Marching Orders: The Untold Story of How the American Breaking of the Japanese Secret Codes Led to the Defeat of Nazi Germany and Japan

by Bruce Lee

Kimmel and his fleet intelligence officer, Capt. Edwin T. Layton, also failed to pass on to the Army at Pearl Harbor another warning from the British in Asia on December 3 that America was about to be attacked. During his investigation into what caused the disaster at Pearl Harbor, Henry Clausen gathered another two hundred intelligence messages the British in Asia sent the Navy at Pearl Harbor. These were not forwarded to Washington prior to the Japanese attack. Clausen collected them for his report to Secretary of War Stimson. The Republicans on the Pearl Harbor Committee tried to keep Clausen’s report to Stimson under wraps. When Clausen finally testified before the committee, his statements sent shock waves through the hearings and changed the course of the committee’s findings. It determined that both the commanders of the Army and the Navy failed in their mutually dependent duties to defend Pearl Harbor. More importantly, the committee found great fault with Army and Navy intelligence. It also accepted the Clausen hypothesis that the entire system for the collection, coordination and evaluation of intelligence was flawed. Clausen was the first to testify publicly about the need for a centralized cryptologic structure, and his report to Stimson, critical of the cryptological process as it existed in 1941, helped lead to the creation of a certified cryptologic structure (i.e., the NSA) after the war.