Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy - Ludwig von Mises ...

1944: A Year of Investigations 429
Rear Admiral Wilson Brown, commander of the fl eet’s
Scouting Force, Task Force 3, spoke well of the fl eet’s pre-war
training:
[T]he high state of effi ciency maintained while doubling the
size of our Fleet in two years, the seamanship, gunnery, and
fi ghting ability of our Navy during two years of war refl ects
[sic] the quality of our naval leadership and of our training
processes during the pre-war period as well as during the war
period.
Th e success of the Japanese, Brown held, was not due to laxity on
the part of U.S. personnel, but rather to the detailed information
the Japanese had about our Fleet. 28
Admiral Hart examined nine witnesses who had not been in
Pearl Harbor during the weeks before the attack, including several
who had then held important positions in Washington and
had been privy to especially important pre-attack intelligence
—Rear Admiral Ingersoll, assistant chief of naval operations;
Rear Admiral Turner, chief of the Navy’s war plans division; Rear
Admiral Wilkinson, director of naval intelligence. Th ey were
all just as surprised as the Hawaiian offi cers had been that the
Japanese had targeted Pearl Harbor.
Hart caught up with Wilkinson on Guadalcanal in the south
Pacifi c. Wilkinson had taken over as director of naval intelligence
in the midst of the October 1941 radical personnel shifts. From
Wilkinson’s testimony, Japan’s immediate objective appeared to
be “the occupation of [the] southwestern coast of Indo-China,
Kampot, and possibly Bangkok, or lower Siam on the Malay
Peninsula.” Japanese troop transports and freighters were “pouring
continually down from Japan and Northern China coast
ports headed South, apparently for French Indo-China and
Formosan ports.” Much activity was going on in the Mandates,
28 Ibid., p. 153.