The Pittsburgh Press (December 2, 1945)
Editorial: Lessons from mistakes
We had advance information of the Japs’ plan the day before Pearl Harbor was attacked. But we didn’t know it because their intercepted message was not decoded and translated until the day after the attack.
We muffed that one for lack of adequate trained personnel to do the decoding and translating. For the same reason, other Jap messages of the utmost importance were not translated until weeks after we intercepted them.
Two months before the attack – we learned that the Japs were seeking detailed information about our fleet anchorages at Pearl Harbor. Maj. Gen. Sherman Miles, then head of Military Intelligence in Washington, tells the congressional investigating committee that this information “taken alone,” would have carried great military significance.
Why shouldn’t it have been taken alone, as well as studied along with any other information in our hands? Failure to evaluate that tip properly may also have reflected the personnel shortage, but it also seems to indicate an absence of acuteness.
The Army seems to have been more interested in guarding the information that we knew the Jap code than in using the information we gained by knowing the code.
The investigation, we think, is strengthening the case for unifying command of the armed forces. Certainly, it is pointing the need, now and for all future time, of an alert, adequate, centralized intelligence system. But that system must be coordinated with our defense machinery, and the defenses must be manned by men who will respond to warnings when they get them.