The consolidated Pearl Harbor mythology thread.

I think one good website on the evidence of advance knowledge of Pearl Harbor is Tom Kimmel's The Story Within the Pearl Harbor Story website: Hello and Welcome | Pearl Harbor 911 Attacks.

Tom Kimmel was one of Admiral Kimmel's grandsons. He was an FBI agent for decades. He devoted much of adult life to investigating the Pearl Harbor attack, especially as it related to Admiral Kimmel.

Tom Kimmel was the first one to discover and discuss the dynamite Hoover-Ladd memos that were released in the late 1970s. The memos were written on 11 and 12 December 1941, less than a week after the attack. These memos were never intended to be released; Hoover and Ladd assumed they would remain buried forever. Here is part of Ladd's memo to Hoover:

Colonel John T. Bissell today informed G. C. Burton [FBI Special Agent George C. Burton], in the strictest of confidence (and with the statement that if it ever got out that he had disclosed this information he would be fired) that about ten days before the attack on Pearl Harbor a number of Japanese radio intercepts had been obtained in Hawaii. When they were unable to break the code in these intercepts in Hawaii they sent them in to Washington where G2 [Army Intelligence Section] broke them. It was found that these radio messages contained substantially the complete plans for the attack on Pearl Harbor, as it was actually carried out. The messages also contained a code Japanese word which would be sent out by radio to the Japanese fleet as the signal for the attack, when this word was repeated three times in succession. . . .

Tom Kimmel has PDF scans of the memos on his website. I discuss the memos at some length in my book on Pearl Harbor.

The FBI angle is interesting, and important, because in his book Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath, historian John Toland discussed evidence that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover learned of the impending Japanese attack and duly informed Roosevelt. One of Hoover's sources was the batch of FBI reports on a Japanese spy who was operating in Hawaii. The spy's reports to Tokyo clearly pointed to Pearl Harbor as a target and indicated an attack was imminent. On 3 December, Special Agent Robert Shivers, the FBI Agent in Charge in Hawaii, advised the head of the Honolulu Police Department's Espionage Bureau, John A. Burns, that the Japanese would attack Hawaii by the end of the week (Toland 285–286).

Burns, who would later serve two terms as governor of Hawaii, discussed this warning in taped interviews conducted at the University of Hawaii in 1975. Incidentally, when Burns revealed this warning, he knew he was dying. One of Burns' deputies, William Kaina, reported in 1982 that Burns discussed the FBI warning with him shortly after Burns met with Special Agent Shivers. Kaina made this statement in an interview for a 1982 documentary produced in Japan titled Search for the Solution of the Pearl Harbor Puzzle (Toland 329).

Further evidence along this line surfaced in 1976 when Colonel Carlton Ketchum revealed in his memoir that J. Edgar Hoover told him in 1942 that in the fall of 1941 the FBI learned from various sources that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor, that he (Hoover) relayed this information to FDR, and that FDR received several other warnings about the impending attack from other sources (Toland 326-327; see also George Victor, The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable, pp. 50-51).

 

Surely that's not how they were using "complete plans" in this context. Surely, obviously they did not mean to say that they had the Japanese plans themselves. Rather, by "complete plans" they meant where the attack would occur, when the attack would occur, where the task force was sailing, the approximate size of the task force, the air-raid nature of the attack, the main targets of the attack, etc.--not the detailed battle plans themselves.

 

No one is saying that Col. Bissell was talking about the operational plans themselves. He was saying that from Japanese intercepts they discerned that Pearl Harbor would be attacked, when it would be attacked, by whom it would be attacked, the air-raid nature of the attack, etc.

Col. Bissell, who as the chief of the Army G2's Counterintelligence Branch at the time, made his disclosure to the FBI on 12/11. The next day, Assistant Director Ladd informed J. Edgar Hoover that Bissell had provided this information "in the strictest confidence." Hoover took it seriously enough that he wrote a memo about it to FDR's press secretary, Steven Early, who was a good friend of Hoover's. We have Ladd's memo to Hoover and Hoover's memo to Early.

Bissell was clearly bothered by the information he possessed. Perhaps he was hoping the FBI would investigate why the Pearl Harbor attack caught the Hawaiian commanders off guard when Army intelligence had known at least two days in advance that the attack would occur. It is also clear that Bissell was worried the Army would find out that he had relayed this information to the FBI, which is why he said he was revealing the information “in the strictest of confidence,” and why he made it a point to note that he would be fired if the Army discovered that he had disclosed this information.

Gen. Elliott Thorpe reported much the same thing that Col. Bissell reported to the FBI: After the war, Thorpe revealed that on 2 December, General Hein Ter Poorten, commander of the Netherlands East Indies Army in Java, informed him that Dutch intelligence had learned from Japanese intercepts that Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked. Early the next morning, Thorpe personally forwarded this information to the War Department in a coded cable and received acknowledgment that the cable had been received. John Toland confirmed Thorpe's account with General Poorten (Toland, Infamy, 281–282, 317).

In his memoir, Thorpe provided his own firsthand account of getting advance warning from General Ter Poorten regarding the attack on Pearl Harbor (East Wind, Rain: The Intimate Account of an Intelligence Officer in the Pacific, 1939-49, pp. 51-52).

 

"Total nonsense"??? Declassified memos that were never supposed to be released on information given to the FBI by the chief of Army G2 Counterintelligence--this material is "total nonsense"? We have the memos. Are you implying that the chief of Army G2 Counterintelligence engaged in some kind of weird practical joke on the FBI? Ladd and Hoover certainly took Bissell's report seriously, so much so that Hoover sent a memo to the White House press secretary summarizing Bissell's account, and he stressed that this information was relayed in the "strictest confidence."

And how do you explain the mutually corroborating Thorpe-Poorten evidence? General Thorpe was our military observer to the Dutch in Java, no fringe figure. General Poorten was the Dutch army commander in Java. Are you suggesting that Poorten lied when he confirmed Thorpe's account? After all, Thorpe said that Poorten was the Dutch officer who advised him that Dutch intelligence had discerned from Japanese intercepts that Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked?

 

Who "clarified" and "found irrelevant" Poorten's information? Did they deal with Thorpe's firsthand account and the fact that it corroborates Poorten's account? I'm familiar with traditionalist responses to this evidence, but their explanations amount of calling Poorten a liar or suggesting that he was just horribly "mistaken." They never explain Thorpe's corroboration of Poorten's account.

Hanyok ignores a mountain of evidence that he can't explain and gives an incomplete, misleading picture of the evidence that he does discuss. I address Hanyok's and Jacobsen's arguments in my book The Real Infamy of Pearl Harbor. Compare Hanyok's article with Dr. Brian Villa and Dr. Timothy Wilford's article "Signals Intelligence and Pearl Harbor: The State of the Question" and with Wilford's book Pearl Harbor Redefined: USN Radio Intelligence in 1941. The Villa-Wilford article is available here: FINT_A_188491 520..556 ++ (miketgriffith.com)

 

Again, no one is claiming that the Japanese "broadcast the plans for the raid." No one. What is being stated is that American, British, and Dutch intelligence intercepted Japanese military and diplomatic communications that stated or clearly indicated that Pearl Harbor would be attacked, and that some of American and Allied intercept sites were tracking the Japanese task force.

In addition to General Thorpe's and General Poorten's evidence, we also have Captain Johan Ranneft's diary-verified account that ONI informed him that a Japanese task force was nearing Pearl Harbor. Ranneft was the highly respected and highly decorated Dutch naval attache in DC. He later related his account to close friends and family members, and repeated it to historian John Toland. Ranneft's account is especially powerful because he recorded this information in his diary at the time. As Dr. George Victor points out, traditionalists are simply wrong when they claim that Toland "mistranslated" the account from Ranneft's diary--Ranneft himself translated it for Toland when Toland interviewed him. I devote an entire chapter to Ranneft's account in my Pearl Harbor book.

 

So what is being babbled about here is a not so thinly disguised marketing ploy to pump our new friend's book.

Unfortunately, that does not work well with folks fairly well versed in the subject matter whom one might find on a forum such as this.

You might get a more appreciative response from a more conspiracy industry directed forum.

 

A friendly question: the plans could be ready for the commander and radio message would say the Key code like North wind or south wind approaching. Broadcasting detailed plans would be stupid and would last a long time. Ask Admiral Luthjens of Bismarck fame what 30 minutes of broadcasting can do. At least it almost killed all of his crew. I wonder if the message was " you are god, my Fuhrer" for the ca 30 minutes if I understood his broadcast time perfectly.

 

Unfortunately I do not understand all yur joking but is this meant for me?

 

Is claiming that the Japanese broadcast their plan for the Pearl Harbor Raid. The gentlemen is not saying "We had the day & date, but not the time", or some variation thereof.

Odd how CT'ers, make one claim, and when called on the carpet, deny, deny, deny. It does get old...Especially without proof, only hearsay. Quite funny, how none of these telegrams, cables, and decrypts cannot be "found."