Barry Rene DeCicco wrote:
> Instead, they hit a base still asleep.
>
> The US just didn't seem to realize that the Japanese were about
> to attack. And the Phillipines were certainly a better first-strike
> target than Hawaii, which was more risky.
Here was the story I was told when I was attached to NSA -- told by a civilian who had worked there in the '40s. Sometime in Sept. of 1941 a Japanese destroyer put in to San Francisco harbor. As was standard when a foreign warship entered a harbor, a U.S. Navy inspection party went on board. The ship's security was lax, and a young Ensign found himself wandering the ship by himself; he wandered by the radio room, which was unoccupied, with the code book lying in plain sight. He pocketed it and when back to base with admiral's stars gleaming in his eyes. He's probably still peeling potatoes in some out-of-the-way navy station -- for of course the Japanese changed their code as soon as they discovered it had been compromised -- and the people at Naval Security Station in Washington had the code just about broken by that time.
That was the story told me in 1952 by an NSA employee. I can't vouch for it beyond that. If it is true, that partly explains why the Pearl Harbor attack would have been so successful a surprise.
Carrol