Pearl Harbor: Weak Leads-- Pearl Military Judge Drafts Martial Law Before Attack
Researching Pearl Harbor has Potentially Relevant Leads that Typically Get Sidelined
There are documents in the Pearl Harbor Investigation files that aren’t easy to investigate, or showing the document or claim’s provenance is difficult with the passage of time.
These tips and leads were relevant in the moment, and were perhaps able to be investigated and augmented in 1945, but by 2022, they have grown quite stale.
Going through these files it occurs to me that there’s a certain aspect where the investigators and the writers are writing to history instead of writing to their contemporaries. I have found some documents that communicate that very message, that even though the 1945 public was never going to accept that their government lied them into war, that preserving these documents for the historians, for posterity, was its own worthwhile purpose.
What I suspect that these individuals did not consider was that certain leads were able to be investigated in the moment, and others would only become clear in time or with the benefit of declassifications and different political regimes that didn’t care as much to preserve Roosevelt’s dirty secrets.
Here’s a good example of one lead that was useful in 1945 but that is quite difficult to pursue in 2022:
So, let’s note that this is the memo written after a phone call lead. So there’s immediately a legitimate doubt as to its authenticity.
There was a General Green, Gen. Thomas Henry Green, who was the Judge Advocate of Pearl Harbor during the attack. That information probably wasn’t impossible to find at the time, but notably harder to obtain in 1945 than today. So this part of the information checks out. Gen. Green was not a General at the time of the attack, he was a Lieutenant Colonel, but if you re-read the tip that’s not necessarily in conflict with the tip.
To clarify: The tipster is saying the current Judge Advocate, General Green, when he was at Pearl Harbor, drew up the proclamation issuing martial law.
The tip suggests that General Green knew about the attack or pending attack, even though Admiral Kimmel and General Short did not. That part is possible, but let’s say improbable. Why would the Roosevelt war party inform the island’s chief judge and not inform the commander, or inform him and not worry that he would inform Kimmel and Short?
I found the martial law orders from Lt. Col. Green in the Tuesday Dec. 9 issue of the Honolulu Advertiser, page 9, thanks to newspapers.com. I’ll post them below so you can read them if you want.
The Japanese attack started at 7:55AM in Pearl Harbor. Assuming the Honolulu Advertiser was a morning daily paper, it probably ‘went to bed’ and was being printed the day before, either at 5:00PM, or at the latest by 3:00AM. The martial law orders are dated December 7th, they are reasonably complex enough where they could have been drafted on Sunday the 7th, but that seems unlikely. This suggests the tipster is correct that something suspicious is afoot.
Some claim that martial law was declared within hours of the attack on December 7th. I suppose one interpretation is that the status of martial law was invoked prior to the written orders being drafted and promulgated. Hawaii would be under martial law for three years.
A reasonable non-conspiratorial explanation could be that the General drafted these items a few days before the attack, anticipating a potential attack.
But if that’s true, and the General had reason to anticipate a pending reason to declare martial law, then again why didn’t anyone notify the fleet waiting in harbor? Why were all the defenses down if the reason for alert was up? Why were some people preparing documents, but few were notifying those responsible for the physical defense of the island?
The fleet was on patrol until Friday December 5th, and came into Pearl Harbor for a quarterly inspection with Admiral Kimmel on Monday December 8th. Notably this fact has been hard to find and relatively suppressed. But if they were drafting the martial law order, why weren’t they notifying the incoming Pacific Fleet?
Why was the head lawyer worried about the legal implications after an attack when the guys manning the radars and anti-aircraft batteries were not told at least to be on alert?
The Occam’s Razor argument used by the Rooseveltians is that the military is just big and dumb. This is the incompetence theory. The Occam’s Razor argument used by the Dissenters is that the elites wanted war and ordered the military to be unprepared.
There’s no doubt that there’s a lot of incompetence in the military, but it’s also true that Roosevelt desperately wanted war.
There’s probably a way to identify the name of Sergeant Clark. It would take some investigating, but finding the full list of military who did not perish on a given day is a large challenge, especially when the subject’s name is a common one like Clark.
And even then, what does the name get you? You might be lucky enough to find surviving family members, but many spouses and children were disinterested in their relative’s war experiences or their relative was disinterested in reliving the trauma and tragedy of World War 2. As someone who has tried to pry these stories out of veterans, I can personally say that it’s not easy to get them to talk, but when they do it’s often the kind of stories that one never forgets.
Sgt. Clark is likely long gone. Many of those veterans were not writers and did not participate in oral histories, so he may not have collected his memories anywhere. It could be a wild goose chase with no reward at the finish line. Such is the nature of researching these topics from so long ago.
The real people to question about this were Sergeant Clark, and Generals Green and Short. Gen. Green died in 1971, and Gen. Short died in 1949. General Green does not appear to have left his archives anywhere, and General Short left most of his papers to the wonderful Hoover Institution at Stanford. Short’s papers were donated in 1975 and closed to research for 40 years, opening only in 2015. The history of Pearl Harbor has yet to be properly researched and written.
Politica | PEARL HARBOR SERIES:
Pt 8 - Reporter Tells US Japs Will Attack After Midnight on Dec. 6th
Pt 7 - Toward a Taxonomy of Claims about “Advance Knowledge” of the Attack
Pt 6 - Japs Were Trying to Escape Panama on Dec. 2nd
Pt 5 - Yes, there was Warning of the Pearl Harbor Attack
Pt 4 - ‘Very Bitter’ Housewife in ‘45 Notes Flaws in the Official Story
Pt 3 - Lloyd’s of London Cancelled Insurance Policies in August 1941
Pt 2 - Tips About The Pearl Harbor Attack 77 Years Late
Pt 1 - Pearl Harbor Revisionism
Honolulu Advertiser, Tuesday December 9, 1941, page 9:
