For almost a year the official Army & Navy reports on Pearl Harbor had lain under cover, marked "Secret." Last week, the excuse was good no longer: President Truman made them public.
In a week of formal triumph over Japan, few citizens had the inclination to read the story of the first U.S. defeat, three years and nine months ago. The very bulk of the documents (130,000 words) was forbidding. The New York Times printed it all and sat down. Congressmen, before they had read it through, shouted that it was a "whitewash" or that it was incomplete. Harry Truman said that it proved everyone was to blame.
By & large, the reports justified Mr. Truman's easygoing generalization. The Army Board agreed: "The winds of public opinion were blowing in all directions. . . . We were preparing for war by the conference method . . . that was the product of the time and conditions due to the transition from peace to war in a democracy."
But certain other facts were inescapable: there were men in high places, charged with the defense of the republic, who had erred; there were others who had been completely and unaccountably fatheaded.
Two men had already been adjudged (by the 1942 Roberts report) as derelict in their duties: Lieut. General Walter C. Short, Commander of the Army's Hawaiian Department, and Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet on the day the Japs attacked. New light shed by the reports did nothing to brighten their records; it cast them, indeed, into darker shadow. What the new light did was to illuminate other failures. Among them:
¶ General of the Army George Catlett Marshall, then, as now, Chief of Staff.
¶ Lieut. General Leonard T. Gerow, now head of a board to study lessons of World War II, then Chief of the War Plans Division of the Army's General Staff.
¶ Admiral Harold R. Stark, recently commander of U.S. Naval Forces in Europe (where he was made an honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire), but on Pearl Harbor Day Chief of Naval Operations.
¶ Cordell Hull, then the Secretary of State.
The Gamblers. The reports for the first time gave eye-popping details of the Jap attack. On Nov. 27-28, a Jap task force, carefully and particularly trained for its mission, set sail from Tankan Bay in northern Japan and headed east, in radio silence. Its orders were to sink any vessel it should meet, even Japanese; nothing must be left to a chance betrayal of its course. In the force were six carriers carrying (said the Board) some 424 planes,*two battleships, three cruisers and a destroyer division.
At sea—fortunately south and west of Pearl Harbor—were the U.S.'s only combat-fit carriers in the Pacific, the Lexington and the Enterprise, with a combined complement of only 180-odd planes. Like sitting ducks in Pearl Harbor were eight of the battleships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, in a condition of only partial readiness. This the Japs knew; they were well supplied with every detail of intelligence about their target.