Fifteen Guns

SECRET MISSIONS (433 pp.)--Ellis M. Zacharias--Putnam ($3.75).

At 56, Rear Admiral Ellis M. Zacharias, U.S.N. (rtd.) is a man with several missions, none of them much of a secret any more. One is to put the story of his professional career in what strikes him as the proper public light (despite his specialized knowledge of the Japanese language and Japanese navy, Annapolis-trained Ellis Zacharias remained a captain during World War II, reached flag rank only at his recent retirement). The others are: 1) to plead the case for broader and better U.S. naval intelligence; 2) to blast away at U.S. naval stupidity; 3) to make sure that nobody undervalues the particular intelligence work in which Ellis M. Zacharias was concerned.

Dec. 7, 1941, he suggests--expanding the testimony he had already given before the congressional Pearl Harbor Investigating Committee--was the banner day for U.S. naval stupidity. Eight years before, in 1933, elaborate Pacific maneuvers known as Fleet Problem 14 had been performed. Their underlying assumption: that an enemy would strike with carrier-based planes at a U.S. naval base. Yet "at Pearl Harbor, at the moment of the most intense Pacific crisis in 1941, we repeated the very conditions of Fleet Problem 14."

The Tipoff. Moreover, continues Zacharias, he for one knew what the Japs were likely to do, and warned Washington well in advance. As early as October 1940, Zacharias learned of an impending raid by Jap suicide planes on U.S. capital ships. The raid, of course, never came off, but "from then on, I expected a Japanese attack . . . momentarily." Navy brass, he says, shared this apprehension "only in the most perfunctory manner."

On the morning of Pearl Harbor itself, Zacharias was at sea in command of the heavy cruiser Salt Lake City. Ten months earlier, however, he had gone to call on Admiral Kimmel, "to lay before him my analysis and perhaps to place my knowledge of Japanese psychology at his disposal. . . . I told the Admiral . . . that if Japan decided on war with us she would open hostility with an air attack . . . probably on a Sunday morning.

"Admiral Kimmel asked how I thought this air attack could be prevented. I told him, 'Admiral, you will have to have patrols out at least five hundred miles daily.' He replied . . . 'Well, of course we have neither the personnel nor material to do that.' I pondered for a moment, then added: 'Admiral, you'd better get them, because that is what's coming.' " (Kimmel later testified that he could remember no such conversation.)

Uphill Fight. Later in the war Zacharias was called back to Washington as second in command of the Office of Naval Intelligence, under Rear Admiral Harold C. Train ("who had never had one day's experience in intelligence work"). It was an "uphill fight . . . against obstruction and inertia." Then, "just when I was at the top of my successes, and was planning new ones ... I was ordered to sea in command of the battleship New Mexico. All of my subordinates were amazed . . . and so was I. . . . It will have to be credited to the fact that I was moving too rapidly, and was becoming too strong for the good of more ambitious individuals. . . ."

Later still, in 1945, Zacharias was again recalled, this time to prepare and deliver a series of radio talks in Japanese. Fourteen of these talks were beamed to Tokyo between May and August. They reached influential Japanese up to and including the Emperor, says their author, and were more instrumental than the atomic bomb itself in bringing Japan "emotionally and spiritually" to its knees. Yet Admiral Nimitz, among others, had been "persistently advised" against such psychological warfare.

Secret Missions is sure to set the blue-water admirals aboil, and may even raise the temperature, with doubtless wholesome results, in O.N.I.'s offices (once described by the late Colonel John W. Thomason Jr., U.S.M.C., as "a haven for the ignorant and well-connected")-If at times brash, energetic Author Zacharias seems on the verge of confessing that he is the only U.S. Navy officer who knew what World War II was about, his general complaints about barnacled gold-braid thinking are all too probably justified. Whatever naval pundits may make of his claims and conclusions, lay readers should be interested in his story, much of it well told and all of it as shy as a is-gun salute.

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