Husband Kimmel takes command of the Pacific Fleet

On 1 February 1941, aboard the battleship USS Pennsylvania, lying at Pearl Harbor (PL) on the Hawaiian island of Oʻahu, Admiral James O. Richardson handed over command to Husband Kimmel. Kimmel, until that day a rear admiral commanding the cruisers of the Battle Force, received the temporary rank of full admiral and two titles at once: Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet, and Commander-in-Chief, United States Fleet. The second mattered in case the two ocean fleets had to operate together. According to the most frequently cited figure, Kimmel was promoted over the heads of thirty-two more senior admirals.

It is often said that on this day Kimmel became “commander of the US Navy in the Pacific”. This needs some qualification. Kimmel commanded the main battle fleet in the central and eastern Pacific, based in Hawaii. In the Philippines and Chinese waters a separate and much weaker Asiatic Fleet under Admiral Thomas C. Hart operated, which was not subordinate to Kimmel.

A new fleet organisation

The change of command coincided with a reorganisation of the entire US Navy. Since 1922 its main forces had formed a single United States Fleet, made up of the Battle Force, stationed in the Pacific, and the weaker Scouting Force. General Order No. 143, issued on 1 February 1941, divided the naval forces into three fleets, each with its own commander-in-chief: the Atlantic, the Pacific and the already existing Asiatic Fleet. The Atlantic Fleet, built up from the former Atlantic Patrol, was taken over the same day by Admiral Ernest King. The division reflected the new situation. The Two-Ocean Navy Act of July 1940 promised that within a few years America would have enough ships to fight simultaneously in the Atlantic and the Pacific, and American warships were already patrolling the Atlantic, across which convoys were sailing to Britain.

The main forces, however, remained in the Pacific: twelve of the fifteen American battleships, four aircraft carriers and most of the cruisers and destroyers. Most of them had been stationed for less than a year in a harbour that the fleet command considered unsuitable.

The fleet in Hawaii

In April 1940 the Battle Force, normally based at the Californian ports of San Diego and San Pedro, sailed for its annual manoeuvres in Hawaiian waters. On 7 May, a few days after they ended, it was ordered to remain in the islands. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt believed that a fleet pushed four thousand kilometres westwards would serve as a warning to Japan: Tokyo would have to reckon with the fact that any expedition southwards, towards the Dutch, British or French colonies, would leave the Americans an open road to Japanese waters. A month later France fell, and the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina were left without the protection of their mother countries. In September Japan moved into northern Indochina and signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, directed above all against the United States.

Richardson, regarded as the US Navy’s foremost expert on Japanese strategy, did not question the aim of the President’s policy, only its instrument. He held that Pearl Harbor had neither the docks, nor the depots, nor the barracks to sustain the whole fleet, that the crews were wasting time there instead of training, and above all that ships crowded into a cramped harbour would, in the event of war, be the first target of a Japanese attack. He wanted to return to California, prepare the fleet for war and only then sail west. He travelled to Washington twice on the matter. At a meeting on 8 October 1940 he told Roosevelt that the senior officers of the navy lacked the confidence in the country’s civilian leadership that waging war in the Pacific required. By the end of October leaks from the White House were already heralding his recall, and early in 1941 it was decided that he would receive none of the new commands in the reorganisation of the fleet. He reverted to his permanent rank of rear admiral and to work on the navy’s General Board.

The new commander

Kimmel was a different kind of officer from his predecessor: he did not argue with Washington about policy but carried out orders with enormous, at times excessive, diligence. In 1915 he had briefly served as aide to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy – Roosevelt himself. His subordinates valued his energy. William Halsey, who in 1941 commanded one of the Pacific Fleet’s carrier task forces, later called him “the ideal man for the job”. His critics charged that he could not delegate and checked every detail himself.

Kimmel accepted the decision to base the fleet in Hawaii as a fact and from his first days turned to what he considered most urgent: training the fleet for war. In mid-February he issued an order on the security of the fleet in base, providing in case of an air raid for anti-aircraft defence by the ships in harbour, anti-submarine patrols and warning procedures. On 18 February he wrote to the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold Stark: “I feel that a surprise attack (submarine, air, or combined) on Pearl Harbor is a possibility, and we are taking immediate practical steps to minimize the damage inflicted and to ensure that the attacking force will pay.”

Warnings from Washington and Tokyo

Kimmel was not the only one thinking about such an attack. On 24 January 1941 the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, wrote to the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, that if war with Japan came, it was “easily possible” that it would open with a surprise attack on the fleet or the naval base at Pearl Harbor. He judged air bombing and attack by torpedo planes to be the gravest dangers, followed by sabotage, submarines, mines and bombardment from the sea. Stimson replied on 7 February that he was forwarding the letter to the army commander in Hawaii with instructions to co-operate with the navy. Kimmel and the new army commander received copies of both letters at about the time they took up their posts.

Almost in the same days the United States ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph Grew, reported that the Peruvian minister had heard of a Japanese plan for a surprise strike on Pearl Harbor in the event of war. Naval intelligence considered the rumour unreliable and passed it on to Kimmel with that comment at the beginning of February. The rumour was premature but not plucked from thin air: on 7 January 1941 the commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, had presented the Navy Minister, Koshirō Oikawa, with a first outline of a carrier strike on the American fleet in its base. One of its inspirations was the British attack on Taranto in November 1940.

Short in Hawaii

The defence of the island of Oʻahu itself and of the base, including anti-aircraft defence, radar and fighters, was the army’s responsibility. On 7 February 1941 command of the Hawaiian Department was assumed by General Walter Short, who received the temporary rank of lieutenant general (the Army Chief of Staff, George Marshall, signed the appointment in the first days of February, hence the date of 8 February in some sources). The navy was responsible for long-range reconnaissance around the islands, the army for close defence. Kimmel and Short were on friendly terms and signed agreements on co-operation, but there was no unified command, and it later emerged that neither knew exactly what precautions the other had taken.

A year of preparations

Over the following months Kimmel bombarded Washington with requests: for patrol aircraft, of which he had too few to search the sea around Hawaii every day; for modern anti-aircraft artillery; for tankers, without which the fleet could not operate far from its base. He pressed for the fortification of Wake and Midway atolls, where Marine garrisons were installed in the summer. Instead of reinforcements came a weakening. In the spring of 1941, as the United States became ever more involved in the war in the Atlantic and American and British staff officers agreed that in the event of war Germany would be the first enemy, the aircraft carrier Yorktown, three battleships, four light cruisers and more than a dozen destroyers – roughly a quarter of the Pacific Fleet – were transferred to the Atlantic. Kimmel protested, but in vain.

The war plan he was to carry out did not provide for the defence of Hawaii but for offensive operations: on the outbreak of war the fleet was to strike at Japanese bases in the Marshall Islands in order to draw Japanese forces away from Malaya and the Netherlands Indies. This was what Kimmel was training his ships for. Meanwhile the decrypted Japanese diplomatic messages that Washington was reading thanks to the breaking of the Purple cipher did not reach Pearl Harbor. Kimmel asked to be informed of everything that might concern the fleet and was convinced that this was being done.

Pearl Harbor and the inquiries

At the end of November 1941, when negotiations with Japan broke down, Stark sent Kimmel a dispatch that opened by saying it was to be considered a “war warning”. Yet it named the Philippines, Thailand, the Kra Isthmus and Borneo as Japan’s probable targets, not Hawaii. Kimmel judged that the greatest threats to the fleet in harbour were sabotage and submarines, did not order long-range air reconnaissance in all directions and kept the battleships in base. He sent two carriers off with aircraft for Wake and Midway. On 7 December 1941 six Japanese carriers under Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo dealt the fleet the blow against which Richardson had warned: the attack on Pearl Harbor sank or damaged eight battleships and killed more than 2,400 Americans.

Ten days later Kimmel and Short were relieved of their posts and reverted to their permanent ranks. In January 1942 the commission headed by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts found that both had been guilty of dereliction of duty. Both soon retired. Subsequent inquiries by the navy, the army and finally Congress – which in 1946 spoke of “errors of judgment” rather than dereliction – shifted part of the responsibility to Washington, but the dispute over the guilt of the Hawaiian commanders continues to this day.

Place in the war

The change of 1 February 1941 looked like an ordinary change of command, but it settled the dispute over where the American fleet should be stationed. Roosevelt had opted for deterrence: the fleet in Hawaii was to hold Japan in check while America concentrated on aid to Britain, and since the November election the President could pursue this policy with a fresh mandate. The commander who had warned that the ships were thereby being exposed to a blow was replaced by a loyal and capable officer with no influence over political decisions. Japan, however, read the fleet’s presence at Pearl Harbor not as a warning but as a target. When Yamamoto prepared his strike, he knew exactly where the American battleships would be. For Americans Kimmel’s name became a symbol of the surprise of 7 December, although historians today agree that the men in Washington, who knew more than he did, also contributed to the disaster.