Unexplained Mysteries of World War II

Part One

Puzzling Events

Dress Rehearsal for Pearl Harbor?

Lieutenant Mastake Okuyama was leading a squadron of Japanese Imperial Navy bombers on a sweep up China’s broad Yangtze River, known to the Chinese as Ch’ang Chiang (Long River), for it flows for thirty-one hundred miles from deep within the country and empties into the Yellow Sea. Among the great cities on the Yangtze’s banks are Shanghai and Nanking. It was the morning of December 12, 1937.

At the same time that Lieutenant Okuyama and his squadron were winging up the rich valley of the Yangtze, keeping a sharp eye below for vessels plying up and down the river, the USS Panay, a 450-ton gunboat, was heading downriver. Especially built in Shanghai for service on China’s rivers, the Panay was built to protect American shipping from the bands of cutthroat pirates that infested those waters.

In charge of the Panay was Lieutenant Commander James J. Hughes, a Naval Academy graduate, who had held the post since the previous year. His gunboat was 191 feet overall, and its arms included a main battery of two three-inch guns, a battery of .50-caliber antiaircraft machine guns, and ten standard .30-caliber machine guns for use against pirate attacks at close quarters.

Her twin buff funnels and awning-rigged upper walls identified the Panay as a shallow-draft boat, and the huge American flags billowing from her bow and stern staffs could be seen at a great distance by even the most myopic individual.

The Panay, which had a crew of fifty-five, was on a mercy mission, having evacuated from Nanking, which was under siege by the Japanese army, four U.S. Embassy officials, five refugees, and a bevy of western journalists. Now, just before noon, Commander Hughes’s boat had churned for thirty miles, and he radioed his position to Shanghai, reporting that he was anchoring the craft.

A savage war had been raging in China since the sultry night of July 1, 1937, when an incident occurred near Peking’s (Beijing’s) historic Marco Polo Bridge. A jittery unit of the Kwantung Army, which the warlords in control of the Japanese government had sent to guard their interests in the city, opened fire on a nearby encampment of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese Army after one of the latter’s soldiers suddenly vanished into the darkness.

It was later discovered that the Chinese soldier had been struck with a sudden need to heed the call of nature, but shots rang out and the two sides began a firefight. Using that pretext (wanton aggression against Imperial Japan) Japanese warlords poured troops, tanks, and airplanes into China, and a full-scale conflict erupted.

Japan was fully mobilized. Printed government pamphlets exhorted the home front and the military to self-sacrifice for the beginning of a crusade to liberate Asia and the western Pacific from imperialism. Actually, that liberation crusade had its origins ten years earlier. In 1927, Japanese generals and admirals held that an armed conflict with the United States was inevitable. So they drew up a top-secret plan called the Tanaka Memorial—a blueprint for military conquest of China and vast expanses of Asia and for war with the United States.

Now, a decade later on the Yangtze River near Nanking, all hands on the gunboat Panay were enjoying a leisurely lunch when they were interrupted at 1:30 P.M. by a shout from Chief Quartermaster Lang: The Japs are letting bombs go!

Roaring down on the anchored Panay was Lieutenant Mastake Okuyama’s squadron, which would later be described as having eight to fifteen aircraft. Commander Jim Hughes rushed to the pilothouse, which was then ripped apart by an explosion that broke the skipper’s leg.

On deck, Universal News’s Norman Alley grabbed his motion-picture camera and started filming. The planes zoomed in so low that he could easily make out the faces of the pilots. Alley was dumbfounded over the fact that they continued to bomb the Panay when they no doubt could clearly see the huge American flags fore and aft, waving in the breeze.

At the same time, crewmen on the Panay leaped to their machine guns and sent bursts in the direction of the diving Japanese planes. Jim Marshall, Far East correspondent of Collier’s magazine, was watching in amazement. The attackers were so low that it was impossible for them not to know they were bombing an American ship, he reflected. Moments later, Marshall was seriously wounded by bomb fragments that struck him in the neck, shoulder, stomach, and chest.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Arthur F. Anders, the executive officer, took command from the badly injured skipper, Jim Hughes. While directing the futile machine-gun fire against the swooping Japanese aircraft, Anders, of Vallejo, California, tumbled over with jagged wounds in the throat.

Twenty minutes after the first explosion, the Panay, riddled by machine-gun bullets and bomb fragments, began to sink. Lieutenant Anders, sprawled on deck, bleeding profusely and unable to speak because of his neck wound, took a piece of white chalk and scribbled on the bulkhead: Take to [life] boats. Stay as close to shore as possible. Then send the boats back.

Crewmen and passengers scrambled over the side, climbed into the lifeboats, and paddled madly for shore. Others jumped off the side and began swimming. Suddenly, they heard the terrifying noise of Japanese planes diving once again, and then there was the angry hissing of machine-gun bullets pelting the water around them.

USS Panay sinking in the Yangtze River. (U.S. Navy)

Just as the survivors reached the shelter of the reeds along the bank, a Japanese launch raced up and rained bursts of machine-gun fire toward the huddled men. Then the launch turned and raked the sinking Panay. But before the gunboat went under, the launch pulled up to it and a few Japanese officers scrambled aboard, perhaps in a search for secret codes or new devices.

For several days, the survivors’ ordeal continued as they trudged inland for twenty miles to seek haven within Chinese lines. All the while, bands of Japanese soldiers stalked the countryside in an effort to hunt them down.

Once the Panay survivors reached safety, they took stock of their losses. Two American sailors and an Italian newspaper reporter, Sandro Sandini, had been killed, and seventeen crewmen and U.S. Embassy officials had been wounded, some of them seriously.

In the meantime, the day after the Panay was sunk, Japanese General Iwane Matsui, a squat figure with horn-rimmed glasses who rode astride a symbolic white horse, led his victorious troops into Nanking on the heels of Chiang Kai-Shek’s retreating forces. Matsui proclaimed that the Japanese Imperial way is shining through.

With that, Japanese troops launched a bloodbath in Nanking, the likes of which had been unknown since the days of the barbaric Attila the Hun. An estimated 250,000 Chinese civilians—men, women, and children—were murdered, mainly by beheading with samurai swords or bayoneting. The carnage came to be known as the Rape of Nanking. Even hardened German army observers were shocked by what they reported to Berlin as systematic butchery.

When word of the Panay episode reached the United States, there were strident cries of outrage. Usually reserved Cordell Hull, the white-haired, soft-spoken secretary of state, denounced the Panay sinking as the handiwork of wild, half-insane Japanese admirals and generals.

American anger intensified a few days later, when Colonel Kingero Hashimoto, the senior Japanese officer in the region, who hated the United States with a passion, was quoted in newspapers as declaring, "I had orders to fire [on the Panay]."

In the White House, President Franklin D. Roosevelt viewed the newsreel film shot from the deck of the Panay by Universal News’s Norman Alley. Then, exercising presidential power, Roosevelt ordered the censoring of the close-ups of Japanese pilots’ faces before the newsreel was released to American theaters. This selective film editing was intended to calm the public’s outrage and avoid war with the powerful Japanese military machine.

Had the Panay attack really been an accident? Or had it been a sort of dress rehearsal for the sneak raid on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, that would be launched nearly four years later? Did the Japanese warlords want to test American will and fiber by their deadly attack? Far from being a tragic case of mistaken identity, as the Japanese later claimed, many American military leaders privately were convinced that the assault had been a planned, finely tuned operation, a joint venture involving dive bombers, a heavily armed launch, and foot soldiers.

Perhaps the Japanese warlords had many questions that could be answered by the Panay attack. Just how strong—or weak—would be the official American reaction to the bloodletting and property destruction? How strong and well-trained was the United States military establishment? There were a few thousand American marines stationed in nearby Shanghai. Would they be rushed to the scene of the Panay attack to confront possible follow-up assaults?

Seeking not to be plunged into direct confrontation in the Far East, the Roosevelt administration, after expressing a proper amount of public indignation, couched their official protests to the Japanese government in delicately worded phrases, charging that the Japanese pilots had been guilty of reckless flying.

Possibly in a bid to cloak their real future intentions against the United States, the Japanese government apologized for the Yangtze River violence and handed over a compensation check in the amount of $2,214,007.36. However, the stark question remains: Had the Japanese warlords become so emboldened by America’s wishy-washy response to the unprovoked attack on the Panay that they considered the United States to be a paper tiger and continued with their plans for the sneak raid on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor?¹

Shadowy German Scientist

Early in 1939, war clouds were gathering over Europe, but most of the German Herrenvolk (people) wanted peace. In late August, William L. Shirer, an American correspondent for CBS radio, strolled the streets of Berlin and talked with scores of ordinary citizens. That night, he wrote in his diary: Everybody here is against the war. How can a country get into a major war with a population so dead against it?

Adolf Hitler had already pondered that question. At a conference in his Bavarian mountaintop retreat on August 22, the führer told his top generals and admirals: I shall give a propaganda cause for starting the war. Never mind if it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterward if he told the truth. In starting and waging a war, it is not right that matters, but victory!

At dawn on September 1, 1939, five German armies, paced by swarms of shrieking Stuka dive-bombers, poured over the Polish frontier and began to converge on Warsaw from three sides. The speed, power, and finesse of the German juggernaut, the most powerful that history had known, created a new word in the languages of many nations: Blitzkrieg.

On September 3, after the German führer had curtly rejected an ultimatum by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to withdraw from Poland, England and France declared war on Germany. Woefully unprepared for a major conflict, Great Britain and France could only sit on the sidelines and watch the far-outnumbered, undertrained, and ill-equipped Polish army be smashed in only twenty-seven days.

Then, on October 17, three weeks after the Nazi swastika was hoisted over Warsaw, Vice Admiral Hector Boyes, the Royal Navy attaché at the British Embassy in Oslo, Norway, ripped open the envelope he had just been handed by an aide and began reading the anonymous letter enclosed. Written in long-hand, the source said that if the British wanted highly important information on German technical and weapons developments, it should indicate an affirmative answer by altering the beginning of the regular BBC (British Broadcasting Company) German Service broadcast to insert the words: "Hullo, hier ist London" (Hello, here is London).

Intrigued and mystified by the curious letter from an unknown yet seemingly authoritative source, Admiral Boyes rushed the missive to his government in England.

In that late autumn of 1939, London was gripped by a climate of foreboding. There had been plenty of war news—all of it bad. In an atmosphere of gloom, Stewart Menzies, chief of MI-6 (Great Britain’s secret service), and his top officials gathered in his headquarters on Broadway, a quiet side street near Parliament Square and Westminster Abbey.

Menzies and his aides discussed intensely the significance of the anonymous letter that Admiral Boyes had received in Oslo. Was it the handiwork of a crackpot? Several felt that it might be some sort of psychological warfare gambit perpetrated by the Abwehr, the Third Reich’s secret service, a clandestine apparatus with some sixteen thousand agents on seven continents.

Finally, the MI-6 hierarchy, at Menzies’s urging, decided to follow up on the Oslo letter and authorized changing the BBC broadcast preamble to Hullo, hier ist London.

Thus began one of the most intriguing and complex mysteries of World War II.

On November 4, 1939, a week after the BBC broadcast, a guard at the British Embassy in Oslo, six hundred miles from London, was making his rounds in a heavy snowstorm when he spotted a parcel on a stone ledge. Wrapped in kraft paper and bound by sturdy string, the container was roughly three inches thick, twelve inches wide, and fifteen inches long. It was half covered by snow, and had it not been found at the time, the package might have been buried in the white stuff, undetected for weeks.

The parcel was addressed to Admiral Hector Boyes, and the guard rushed it to the naval attaché. When Boyes opened the package—very gingerly, for it might have contained a bomb—he found eight pages of typewritten text detailing German technical innovations under development and a number of sketches of what appeared to be revolutionary new weaponry, including huge rockets. Boyes rushed the parcel to London.

Thirty-six hours later, copies of the mystery package contents were distributed to several British scientists and intelligence experts for their analyses and conclusions. Most of the experts were skeptical. A few of them considered the documents to be fakes, a devious scheme by the Germans to cause the British to waste valuable time pursuing technological developments that didn’t exist.

However, twenty-eight-year-old Reginald V. Jones, who was on the staff of the British secret intelligence service, was startled by the extent of the technical disclosures. It seemed logical that the Germans were developing an entirely new dimension of warfare. Chief among these haunting new German weapons were a radio-controlled glide-bomb, a pilotless aircraft called the V-1 (later known to the Allies as a buzz bomb), and massive long-range rockets labeled V-2s.

While British scientists used the detailed drawings and text to develop countermeasures, the identity of the person responsible for the Oslo mystery package remained a subject of heavy debate among the British privy to its secrets. How had one individual (presumably a German) been able to collect so many Third Reich top secrets—including detailed drawings—and have the means and the ingenuity to get the priceless data to British leaders?

It was clear that the individual had an extensive technical and scientific background and direct access to weapons developments in the Third Reich. It was also obvious that the Oslo-packet author was a staunch anti-Nazi, one who desperately wanted Adolf Hitler’s dreams of conquest stifled and who would risk death for the cause.

Professor Reginald V. Jones of British intelligence was startled by the contents of the Oslo package. (Courtesy R. V. Jones)

There were countless conjectures over the identity of the conspirator. Whomever he or she may have been, the unknown person played an unheralded but major role in Britain’s thwarting Adolf Hitler’s plans for the future. Perhaps MI-6 chief Stewart Menzies, who had numerous clandestine contacts within the Third Reich, had known. If so, he took the puzzling secret to his grave.²

Spy in the War Cabinet?

In early august 1940, England braced for an invasion by the German Wehrmacht, which was coiled across the channel and ready to spring. Within ten months after war had broken out, Adolf Hitler reigned as the absolute ruler of most of western Europe.

If the Boche [Germans] come, Winston Churchill confided to an aide, Well have to hit them on their heads with beer bottles—we’ve got no other weapons!

However, Hitler decided he would never have to launch Operation Sea Lion, a cross-channel invasion. On August 1, he signed General Order No. 17, which directed Hermann Goering, who had been recently elevated to the specially created post of Reichsmarschall, to bring England to its knees with air power alone.

Arrayed along the channel coast and on up into Norway were 3,358 Junkers, Dorniers, Heinkels, Stukas, and Messerschmitt 109s and 110s—a force of unprecedented numbers. All across southern England, a few hundred Royal Air Force (RAF) fighter pilots, flying Spitfires and Hurricanes, grimly prepared to confront this mighty challenge.

These RAF fighter pilots were a breed apart—brash, scrappy, and courageous. A few years earlier, many had been avowed pacifists. Some had signed the controversial Oxford Pledge, in which they swore that they would never fight for King and Country. But now, with the survival of England at stake, they would fight and give their lives if need be.

Air Marshal Hugh Dowding, chief of the RAF Fighter Command, had been forewarned by electronic intercepts (code-named Ultra) that Goering was unleashing an all-out onslaught. Armed with this knowledge, the revolutionary miracle of radar, and an excellent radio-control system, the fifty-eight-year-old Dowding would direct what Churchill called the Battle of Britain from an underground chamber (known as The Hole) at Fighter Command headquarters at Bentley Prior in Middlesex.

For four weeks, fierce, murderous clashes raged over the skies of England and the channel. Through Ultra, Dowding knew in advance the Luftwaffe’s targets and tactics, permitting RAF tactical officers to gather their squadrons at the right places, times, and altitudes, concentrating British power against the main assaults, rather than frittering away the slender RAF air reserves by chasing madly across the skies after secondary or decoy flights.

But, while Air Marshal Dowding had a figurative ear planted in Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe headquarters, the Germans apparently had a pipeline directly into the British War Cabinet. Although Goering and his commanders were not privy to detailed RAF tactics, the enormous advantage that Dowding enjoyed, Adolf Hitler and the German high command were learning of top-level British governmental decisions within hours after they were made.

At this time, with Britain in its greatest peril since the Spanish Armada sailed into the English Channel in 1588, United States Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C., and Hawaii was intercepting and decoding top-secret wireless messages transmitted by the Japanese naval attaché in Berlin to the chief of the Third Section, Naval Staff, at Imperial General Headquarters outside Tokyo. In part, one signal read: I have received from the German navy minutes of a meeting held by the British War Cabinet on 15 August (1944). . .

Unfortunately for Great Britain, this telltale Japanese communication, and many others in a similar vein, would not be known until late in the war in Europe. In 1940, American Naval Signals Intelligence was staffed by only a handful of men, and only a few of them were capable of translating Japanese into English. So tremendous was the flood of intercepted Japanese communications that it took three and a half years before hard-pressed American naval men reached the stack of accumulated intercepts that revealed the Nazis seemed to have had a pipeline into the British War Cabinet.

Who was this Nazi mole in the highest councils of the British government? At a time when the Battle of Britain was raging in 1940, how had this person managed to slip long and detailed War Cabinet minutes involving the most crucial decisions to Berlin?

What were the informant’s motives? Was he or she planning on not only providing the Nazis with high-grade intelligence, but also trying to undermine the Winston Churchill government and have it replaced by another that would be receptive to surrendering when the Germans leaped the channel and invaded Great Britain?

Could this person have been an associate of the notorious Tyler Gatesworth Kent, a twenty-nine-year-old American who had been destined for high places in the U.S. State Department? A tall and personable young man, Kent had come to the American Embassy in London in October 1939 (a month after war broke out). Well-educated, studious, and a speaker of five languages, Kent had developed a firm belief in the Nazi line that international Jewry had propelled the world into war in order to gain influence and authority over the ruins.

Despite his drastic theories, Tyler Kent was trusted completely and assigned to the top-secret embassy code room by Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. (whose son John would one day be president of the United States). There, Kent had access to the most highly confidential communications between Ambassador Kennedy and U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Also available to the young embassy official were dispatches by other American envoys in Europe who used the London facility as a message center.

What’s more, Tyler Kent handled the Gray Code, a cipher system that the State Department thought to be unbreakable. It was the Gray Code that Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt used for their most secret communications.

In early 1940, it became clear to British security agencies that secret information was finding its way to Berlin and Rome, the Axis partners aligned against Great Britain. A complicated trail led to Tyler Kent, and at 10:00 A.M. on May 20, Kent was arrested by Scotland Yard detectives. Found in his possession was a set of keys that enabled Kent to get into the safe where Ambassador Kennedy kept his secret papers.

Tyler Kent denied that he was a spy, although raiding detectives had found some fifteen hundred secret embassy documents hidden in his apartment. He was dismissed from the State Department and, with his immunity gone, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to seven years in Dartmoor, the harshest of British prisons.

Since Kent had been arrested on May 20, 1940—some three months prior to the beginning of the Battle of Britain—he could not have committed the treachery of furnishing secret War Cabinet proceedings to Berlin. But had he left behind in the government a fellow traveler who carried on in his place? Either way, the traitor who provided Adolf Hitler with a pipeline into a crucial British agency remains an unknown figure.³

Phantom of Scapa Flow

Under a brilliant display of northern lights that illuminated the region, a German U-boat commanded by Lieutenant Günther Prien, a bold and dashing skipper, slipped through the maze of channels and currents girdling the stronghold of the British Home Fleet—Scapa Flow, the vast anchorage in the Orkney Islands of northeast Scotland. Prien headed for his target, the old battleship Royal Oak. It was nearing midnight on October 13, 1939—six weeks since Great Britain went to war with the Third Reich.

The British admiralty was not too concerned about the safety of its warships. Scapa Flow was considered to be impenetrable to submarines. On the Royal Oak, most of the 1,146 members of the crew were sleeping peacefully, secure in the knowledge that German U-boats could not get to them.

Suddenly, the stillness over Scapa Flow was shattered by three tremendous explosions, one right after the other. Lieutenant Prien had fired three torpedoes, all of which crashed into the battleship. Mortally wounded, the Royal Oak capsized in only thirteen minutes, taking to a watery grave 832 crewmen and the ship’s skipper, Rear Admiral H. F. C. Blagrove. Meanwhile, the U-boat sneaked back out of Scapa Flow along the same route it had entered, undetected and unscathed.

It was a stupendous maritime feat and a colossal propaganda victory for the Third Reich. Günther Prien and his crew were received as heroes in Berlin, and the U-boat skipper was decorated with the Knight’s Cross by Adolf Hitler himself.

In London, the admiralty, deeply embarrassed and humiliated by the Royal Oak’s demise while in its own anchorage, assumed that the U-boat had been guided to its target by a spy in the Orkneys. MI-5, the British counterintelligence service, was promptly blamed by the admiralty for failing to flush out this Nazi spy.

MI-5 agents descended en masse on the Orkneys to find the elusive spy who had made this German exploit possible. The search failed. Spy mania gripped the people of the Orkneys: Clearly, a highly dangerous Nazi was loose in their midst.

Sixteen months later, in the spring of 1942, a popular American magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, published an article identifying the Scapa Flow spy as a former officer in the German Imperial Navy, Captain Alfred Wehring.

U-boat skipper Günther Prien, hero of Scapa Flow. (Captured German painting, National Archives)

According to the Post account, Wehring had been recruited in 1928 by German intelligence to be its man at Scapa Flow, which, it was believed, would be a crucial location in any coming war against the British. Wehring adopted the fictitious name Albert Oertel, posed as a Swiss watchmaker, and opened a small shop in the village of Kirkwall in the Orkneys.

Twelve years later, Wehring emerged from deep undercover and signaled to Captain Karl Doenitz of the U-boat command detailed intelligence about Scapa Flow’s defenses, its unpredictable currents, and its