Note the British-English spelling of Harbour in the one you posted. Here's the orignal, snopes >> Was Pearl Harbor an 'Inside Job'?
Well I feel a bit better now. I thought that public schools had gone down the toilet after reading this.
When I was a grad student at Purdue I helped teach the WWII class. We taught in a 500 seat auditorium and the course was always over-subscribed. There's a lot of interest in the actual facts of the war. BTW, when I took the class as an undergrad the prof said that the Japanese were broadcasting all the way across the Pacific. We had a nice chat after class.
I know this is a meme joke, but to be honest, I wouldn't be surprised. It's cool to be a revisionist these days, regardless of facts.
It's my understanding that in a way he was correct. The IJN people who keyed the messages were transmitting all the way across the Pacific .. When the atmospherics from the Home Islands allowed them to do so.
The Nagumo Kido Butai had all shipboard radios disabled by removing the keys, which were locked up in the captain's safe. The scouts had paper jammed into the key so no accidental transmission of even on key click could be made. Those radios had to be able to operate if the scout planes spotted a USN carrier force bearing down on them. The IJN was quite proud of the fact that they did nothing to give away the attack. Transmitting, especially as we were monitoring their radio traffic in Japan, would have been abysmally stupid. The Kaigun went so far as to have radio operators from the carriers in Japan to spoof our RDX into thinking the carriers were in Home Waters.
But didn't they have the ships signal men on board ships in the Home Islands transmitting from there? And weren't these transmissions on occasion picked up in the US and certainly Hawaii? So transmitting all the way across the Pacific just not form the PH strike force.
NEVER from the Nagumo Kido Butai. That's the point. They operated under total radio silence during the trip east. The radiotelegraphers at Japan were stationed ashore.
IIRC that was part of the problem...the guys at HYPO and CAST continued to pick up the keys in Japanese home waters and then got focused on the movements of the Malaya task forces, which did not maintain silence and so got distracted that they missed they were not hearing the operators on the Japanese CV any more. ISTR there is a very good article declassed by NSA that talks about it specifically...I used to use it as a teaching example for the old "out of sight, out of mind" cognitive bias, but that was three years ago and my memory isn't what it used to be.
Given that the IJN ships were ID'd by their call signs and the three carrier divisions were RDX'd as being in home waters it's not surprising that the assumption was made. We really didn't have anything else to work with at the time. The changes in JN-25, coming only months apart, had Rochefort's boys grasping at straws.
I can't find the NSA article I was thinking of, but these are pretty good. William F. Friedman, Certain Aspects of 'MAGIC' in the Cryptological Background of the Various Official Investigations into the Pearl Harbor Attack, SRH-125, CCH Files. Unknown Error Frederick D. Parker, Pearl Harbor Revisited: United States Communications Intelligence, 1924-1941 (Center for Cryptologic History, 1994). https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptolog.../wwii/assets/files/pearl_harbor_revisited.pdf pearlharbor-nsa : NSA : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive Pearl Harbor https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/d...es/pearl-harbor/FOLDER_494/41782679082173.pdf Well, the links worked for me? Damned NSA and their tricksy ways. Well, fixed some of them anyway...