At 10:04 one morning last week big, bluff Senator Alben Barkley rose in the caucus room of the Senate Office Building and rapped for order. Spectators filled the hall to the corners. Senator Barkley asked for absolute quiet; the acoustics are notoriously bad. The Congressional commit tee's investigation of Pearl Harbor had begun: in the days & weeks to follow, history would be dragged up from the dark corners, dusted off and laid out on the committee table for the world to read.
Seated with Senator Barkley were four other Senators and five Representatives. Klieg lights glared on the witness chairs. Cameramen were poised for action; there were seats for 100 reporters.
In the front row of spectators sat two men with a special interest in the proceedings: big, heavy, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, in a grey business suit, and lean, bronzed Lieut. General Walter C. Short, also in grey. Their careers were al ready wrecked. Now other men would feel the stab of fact as well as the bludgeon of political innuendoes.
"Exhibit 1." In the first few days, the most interesting evidence came not from the witnesses, but from a 253-page printed booklet introduced as "Exhibit 1." This was a complete dossier of coded Japanese messages intercepted by U.S.
Army and Navy Intelligence between July 1, 1941 and Pearl Harbor Day. It showed conclusively, if further proof were needed, that official Washington was intimately aware, long before Dec. 7, 1941, of the warlike intentions of the Jap Government. It also showed that matters were coming to a climax in Japan by the end of November and that a deadline for war had been set.
On Nov. 22, Tokyo had cabled to Ambassador Nomura and Special Ambassador Kurusu: "There are reasons beyond your ability to guess why we wanted to settle Japanese-American relations by the 25th. . . . This time we mean it, that the deadline absolutely cannot be changed. After that things are automatically going to happen.. . ."
Testimony developed at the hearing, from captured Jap documents, indicated that the attack on Pearl Harbor was conceived by Admiral Yamamoto as far back as January 1941. The actual date for the attack (Dec. 8, Japanese time) had been fixed by Nov. 7.
"Miss Kimiko." How far things had gone was illustrated by a telephone conversation on Nov. 27 between Kurusu and Kumaicho Yamamoto, head of the American section of the Jap Foreign Office. The two men used a voice code in which "Miss Umeko" referred to Secretary Hull and "Miss Kimiko" to President Roosevelt. The term "matrimonial question" meant the negotiations in Washington, and talk of childbirth meant that a crisis was at hand. All this was clear to the U.S. agents who had tapped the Japs' wires; the U.S., in peace as well as war, had all the Jap signal codes. This was what the agents heard:
Yamamoto: How did the matrimonial question go today?
Kurusu: There wasn't much that was different from what Miss Umeko said yesterday. . . . Does it seem as if a child will be born?
Yamamoto (in a very definite tone): Yes, the birth of the child seems imminent. It seems as if it will be a strong, healthy boy. . . . Did you make any statement to the newspapers regarding your talk with Miss Kimiko today?
Kurusu: No, nothing. Nothing except the mere fact that we met.