MacA. and family, and the senior officers, are living in Lennon’ s Hotel, which is a rambling, graceful old Victorian hostelry that reminds me of the place the Southern Pacific railroad used to operate in Yellowstone Park. This time I was assigned quarters appropriate to my rank: that is to say, sharing a two-room suite with an Army Ordnance Corps colonel. Because the Colonel is portly, mustached, and almost certainly snores, and because I wanted a place affording some privacy, and because I didn’t think I should permit anyone in Supreme Headquarters to tell me to do anything, I have taken a small cottage near the (unfortunately closed for the duration) Doomben Race Track, where this is written.
It should go without saying that I think the JCS decision of 2 July to invade the Solomons was wrong. I have the somewhat nasty suspicion that it was based on Roosevelt’s awe of King, and his dislike of MacA., rather than for any strategic purpose.
The night before (1 July) I had dinner with a colonel named Goettge, who is the First Marine Division G-2. There was no question in his mind how the JCS was going to decide the issue. I found that rather disturbing, as theoretically it was still under consideration. He was in with MacA.’s intelligence people, getting what they had on Tulagi and Guadalcanal when the JCS cable ordering Operation PESTILENCE came in.
He tells me-and I believe-that it is going to be one hell of a job getting the 1stMarines ready to make an amphibious landing in five weeks, including, of course, the rehearsal operation in the Fiji Islands.
Ghormley has requested that the 2ndMarines, of the 2ndMarine Division, be combat-loaded at San Diego. The 5thMarines werenot combat-loaded, which means that they had to unload everything onto the docks, Aotea Quay, at Wellington, sort it out, and then reload it, so that it meets the needs of an amphibious landing force. That’s what they are now doing; and according to a friend of mine in the 5thMarines, it is an indescribable mess, with cans spilling out of ordinary cardboard boxes, and so on.
The problem is compounded by the dock workers, a surly socialist bunch who, I suspect, would rather see the Japs in New Zealand than work overtime or over a weekend. I’m sure that the Marines and Navy people here have been raising hell about it with port people in America, but if you could add your weight to getting somethingdone about it, your effort would be worthwhile.
On the Fourth of July, we learned from Coastwatchers that the Japanese have started construction of an airfield on Guadalcanal. That’s frightening. Both MacA. and Ghormley are fully aware of the implications of an air base there, but they both, separately, insist that the Guadalcanal operation should not be launched until we are prepared to do it properly. It is not pleasant to consider the ramifications of a failed amphibious invasion.
That opinion is obviously not shared by the JCS. I don’ t know how Ghormley took it in Auckland, but I was with MacA. when a copy of the JCS cable of 10 July ordering Ghormley to "seize Guadalcanal and Tulagi at once" reached here. He thinks, to put it kindly, it was a serious error in judgment.
It wasn’t until the next day (11 July) that the other infantry regiment (the 1stMarines) and the artillery (11th) of the 1stMarine Division reached Wellington, N.Z. Now they are expected to unload, sort, and combat-load their equipment and otherwise get set for an amphibious landing in twenty days.
The same day, as you know, we learned that Imperial Japanese Headquarters has called off its plans to seize Midway, New Caledonia, and Samoa. Under those circumstances, no one here can see the need for "immediately" landing at Guadalcanal.
Last Thursday (16 July), a courier brought a copy of Ghormley’s operation plan (OPPLAN 1-42). There are three phases: a rehearsal in the Fiji Islands; the invasion of Guadalcanal and Tulagi; and the occupation of Ndeni Island in the Santa Cruz Islands. MacA.‘s reaction to it was that it is as good as it could be expected to be, given the circumstances.
MacA. made B-17 aircraft available to the 1stMarine Division for reconnaissance , and they flew over both Guadalcanal and Tulagi on Friday. On Saturday we learned that the aerial photographs taken differ greatly from the maps already issued-and there is simply no time to print and issue corrected ones.
I’m going to leave here first thing in the morning for New Zealand, and from there will join the rehearsal in the Fijis. I don’t know what good, if any at all, I can do anyone. But obviously I am doing no one any good here.
Respectfully,
Fleming Pickering, Captain, USNR
top secret
(Two)
Supreme Headquarters
Southwest Pacific Area
Brisbane, Australia
1705 Hours 21 July 1942
It was the first time Pickering had been to the Cryptology Room in Brisbane. He found it in the basement, installed in a vault that had held the important records of the evicted insurance company. There was a new security system, too, now run by military policemen wearing white puttees, pistol belts, and shiny steel helmets. The security in Melbourne had been a couple of noncoms armed with Thompson submachine guns, slouched on chairs. They had come to know Captain Fleming Pickering and had habitually waved him inside. But the MPs here not only didn’t know who he was, but somewhat smugly told him that he was not on the "authorized-access list."
Finally, reluctantly, they summoned Lieutenant Pluto Hon to the steel door, and he arranged, not easily, to have Pickering passed inside.
Hon waved Pickering into a chair, and then typed Pickering’s letter to Navy Secretary Frank Knox onto a machine that looked much like (and was a derivative of) a teletype machine. It produced a narrow tape, like a stock-market ticker tape, spitting it out of the left side of the machine. Hon ripped it off, and then fed the end of the tape into the cryptographic machine itself. Wheels began to whir and click, and there was the sound of keys hitting paper. Finally, out of the other end of the machine came another long strip of tape.
When that process was done, Lieutenant Hon took that strip of paper and fed it into the first machine. There was the sound of more typewriter keys, and the now-encrypted message appeared at the top of the machine, the way a teletype message would. But there were no words there, only a series of five-character blocks.
Hon gave his original letter and both strips of tape to Pickering; then, carrying the encrypted message, he left the vault for the radio room across the basement. Pickering followed him.
"Urgent," Hon said to the sergeant in charge. "For Navy Hawaii. Log it as my number"-he paused to consult the encrypted message-"six-six-oh-six."
Pickering and Hon watched as a radio operator, using a telegrapher’s key, sent the message to Hawaii. A few moments later there came an acknowledgment of receipt. Then Hon took the encoded message from the radio operator and handed it to Pickering.
In a couple of minutes, Pickering thought, that will be in the hands of Ellen Feller. He wondered if her receiving a message from him triggered any erotic thoughts in her.
He followed Hon back to the Cryptology Room. Hon turned a switch, and there was the sound of a fan. Pickering dropped his letter, the two tapes, and the encrypted printout into a galvanized bucket, and then stopped and set it all afire with his cigarette lighter. He waited until it had been consumed, and then reached in the bucket and broke up the ashes with a pencil.
It wasn’t that he distrusted Hon, or any of the others who encrypted his letters to the Secretary of the Navy. It was just that if he personally saw to it that all traces of it had been burned, there was no way it could wind up on Willoughby’s, MacArthur’s, or anyone else’s desk.