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[2587]1

PEARL HARBOR ATTACK

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 5, 1945

CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES,

JOINT COMMITTEE ON THE INVESTIGATION
OF THE PEARL HARBOR ATTACK,

Washington, D. C. The joint committee met, pursuant to adjournment, at 10 a. m., in the caucus room (room 318), Senate Office Building, Senator Alben W. Barkley (chairman), presiding.

Present: Senators Barkley (chairman), George, Lucas, Brewster, and Ferguson; and Representatives Cooper (vice chairman), Clark, Murphy, Gearhart, and Keefe.

Also present: William D. Mitchell, general counsel; Gerhard A. Gesell, Jule M. Hannaford, and John E. Masten, of counsel, for the joint committee.

[2588] The CHAIRMAN. The committee will come to order. General Gerow, will you be sworn, please?

TESTIMONY OF LT. GEN. LEONARD TOWNSEND GEROW, UNITED STATES ARMY 2

(Having been duly sworn by the chairman.)

The CHAIRMAN. Is counsel ready to proceed?

Mr. MITCHELL. I want to make a short statement to the committee which I think may help it in connection with the next two or three witnesses, including General Marshall.

Calling General Marshall out of turn, of course, upset our order of proof, and we are bringing up some matters now which we had not intended to present to the committee until sometime later.

One, I think, is the story of the so-called "winds" message, and the other is the detailed record in handling, analytically, and so on, what is know as the fourteenth part of the message which came in on December 6 and 7.

Our order of proof originally was for taking those things up as a special order of proceeding. We intended to call all our witnesses on that at one time, and in advance of General Marshall's testimony. Now that he is coming on he will have to be asked about that.

My statement is intended to sort of orient the committee as to what we know about the situation, so that they will [2589] understand the testimony and be better equipped to do something about it until General Marshall comes in.

Now, the first thing is this "winds" message. That is a sort of a romantic term. I want to report now just generally what the state of the inquiry is in regard to the "winds" message, so the committee will understand.

Italic figures in brackets throughout refer to page numbers of the official transcript of testimony. See Hearings, Part 5, p. 2490, for suggested corrections in his testimony submitteed by General Gerow.

The winds message, originally the winds code, which is found on page 154 of the diplomatic intercepts, exhibit 1, I want to call the attention of the committee to the fact at the start that if the Japanese had used that method of communication and we had intercepted their diplomatic message what you would have learned was that the diplomatic relations between the United States and Japan were in danger, and that instructions had to be given to burn the code.

My first reaction to the winds message was, if we had intercepted it, we would have had little more than we had already, because we knew our diplomatic relations were in danger and we knew they had given orders to burn the code. So my original reaction was there was much ado about nothing in the winds message.

But passing that I want to also call to the attention of the committee the fact that the code, as set up by its very terms, provides:

In case of emergency (danger of cutting off our [2590] diplomatic relations), and the cutting off of international communications, the following warning will be added in the middle of the daily Japanese language shortwave news broadcast:

That shows on its face that the Japs only set this method up for an emergency system, in case they could not use the ordinary means of communication.

Now the proof already shows that they were using the ordinary means of communication right up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. So the question arises at once whether they did send out those messages. Heretofore all the assumptions have been that they did, and there has been an inqury by the other boards as to who received them and what was done with them.

Now we have made a plan, to dig out all the facts on that, and I just want to report the present status of that.

In the first place, in our effort to find out whether the message ever was sent we have already the FCC report from one of the best monitoring stations, we have the exact report from them as to just what they picked up. That report was that one of the messages picked up on the 4th of December by the Japanese listener on the FCC station, which he picked up because it resembled did not exactly comply with the code but resembled the code-had the statement in it, "North wind cloudy," which [2591] meant war with Russia and not with the United States and Great Britain, and that we can talk about as the false winds message, which was probably a real broadcast and not a code broadcast, and caused, of course, confusion among witnesses as to whether they ever saw the message or not.

We also had from the FCC the report that on the afternoon of December 7, after the attack on Pearl Harbor and after the ordinary means of international communication had been closed, a winds message was received. That message said nothing about "East wind rain," ," which meant war with the United States, because that was already known all over the world, but it did use the expression which meant war with England.

That is the message received by the FCC after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and was an implementing message to warn the Japanese people abroad that they were about to have war with Great Britain.

The next thing we did was to inquire from the Dutch and British and Australia, through the State Department, as to whether either of