[ARC5] "Radar and Radio Intercept Philippines 1941 - 1942" article

[Jim Haynes]

I don't read this group very carefully, so if the following is old news
please ignore it.

There is a two-volume book titled "The U.S.Navy's on-the-roof gang..."
by Matt Zullo.  It's classified as a historical novel because the
author invented dialogue among the characters to make the story go; but
I believe it is otherwise factual.

The main theme is that a Navy radio operator in the Phillippines
who was also a ham and ace CW guy heard some code that he couldn't
make any sense of.  After studying it and with help from someone who
knew Japanese he realized it was kanji - a Morse-like adaptation of
the Japanese language kata kana syllables.  He learned to copy it
and proposed to the Navy higher-ups that they should train operators
to copy it and intercept it because Japan back in the 1920s-30s was
considered a likely threat to U.S. interests in the Pacific.

He got buy-in to start a school for operators.  For lack of space
they built a classroom on the roof of the Main Navy building in D.C.
Hence the graduates being called the "on-the-roof gang".  Much of
the book will mainly be of interest to the families of the operators
involved, as he identifies practically every one by name.  But there
are interesting stories about all the activities.

One of these, almost a sidebar to the main story, has some of the men
arriving at Pearl Harbor in January 1932.  There had just been a Navy
war games exercise.  The commander of the "enemy" was an early
enthusiast for naval aviation.  He left his battleships in San Diego
and took two aircraft carriers and a motley assortment of airplanes
for his attack.  He planned his attack for a Sunday morning at dawn,
parked his ship where it was unlikely to be seen by any Navy recon
flights, and then launched his attack.  They used sacks of flour to
represent bombs.  It was a spectacular success.  Several battleships
were judged sunk or heavily damaged, air fields were put out of action,
and not a single defensive airplane got off the ground.

But then the Navy brass forced the referees to reverse their findings
and declare the defense the winner.  The argument was that no nation
powerful to attack the U.S. would do so without a formal declaration
of war.  And even if they did they would not be so rude as to attack
at dawn on a Sunday morning.  All this was reported in the Hawaiian
newspapers and the New York Times, so the Japanese were well aware
of it.  And put the same plan into operation nearly ten years later
on 7 December 1941.

With all that has been printed about the Pearl Harbor disaster, I had
never heard this story until recently when I acquired the on-the-roof-
gang books.

see 
https://medium.com/war-stories/the-pearl-harbor-attack-of-1932-194a5e8192fc

or search the web for fleet problem 13 pearl harbor  and Admiral Henry 
Yarnell

 	---

 	"Ya can argue all ya wanna, but it's dif'rent than it was."
 	"No it ain't! No it ain't!  But ya gotta know the territory."
 		Meredith Willson, The Music Man