Pearl Harbor: December 7, 1941

U.S. Marks 74th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor Attack

With an eye on the immediate aftermath of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, thousands of World War II veterans and other observers today commemorated the 67th anniversary of the devastating Japanese military raid.

The theme of the event - "Pacific War Memories: The Heroic Response to Pearl Harbor" - was something of a departure from the past.

Usually, the commemoration focuses on the attack on the USS Arizona, Pearl Harbor and several other installations on Oahu. But this year's remembrance ceremony centered more on the months following the raid, said Eileen Martinez, chief of interpretation for the National Park Service.

"We're moving into the Pacific War, the first strike back," she said.

To that end, one of two keynote speakers were Thomas Griffin, a surviving member of the pilots and crew who answered the Pearl Harbor attack four months later with an aircraft carrier-launched bomber raid on Tokyo.

The B-25 mission, led by Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle, inflicted little damage on Japan but boosted morale in America and led the embarrassed Japanese government to launch an ill-fated attack on Midway Island.

The other keynote address was delivered by Admiral Robert F. Willard, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

Sunday's commemoration featured a performance by the U.S. Pacific Fleet Band, morning colors, a Hawaiian blessing, a rifle salute by the U.S. Marine Corps and a recognition of those who survived the attack.

At 7:55 a.m., when the attack began 67 years ago, a moment of silence was observed. The destroyer USS Chung-Hoon will render honors to the USS Arizona, which still lies beneath the harbor with its dead. Almost 2,400 Americans were killed and nearly 1,180 injured when Japanese fighters bombed and sank 12 naval vessels and heavily damaged nine others on Dec. 7, 1941. The Arizona, which sank in less than nine minutes after an armor-piercing bomb breached its deck and exploded in the ship's ammunition magazine, lost 1,177 sailors and marines. About 340 of its crew survived.

Other major installations on Oahu, such as Wheeler Field and Kaneohe Naval Air Station, also were attacked.

This year's ceremony comes weeks after construction began on a new visitor's center for the USS Arizona Memorial. The existing center, which was built 28 years ago on reclaimed land, is sinking. Officials have said it will be unusable in a few years.

This year's event will be held a half-mile away at Kilo Pier of Naval Station Pearl Harbor, the site for next year's commemoration as well. The new visitor's center is scheduled to open Dec. 7, 2010.

Pearl Harbor Survivor Recalls Horrific Attack 67 Years Later

Nearly seven decades have passed since 89-year-old Dallas Harvey witnessed the horrific attack at Pearl Harbor, but the brutal images remain emblazoned in his memory as if not a day had gone by.

In an interview with Telegraph.com, Harvey - who was a 21-year-old medic on the USS Argonne repair ship on the day of the attack on Dec. 7, 1941 - spoke of a harbor full of black smoke and chaos aboard the ships. The water was burning, the oil had spilled out from the ships and it looked like the whole harbor was on fire, Harvey said.

Three planes that I recall came over and dropped bombs on the naval air station on a small island in the bay ... the third plane flew over our ship, then I saw the red dots (of the Japanese sun insignia) on the wings, and learned that the attackers were from Japan, Harvey told the Telegraph.

"I was almost positive we would be prisoners by nightfall," Harvey told the Telegraph.

He added that he suppressed many painful memories from the surprise morning attack by the Japanese in Hawaii, including the grim task of unloading hundreds of bodies from the destroyed ships onto the dock.

I blocked that part out until 50 years later, when I went to the 50-year reunion ... I had a total blackout.

Harvey, one of the last living survivors of the attack that killed 2,402 and wounded 1,282, says he bears no ill will toward the Japanese. He retired from the Navy after 30 years of service and lives with his family in Southern Illinois, according to the Telegraph.

Will

Pearl Harbor: December 7, 1941

Pearl Harbor Commemoration To Focus On US Response

There's a different focus to Sunday's 67th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Usually, the commemoration focuses on the attack on the USS Arizona, Pearl Harbor and several other installations on Oahu. But the theme this year is "Pacific War Memories: The Heroic Response to Pearl Harbor."

It will focus more on events following the raid that killed 2,400 Americans and destroyed or damaged more than 20 naval vessels on Dec. 7, 1941.

One of the keynote speakers will be Thomas Griffin, a surviving member of those who answered the Pearl Harbor attack four months later with an aircraft carrier-launched bomber raid on Tokyo.

Report Debunks Theory That the U.S. Heard a Coded Warning About Pearl Harbor

It has remained one of World War II's most enduring mysteries, one that resonated decades later after Sept. 11: Who in Washington knew what and when before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941?

Specifically, who heard or saw a transcript of a Tokyo shortwave radio news broadcast that was interrupted by a prearranged coded weather report? The weather bulletin signaled Japanese diplomats around the world to destroy confidential documents and codes because war with the United States, the Soviet Union or Britain was beginning.

In testimony for government inquiries, witnesses said that the "winds execute" message was intercepted as early as Dec. 4, three days before the attack.

But after analyzing American and foreign intelligence sources and decrypted cables, historians for the National Security Agency concluded in a documentary history released last week that whatever other warnings reached Washington about the attack, the "winds execute" message was not one of them.

A Japanese message intercepted and decoded on Nov. 19, 1941, at an American monitoring station on Bainbridge Island, in Washington State, appeared to lay out the "winds execute" situation. If diplomatic relations were "in danger" with one of three countries, a coded phrase would be repeated as a special weather bulletin twice in the middle and twice at the end of the daily Japanese-language news broadcast.

"East wind rain" would mean the United States; "north wind cloudy," the Soviet Union; and "west wind clear," Britain.

In the history, "West Wind Clear," published by the agency's Center for Cryptologic History, the authors, Robert J. Hanyok and the late David Mowry, attribute accounts of the message being broadcast to the flawed or fabricated memory of some witnesses, perhaps to deflect culpability from other officials for the United States' insufficient readiness for war.

A Congressional committee grappled with competing accounts of the "winds execute" message in 1946, by which time the question of whether it had been broadcast had blown into a controversy. The New York Times described it as a "bitter microcosm" of the investigation into American preparedness.

"If there was such a message," The Times wrote, "the Washington military establishment would have been gravely at fault in not having passed it along" to military commanders in Hawaii. If there was not, then the supporters of those commanders "would have lost an important prop to their case."

In an interview, Mr. Hanyok said there were several lessons from the controversy that reverberate today. He said that some adherents of the theory that the message was sent and seen were motivated by an unshakable faith in the efficacy of radio intelligence, and that when a copy of the message could not be found they blamed a cover-up - a reminder that no intelligence-gathering is completely foolproof.

Washington also missed potential warning signs because intelligence resources had been diverted to the Atlantic theater, he said, and the Japanese deftly practiced deception to mislead Americans about the whereabouts of Tokyo's naval strike force.

"The problem with the conspiracy theory," Mr. Hanyok said, "is that it diverted attention from the real substantive problems, the major issue being the intelligence system was so bureaucratized."

Beginning about Dec. 1, Washington became aware that the Japanese were ordering diplomats overseas to selectively destroy confidential documents. But, the N.S.A. study found, "because of the sometimes tardy exploitation of these messages, intelligence officers in the Army and Navy knew only parts of the complete program."

"It is possible," the study went on, "that they viewed the Japanese actions as ominous, but also contradictory and perhaps even confusing. More importantly, though, the binge of code destruction was occurring without the transmittal of the winds execute message."

The authors concluded that the weight of the evidence "indicates that one coded phrase, 'west wind clear,' was broadcast according to previous instructions some six or seven hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor."

"In the end, the winds code never was the intelligence indicator or warning that it first appeared to the Americans, as well as to the British and Dutch," they wrote. "In the political realm, it added nothing to then current view in Washington (and London) that relations with Tokyo had deteriorated to a dangerous point. From a military standpoint, the winds coded message contained no actionable intelligence either about the Japanese operations in Southeast Asia and absolutely nothing about Pearl Harbor.

"In reality," they concluded, "the Japanese broadcast the coded phrase(s) long after hostilities began - useless, in fact, to all who might have heard it."

That war with Japan was anticipated is apparent from a separate memorandum to President Franklin D. Roosevelt dated Nov. 13, 1941, from William J. Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. The memorandum was found in the National Archives last year by the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group.

Reporting on a conversation the week before between Hans Thoman, the German chargé d'affaires to the United States, and Malcolm R. Lovell, a Quaker leader, Mr. Donovan quoted Mr. Thoman as saying that Japan was trying to buy time.

"In the last analysis, Japan knows that unless the United States agrees to some reasonable terms in the Far East, Japan must face the threat of strangulation, now or later. Should Japan wait until later to prevent this strangulation by the United States, she will be less able to free herself than now, for Germany is now occupying the major attention of both the British empire and the United States.

"If Japan waits, it will be comparatively easy for the United States to strangle Japan," Mr. Donovan's memorandum quoting Mr. Thoman continued. "Japan is therefore forced to strike now, whether she wishes to or not."

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