harbor, FDR, Kimmel, Short & Marshall

OP,
I do not know, but it probably relates to the fact he thought he had accomplished his goal of getting the facts before the public. After all he had caused seven of the 10 investigations to happen, and after he deceased his two surviving sons caused the tenth.

Another probable reason was that the professionals on the Naval Court of Inquiry had effectively exonerated him, and even the politicians on the Joint Congressional Committee had found no dereliction of duty on his part.

He suffered a heart attack in the 1950s. Maybe that had something to do with it.

He had three sons, and a grandson in the Navy. Maybe that had something to do with it.

Perhaps the more important question is, if the Navy thought they had a case, why didn't the Navy bring it? One merely need look at the questionable case the Navy had against Captain McVay of Indianapolis fame to see how far the Navy would go in such matters.

Regards,
tk

 

OP,
You may know the answer. I do not, but see The Secret Court Martial of Admiral Kimmel: Pearl Harbor on Trial by: James Edwin Alexander, 2002 for a fictional attempt at an answer.

I do know, however, that the Government brings a criminal case, not the defendant. I also know, from my 25 years as an FBI agent, that the Government, under the rules of discovery, has a duty to reveal exculpatory evidence in its possession to the defendant.

So, presumably the Government would have known that Nimitz, Halsey, King, Spruance, Kinkaid, Richardson, Burke, Moorer, Morison, and several others would testify favorably about Kimmel's performance. Kimmel knew he had support, but had no idea of the depth of this support as most of it was not revealed until after he deceased. Imagine a Government trial counsel (prosecutor) trying to impugn the testimony of the preceding giants of World War II. Also recall that the Joint Congressional Committee, with its 6 democrats and 4 republicans, voted not to allow the testimony of any of the preceding except Richardson, who was not as forthcoming in 1946 as he was in his 1973 book.

Surely, evidence suggesting that the Government had indications of advanced knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack not passed to Kimmel would be relevant and material to a judgment on how well he did his job. Consider such evidence discovered after Kimmel deceased. A couple of many examples should make the point that any Government prosecutor would be reluctant to enter court without being able to adequately explain them.

1. President Reagan's Director of Central Intelligence William Casey wrote in 1988 that,“The British had sent word that a Japanese fleet was steaming east toward Hawaii.”
William Casey, The Secret War Against Hitler, 1988, p.7;

2. MI6’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) Chairman Victor Cavendish-Bentinck reportedly said that, “We knew that [the Japanese Fleet] had changed course [by Friday, 12/5/41]. I remember presiding over a JIC meeting and being told that a Japanese Fleet was sailing in the direction of Hawaii, asking ‘Have we informed our transatlantic brethren?’ and receiving an affirmative reply.” Richard Aldrich, Intelligence and the War Against Japan, Cambridge Press, 2000, p.87. Constantine FitzGibbon, Secret Intelligence in the Twentieth Century, Stein and Day, NY, 1977, p. 255;

3. Sir Julian Ridsdale, member of the JIC, "Recalled a JIC meeting at which radio silence adopted by the Japanese fleet was discussed and its possible destinations reviewed. Pearl Harbor was one of the targets thought most likely and as a result a warning telegram was despatched to Washington. [He later] met with Cavendish-Bentinck and confirmed that a warning telegram had been despatched." Richard Aldrich, Intelligence and the War Against Japan, Cambridge Press, 2000, p.87.

4. USA Col. John Ter Bush Bissell's 1941 "complete-plans" information to the FBI revealed in 2002. See my paper, "Why Was It Possible For a Pearl Harbor to Occur," on my website.

One of my presentations, "Advanced Indications of the Pearl Harbor Attack," describes many more indications, and never uses the word "conspiracy." I would be most pleased to make such a presentation to any interested group associated with this net.

Regards,
tk

 

.
Because he feared the verdict it would bring.

 

U,
Apparently, Admiral Stark found it hard to believe also:
FDR and Admiral Stark On Sacrificing Ships
11 February 1941 - FDR proposed sacrificing 6 cruisers and 2 carriers at Manila to get into war. Navy Chief Stark objected: "I have previously opposed this and you have concurred as to its unwisdom. Particularly do I recall your remark in a previous conference when Mr. Hull suggested (more forces to Manila) and the question arose as to getting them out and your 100% reply, from my standpoint, was that you might not mind losing one or two cruisers, but that you did not want to take a chance on losing 5 or 6." (Charles Beard, PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AND THE COMING OF WAR 1941, p 424)

“I recall your remark [about sending ships to the Philippines] . . . that you might not mind losing one or two cruisers, but that you did not want to take a chance on losing 5 or 6."
16PHA2150, Memo 2/11/41.
Regards,
tk

 

OP,
Since you brought it up, you may find this of interest. Please, let me know if you want more.
Regards,
tk

[FONT=&quot]From Michael Gannon, Operation Drumbeat, Harper & Row, 1990, pp. xviii, 388-391[/FONT]​

[FONT=&quot]It can, and will be, argued in this book that the V-boat assault on merchant shipping in United States home waters and the Caribbean during 1942 constituted a greater strategic setback for the Allied war effort than did the defeat at Pearl Harbor--particularly in that the loss of naval vessels destroyed or damaged at Hawaii had little or no bearing on the decisive carrier battles that developed soon after with the Japanese at Coral Sea and Midway; whereas the loss of nearly 400 hulls and cargoes strewn across the sands of the U.S. Navy's Eastern, Gulf, and Caribbean Sea frontiers threatened both to sever Great Britain's lifeline and to cripple American war industries. As Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall agonized on 19 June 1942: "The losses by submarines off our Atlantic seaboard and in the Carib*bean now threaten our entire war effort." If the leaching of lives and materiel had continued unchecked, one can speculate what would have been the effects on any future Allied invasion of German occupied Europe and on Germany's ability to concentrate all her forces in the war against Russia. . . .[xviii][/FONT]


[FONT=&quot]The end of the six-month period of maximum destruction left nearly four hundred hulks on the seabeds of the Eastern, Gulf, and Caribbean Frontiers. By frontier, they numbered 171 (ESF), [/FONT]62 (GSF),
[FONT=&quot][388] [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]and 141 (CSF). An additional twenty-three vessels were sunk in the Panama Frontier-an aggregate of 397 [/FONT]ships sunk in U.S. Navy *protected waters. And the totals do not include the many ships dam*aged. Overall, the numbers represent one of the greatest maritime disasters in history and the American nation's worst-ever defeat at sea. For Germany this was the most successful sustained U-boat cam*paign in the whole course of the war. In exchange for negligible losses of men and boats the Ubootwaffe had carried off a triumph that was fully the equivalent of victory in a major battle on land. For America's chief ally Great Britain, the losses proved so grievous they imperiled that trade-dependent island nation's ability to continue as an effective contributor to the war. For the Soviet ally it cast doubt that the West would be able to deliver the weapons required to defeat the Wehrmacht's eastern operations. For the United States, in terms of raw resources and materiel, Paukenschlag and its aftermath consti*tuted the costliest defeat of World War II. Most calamitous of all was the toll in human lives, which can be estimated at hardly fewer than 5,000 souls- U.S., British, Norwegian, and other merchant seamen; U.S. and Royal Navy officers and men; and civilian passengers. Whether shot, drowned, scalded, set on fire, frozen, smothered, crushed, starved, or maimed by sharks, they rested now everlastingly on the bed of the sea.

[FONT=&quot]The Pacific Pearl Harbor lasted two hours and ten minutes on a Sunday morning. The Atlantic Pearl Harbor lasted six months. The American people understandably were stunned and angered by what happened at Hawaii, where the naval losses included proud, allegedly impregnable battlewagons and the lives of thousands of young men, though the full account of ships sunk and damaged and the full enumeration of human casualties (2,403 dead, 1,178 wounded) would not be released until after the war. Compounding the shock of those losses was the abhorrent nature of the Japanese tactics, which, carried out while her diplomats were still negotiating in Washington and without prior declaration of war as required by international law, were widely condemned in this country as a "treacherous" "sneak attack" that "hit below the belt." Yet any close examination of the fleet losses at Hawaii discloses that they were not nearly as severe as popular opinion held them to be. No aircraft carriers were in the harbor on the day the attackers struck. Together with all the heavy cruisers and more than half the fleet's destroyers, they were off else-[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot][389] [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]where on missions. The anchored victims were mainly aged, slow, obsolete battleships that had no role in the immediately forthcoming carrier battles with the Japanese. By the date when heavy guns were needed for shore bombardment of invasion beaches much of the Pearl Harbor battle line had been rebuilt. Four battleships disabled on 7 December, USS [/FONT]California, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Maryland, participated in the U.S. naval victory at Surigao Strait on 24-25 October 1944. The repeatedly holed Nevada, which managed to slip her moorings during the attack on Pearl Harbor and beach herself on Waipo Point, supported the Marine landings on Iwo Jima in February 1945. Ironically, those battleships and other warships that were raised from the muck of Pearl Harbor and restored to action would probably never have survived to fight again had they been off soundings instead of at their anchorages. Another piece of luck that the Navy enjoyed was the incredible failure of the Japanese attackers to hit the three targets that would have taken the Navy out of the Pacific war for at least twelve months: (1) the Navy fuel farm in the hills beyond Pearl City; (2) the port installations, including repair yards; and (3) the submarine base with five submarines on manila lines. The judgment of Morison per*suades: "One can search military history in vain for an operation more fatal to the aggressor."26

[FONT=&quot]Though the public had no way of knowing it, the German as*sault on U.S. coastal shipping was far the greater disaster for the United States and her allies. Here for a long while the losses were irremediable. Unlike Hawaii, where the undamaged fleet units were able to take the offensive almost at once after 7 December and to score the major victory at Midway just six months later, in the Western Atlantic, Gulf, and Caribbean sunken bottoms and lives, not to men*tion cargoes, could not that quickly be made good. Some U.S. military leaders, like Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, were late in realizing the magnitude of the catastrophe. On 19 June Marshall wrote to King: [/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]The losses by submarines off our Atlantic seaboard and in the Caribbean now threaten our entire war effort. The following statistics bearing on the subject have been brought to my at*tention: Of the 74 ships allocated to the Army for July by the War Shipping Administration, 17 have already been sunk. [/FONT]22% of the bauxite fleet has already been destroyed. 20% of the Puerto Rican fleet has been lost. Tanker sinkings have been
[FONT=&quot][390][/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]3.5% per month of tonnage in use. We are all aware of the limited number of escort craft available, but has every con*ceivable improvised means been brought to bear on this situation? I am fearful that another month or two of this will so cripple our means of transport that we will be unable to bring sufficient men and planes to bear against the enemy in critical theaters to exercise a determining influence on the war.27 [/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]To this memorandum King responded two days later in more detail than can be repeated here, but with this particular answer to Marshall's query about "every conceivable improvised means": [/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]We had to improvise very rapidly and on a large scale. We took over all pleasure craft that could be used and sent them out with makeshift armament and untrained crews. We em*ployed for patrol purposes aircraft that could not carry bombs, and planes flown from school fields by student pilots. We armed merchant ships as rapidly as possible. We em*ployed fishing boats as volunteer lookouts. The Army helped in the campaign of extemporization by taking on the civil avi*ation patrol.28 [/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]The reader is left to reflect, in view of the foregoing chapters, how "rapidly" on the "large scale" King extemporized his defenses. In [/FONT]1946 the admiral published his official wartime reports to the Secre*tary of the Navy under the title, U.S. Navy at War, 1941-1945. In a chapter called "The Atlantic Submarine War," he wrote that directly upon the outset of hostilities the Navy "accelerated its program of acquiring such fishing boats and pleasure craft as could be used and supplied them with such armaments as they could carry. For patrol purposes we employed all available aircraft-Army as well as Navy. The help of the Civil Air Patrol was gratefully accepted."29 It is not recorded how Marshall accepted King's dissembling or whether he knew it to be a cover. King was not well regarded at the Munitions Building. A bright brigadier general in charge of War Plans had con*fided his opinion of the admiral to a personal diary entry for 12 March. Wrote Dwight David Eisenhower: "One thing that might help win this war is to get someone to shoot King."30 . . . .
[FONT=&quot][391][/FONT]

 

Tom,

Were you Surface Line?

 

N,
Thanks for your note. I was worried the net had been shut down.

Yes, 1100 black shoe, USS Taussig (DD 746), ASW Officer 1966-68; Destroyer School, 1968; USS Bordelon (DD 881), Engineering Officer 1968-1970; USS Manitowoc (LST 1180), 1st Lieutenant, 1970-1971.

Law school, then the FBI. . . .

Thanks for asking.
Regards,
tk

 

OP,
Yes, well before her steering-casualty encounter with Kennedy.
Regards,
tk

 

Tennis Shoe. USS Snook SSN 592 and USS Tautog SSN 639...it wasn't the fender that was bent...

 

I had a question regarding something I’m reading. Instead of making a new thread, I thought I’d add in to this one.
In Leonard Mosley’s biography of Marshall, he stated that it is actually amazing that GM was not relieved of command after the attack, and that Marshall is one of the only top dogs that survived with little stigma attached to him. After all, Kimmel and Short lost their commands, as well as Navy Chief of Staff Admiral Stark, who went on to be a liaison with the British. As the author pointed out, he was “perhaps punished for less overt reasons” (not being very specific).
But the passage that really got my attention was the author describing the general surprise that the armed services had when Marshall kept his job, even going on to state that the Navy felt “discriminated against by the President which fueled subsequent navy suspicions of conspiracy between Marshall and the White House”.
This seems incredible to me as the Navy was FDR’s “buddy”. Did they really feel this way, or am I reading hogwash?

 

Well, one must remember that FDR was Wilson's Assistant Sec. of the Navy for most of both of his terms. I believe he didn't step down from the post until after 1921 when Harding went into the White House. I am not positive but it seems he filled that spot, behind a literally NON functioning Sec. of the Navy for six or seven years.

In that way, he was literally the "man in charge" of the Navy in those years, just as his distant cousing T.R. had been under McKinley. Cousin Teddy was there for less time, but still...

 

Indeed, I had this in mind when I was reading this chapter. Thats why it seems strange that the Navy of all people would believe in a conspriracy between FDR and Marshall. I can understand why they would feel like their commanders were being treated more harshly, but really, a conspiracy?

 

Haha...that reminds me of Mason's book "Battleship Sailor", when he stated that a Nazi sympathizing crewman was nabbed by G men when the California put into Puget Sound. He also said that during the hunt for Bismarck, there were crewmen that were rooting for the Germans! So the Navy had em too, huh?