Fdr: Not Guilty I Don’t Buy It (July/August 2001 | Volume: 52, Issue: 5)

Fdr: Not Guilty I Don’t Buy It

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Authors: Kevin Baker

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July/August 2001 | Volume 52, Issue 5

Admiral Richardson distorts both the events surrounding the attack on Pearl Harbor and what I have written about them. Far from being “preoccupied with blame fixing,” I wrote that Adm. Husband Kimmel and Gen. Walter Short, the Navy and Army commanders at Pearl Harbor, “were dedicated, patriotic men who served their country to the best of their ability and should not be singled out for censure” and that “I, for one, would have nothing against restoring them to their full ranks. . .”

My objection was and is to a congressional resolution that not only urged the President to exculpate both men but added that they “were not provided necessary and critical intelligence ... that would have alerted them to prepare for the attack.” I believe this to be simply wrong. Worse, it was disingenuous—a way to slip the crux of a conspiracy theory past unwitting members of Congress and into the historical record. Admiral Richardson writes that this supposed plot is “peripheral” to his objectives, then proceeds to perpetuate the myth of a conspiracy with various insinuations.

As I wrote, there is plenty of blame to go around for what happened at Pearl Harbor. There was additional information that the Washington high command could and should have shared with the commanders at Pearl. The base was undermanned, and our general lack of military preparedness at the time was, as I termed it, “unforgivable.” Yet I cannot agree that Kimmel and Short should be absolved of all command responsibility—or that they were deprived of information that could have made any meaningful difference in the battle. On the face of it, I find the contention preposterous that a major American military base could not be defended against an enemy that had to travel over 3,000 miles to attack it.

Admiral Richardson seems to me to be arguing along two contradictory tracks. On the one hand, he claims that Pearl Harbor did not have the aircraft available to make an effective reconnaissance of the waters around Hawaii. On the other, he says the commanders at Pearl were stymied by not having the necessary intelligence to do so. Taking up the first point, were Kimmel and Short actually unable to make any effective reconnaissance by air? Certainly they could have benefited from more —and more modern—planes. Yet Gordon Prange, in his classic study At Dawn We Slept , cites several occasions during war crises earlier in 1941 when both Army and Navy forces at Pearl instituted more extensive surveillance. He concludes, “Obviously, Kimmel and Short could go all out when they believed the situation justified; therefore, it is difficult to understand why they did not take similar action upon receipt of the war warning [of November 27, 1941].”

Prange found the commanders most negligent in failing to make any attempt to cover the northwest sector of the approach to Hawaii. He quoted the judgment of Rear Adm. Patrick