Dutch
admiral recalled being shown location of Japanese fleet before it attacked
Pearl Harbor
From
UPI News, by Bruce Nichols
HOUSTON
-- Adm. Johan Ranneft sometimes told of visiting the Navy Department in
Washington the day before the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor and being
shown the location of a Japanese fleet near Hawaii.
Ranneft, who died Jan. 20 at the age of 95, was a captain in
the Netherlands Navy at the time and was serving as the Dutch naval attache in
Washington.
'Apparently
he was standing around with some naval officers and they had the position of
the Japanese fleet located on a map north of Pearl Harbor,' Ranneft's son,
Theodore, said in an interview.
'He said, 'What's the purpose of these ships being there?'
And the people made non-committal comments. Obviously at the time they hadn't
really considered that these ships might attack Pearl Harbor. This is more or
less the story I recall. I just don't know how significant it is.'
Admiral Ranneft's story is one of the main pieces of
evidence cited by historian John Toland in his forthcoming book 'Infamy: Pearl
Harbor and its Aftermath,' a account of interlocking events designed to show
that Washington knew of the impending attack but did nothing about it.
In the book, to be published by Doubleday April 23, Toland
says the presence of the Japanese fleet was never reported to U.S. commanders
in Hawaii. He theorizes that President Franklin Roosevelt withheld the
information to assure a surprise attack and thereby generate popular support
for U.S. entry into World War II.
Toland interviewed Ranneft before his death and recovered in
Holland the admiral's official diary, in which he noted that U.S. naval
intelligence officers showed him the map location of the Japanese fleet on Dec.
2 and again on Dec. 6, the eve of the attack when the ships were reported to be
300 miles northwest of Hawaii.
In his official diary, Ranneft wrote on Dec. 2:
'Conference at Navy Department. ONI (Office of Naval
Intelligence). They show me on map the position of two Japanese carriers
(actually, there were six, plus supporting ships). They left Japan on easterly
course.'
On Dec. 6, he wrote:
'I myself do not think about it because I believe that
everyone in Honolulu is 100 percent on the alert, just as everyone here at ONI
is.'
The younger Ranneft said that, the way his father told the
story, neither he nor the American intelligence officers attached great
significance to the nearness of the Japanese fleet to Hawaii.
'I don't think he at the time thought they were going to
bomb Pearl Harbor,' Ranneft said. 'That seemed such a wild sort of thought,
although there was tension, of course.
Ranneft said he does not think his father told him the story
until some time after the war. 'It was just a story he sometimes told later
on,' Ranneft said. 'I don't remember really when I first heard it. I couldn't
give you a date.'
Ranneft does not know why it took historians so long to take
an interest in his father. He said his father did not particularly keep the
story to himself.
'I wouldn't say that he was all that garrulous,' Ranneft
said. 'He didn't make any effort to go to the newspapers and say look here,
I've got something that really might interest you.'
However, Ranneft said his father had an interesting life and
had a lot of stories to tell his friends. The possibility that Pearl Harbor was
not really a surprise to American officials was only one.
Johan Ranneft was born in Indonesia, raised in Holland,
served in the Dutch Navy and then retired on a rear admiral's pension in 1947
to traveling and the hobby of archeology. He died in Houston of heart failure
following surgery to repair a broken hip.
The son, a consulting geologist, said his father may have
had access to such confidential information at the Navy Department because the Dutch
were supplying intelligence from Indonesia, then the Netherlands East Indies.
Ranneft said his father and the Americans were quite
friendly and his father received a special citation from the Navy in 1946 for
helping obtain from the Swedish government the design of the 40mm Bofors
automatic anticraft gun, which was used extensively by the Navy and Army during
World War II.